Sublime

After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way

I believe Israel is mired in an increasingly chauvinistic ethnonational project, one that has undermined the more humanistic attempts of certain earlier iterations of Zionism.

And for me faith is at least as much about possibility as it is about certainty.

In protesting, the psalmists reach out to a God who loves them.

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 Jewish tradition is not optimistic about human nature but it is stubbornly, insistently possibilistic.4 Its deeply held conviction is not that we will choose the good but that we can do

In the Torah, God summons His special people, Israel, to take the first steps to what might eventually become a truly egalitarian society – or to put it more precisely, a society in which dignity, kavod, does not depend on power or wealth or an accident of birth.

Judaism’s “possibilism” about human nature, its conviction that we can choose the good even if we often don’t.