Sublime

They ruled that any Jew who was killed because he or she was Jewish was considered to have performed Kiddush HaShem. The truth underlying this ruling is that every Jew carries the covenant in his or her very existence. Whatever the religious behavior or commitment, a Jew’s existence alone is witness to God and covenant. As long as one Jew is alive,

I wrestle with and write about theology because I care about it to the depths of my being, because questions about who and what God is, and about what it means to be a Jew and a human being in the twenty-first century matter to me like almost nothing else does.

The Torah of Israel is truly a collective work: not only does it engage the entire people across generations, but it also articulates the divine potentiality that invites continuing interpretation, exploration, and new tellings of its tales and new applications of its laws.

the power of Judaism is clear to those truly engaged in its complex struggles and searchings for truth and divinity. Instead of focusing on new ideas, the Jewish community would be better served by connecting to the original “big ideas” of our heritage: Torah, avodah, and gemilut hasadim,

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, “There is no craving for death in the history of Jewish piety…Earthly life, mortal life, is precisely the arena where the covenant between God and man must be fulfilled…Life here and now is the task.”

In faithfulness to that commitment, the people of Israel pledge to teach the way of justice and righteousness as best it can; to remain distinctive and unassimilated in the world and thus hold up the message for all people to see; to create a model community showing how the world can go about realizing the dream; and to work alongside others to

replacing temple rituals with equally ritualized blessings and prayers, study of Torah, and elaborately regulated interpersonal ethics. The sages frantically arguing about when and how to recite which prayers are survivors and descendants of survivors, remnants of a destroyed world.

shifting the operative frame of the American Jewish experience from one of institutional preservation to one of communal empowerment.

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