Sublime

Kamtza and Bar Kamtza are like matter and antimatter, thesis and synthesis, light and shadow. To hate one and love the other is to lose sight of the essential similarity between the two, and thereby to engage in a useless and all-consuming kind of violence. The War of Gog and Magog, and all struggles for total annihilation, emerge from the clash of

This was my fourth birthday present, this story. In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. In the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish

The years of waiting, the disappointment of Ishmael, the near-loss of Isaac, burned into Jewish consciousness the knowledge that generational continuity does not simply happen. Judaism became, and still is, that rarest of phenomena, a child-centered faith.

What am I meant to learn, to discover? What truths do I need to integrate?

by placing mourning rituals at the heart of Jewish life, the Rabbis enabled the Jews to go on living with exile.

If goodness will not be imposed by power, then the human must be educated toward perfection. The rabbis conceive of God as teacher and pedagogue—teaching Torah to Israel and to the world. This also explains why, in the words of Ethics of the Fathers (chapter 6, Mishnah 2), “the only truly free person is one who studies Torah.”