Sublime

When we turn to Hashem with bitachon, and we show Him that we have no one else to depend on – not the boss, the bank manager, the CPA, the lawyer or the doctor – then Hashem fulfills all our needs as well.

Jewish law, however, requires us to carefully consider the impact our speech will have on others, even if what we say is true. Will it humiliate them? Unfairly harm their reputation? Cause them to feel indebted to us when they’re really not?

Judaism’s primary concern is not how strongly we believe, but how we behave—

Tzedakah lies close to the core of what it is to be a Jew. So much so that the rabbis said, ‘If someone is cruel and lacks compassion, there are sufficient grounds to suspect his lineage.’ Not to give is prima facie evidence that one is not a Jew.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, “There is no craving for death in the history of Jewish piety…Earthly life, mortal life, is precisely the arena where the covenant between God and man must be fulfilled…Life here and now is the task.”

“We aren’t human beings, so much as human becomings,” Artson writes, and we are in a continuous dynamic relationship with God.