Sublime

a free society must be a moral society, for without the rule of law, constrained by the overarching imperatives of the right and the good, freedom will eventually degenerate into tyranny, and liberty, painfully won, will be lost.

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

Once we apprehend the biblical criticism of mimetic contagion and its results, we can understand the biblical profundity of the talmudic principle that Emmanuel Lévinas often cites: “If everyone is in agreement to condemn someone accused, release him for he must be innocent.” Unanimity in human groups is rarely a vehicle of truth; more often it is

One people risked its very existence on the proposition that our common humanity exists in and through our differences; that the human person itself, regardless of faith, independent of race, is in the image of God; and that the unity of God expresses itself in the diversity of creation and human culture. With this we come to one of the most contro

Yerushalmi

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.

if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of itself as a practice—not as an ethnicity, not as an occasional church—but as a set of intentional and disciplined gestures that have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relationship to the sacred.

A man went looking for Rabbi Hillel and said to him, “I want to become a Jew. But only on the condition that you teach me the Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Hillel looked at this smart-aleck and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the entire Torah—all of it. The rest is commentary. Go and study.”