Sublime

But on another scale, the decisions individuals make about their private lives, like a young girl’s demand that she be taken to school in defiance of prevailing cultural norms, also have surprising—and long-lasting—consequences.

Nudge.

Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.

But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness—or Misnagdism, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigorous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement

Colleges generally ask a person distinguished by fantastic career success to give a speech in which they claim that career success is not that important.

American Jews see themselves as people who don’t merely value their university degrees, but also their skepticism, their critical-thinking skills, and their refusal to take anything at face value.

THE

had picked up David Brooks’s book The Road to Character.

The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.