Sublime

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.

What are the values, heuristics, norms and networks that currently shape human behaviour – and how could they be nurtured or nudged, rather than ignored and eroded?

Design guru Herbert Simon once observed, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

sanest guide through the turbulence and hatred of human politics is a humorous and self-deprecating pessimism.

A question permeates this book: “In what new ways of thinking and acting are you willing to engage on behalf of what you believe most deeply?” That question in turn raises the corollary: “What will you not do on behalf of what you believe most deeply?”

All the teachers I worked with—Myrna Lewis, Adam Kahane, LeAnne Grillo, Joseph Jaworski, Otto Scharmer, Matt Gelbwaks, Grady McGonagill, and many others—are phronimos, people of practical wisdom.

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

Second,

Societies are only human and humanizing when they are a community of communities built on face-to-face encounters – covenantal relationships.