Sublime

Rather than grasping towards a God that is predictable and sturdy, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh teaches Moses that what he, and the people he is going to lead, actually need in that moment is a God of perpetual transformation.

Hessed represents the idea that a gracious social order can never be constructed on the basis of rights and obligations alone.

I do not know a God who wants or cares about ritual forms and mumbled words any more than one who wants a great parade of dead animals served up upon the altar.

This, then, is the answer to the problem of civilization: not to flee from the realm of space; to work with things of space but to be in love with eternity. Things are our tools; eternity, the Sabbath, is our mate. Israel is engaged to eternity.

The fundamental idea of Judaism was and is that we bring God into the world through daily acts and interactions, precisely as the book of Genesis portrays the religious drama in terms of ordinary lives. The home, the workplace and the marketplace are religious arenas no less than the synagogue.

God loves diversity; He does not ask us all to serve Him in the same way. To each people He has set a challenge, and with the Jewish people He made a covenant, knowing that it takes time, centuries, millennia, to overcome the conflicts and injustices of the human situation, and that therefore each generation must hand on its ideals to the next, so

only when there is peace, with abundant resources and an untrammeled right to live, will the world be structured to sustain the infinite value of the human being. This is the heart of Judaism, the dream. Jewish

God commands in generalities but calls in particulars. He knows our gifts and he knows the needs of the world. That is why we are here.