Sublime

a true tzaddik has a greater yetzer hara than everyone else, and the consequences of their choices are, therefore, much greater. In this instance, we see that Moshe, who lived his entire life righteously, lost the Promised Land with just one moment of anger.

neither the rabbis nor Moses cared a fig about history. They weren’t historians; they were spiritual leaders, and spiritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my responsibility for it? How am I complicit in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?

They are an account, at the beginning of the Torah’s narrative history of humankind, of a failure, first personal and then moral, to take responsibility – and it is this for which leadership is the answer.

We are all, like it or not, ambassadors of the Jewish people, and how we live, behave, and treat others reflects not only on us as individuals but on Jewry as a whole, and thus on Judaism and the God of Israel.

What Jews have, he argues, modern economies lack: a system of self-control that allows economies to flourish without booms and crashes, inflation and recession.

But that ended in 2010, when the results of a four-year effort to map the Neanderthal genome were published.