Sublime

hope, the belief that present circumstances can be overturned, that they need not—that they must not—have the final word.

The Jewish philosopher Will Herberg once spoke of “cut-flower ethics.” He argued that Jewish ethical norms will last for a brief while, even apart from Jewish teachings, just as flowers uprooted from the soil stay in bloom for a short time after cutting. But soon the flowers fade. Behaviors, too, disintegrate if cut from the soil in which they were

When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were.

before modernity, theology and biblical scholarship were the same thing.

Lyotard

And this, I later learned, is a very Jew-y thing to do. To keep the old traditions and adapt them to modern times. An ancient text can be the most modern, and the holiest and most pious is also sometimes the most provocative and gutsy. An ancient story, which was kept for generations, can get a new life and, as such, new relevancy.

Introductory