Sublime

Shabbos is about the recognition of human limits, acceptance of individual boundedness.

a programme for peace in an unredeemed world.

Many religious people think that concessions to human limitations are incompatible with divine law. An eternal truth should not be qualified by socioeconomic realities or cultural norms. Halacha’s pragmatism bespeaks a different understanding of Judaism.

Judaism’s most important single teaching is that each human being is created in the image of God.

Elijah’s ethical paradigm—mishnat ḥasidim—is incumbent upon anyone truly devoted.

Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.

God wants to be loved with the whole of our hearts, then whether and in what way we involve our hearts in our religious lives is pivotal.

If I had to capture the core of my Jewish experience, it would be this: Eighteen people sitting around a Shabbat dinner table, all of them talking at once, all of them following all eighteen conversations that are simultaneously crossing the table, all of them correcting the eighteen wrong things that other people have just said.

Unbridled self-expression can quickly morph into self-indulgence and self-absorption, isolating us in what Rabbi Heschel refers to as “the pitiful prison of the platitudes of self.”