Sublime

“Where do these Jews find their arrogance?” “They’ve always been stubborn,” Trajan said. “They want few things, but those few they insist upon.”

This book is interesting in another respect. Although the writer is obviously an orthodox Jew, he uses the language of the Stoic philosophy, and is concerned to prove that the Jews live most completely in accordance with its precepts. The book opens with the sentence: “Philosophical in the highest degree is the question I propose to discuss, namely

of both “Sharon the Murderer” and “Begin the Murderer.”

The strength to yield The willingness to hold our judgments lightly

God asks one individual – eventually a family, a tribe, a collection of tribes, a nation – to serve as an exemplary role-model, to be as it were a living case-study in what it is to live closely and continuously in the presence of God. This is – as Jewish history testifies – a weighty and risk-laden responsibility. Since

The requirements for cooperation in a community are tied to all three moral foundations we considered above: a preference for fairness (tit-for-tat), the ability to defer pleasure (low discount rates), and loyalty to the community and its institutions (signaling trustworthiness).

Yet martyrdom alone could not have stopped the massed power of the Seleucids and Hellenizers. In Chasidic reasoning, apocalypse was the only hope left. Indeed, had the Chasidim survived the persecution and won out within the Jewish community, the religion would have been decisively turned onto a path of pacifism, apocalyptic expectation, and denigr