Sublime

The Torah survived as the law of the Jewish nation because Jews continued to see themselves as a nation, even though they had lost all visible bases of nationhood.

We cultivate the practice of responding to ourselves and others with compassion and kindness.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–1993) boldly insists that in this amazing encounter, Moses serves as a paradigm for what is true of every human being: to be created in the image of God is to be assigned a specific task by God.

a hyperliteral reading of the rabbinic dictum that the wicked are called “dead” even in their lives, whereas the righteous are called “living” even in their deaths.

As Naftali Loewenthal surmised, the selective employment of Lurianic concepts by Shneur Zalman was an attempt “to make the teachings of the Maggid and the Baal Shem Tov rationally meaningful to a Hasidic following which was composed of scholarly men who, in the main, made no claim to pneumatic attainment.”