Sublime

I don’t quite know what to say, so I mostly listen. I’ve found during the past forty-eight hours with Gail and Colin that my role as their rabbi is less to dispense wisdom—I wouldn’t dare—and more to engage in the very holy work of not running away.

The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

daily encounters large and small, we are challenged to remember that our animating commitment is to love others, and that our personal mandate is to grow in love.

The strength to yield The willingness to hold our judgments lightly

Rabbi Soloveitchik speaks with a passion of the modern “man of faith” who feels a dialectical tension between the pull of the covenantal community and the socioethical responsibilities of modern life. Interaction, and not withdrawal, is the creative response.

for Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it.

Judaism without generosity is a hollow shell.

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.