Sublime

As Rabbi Elliot Dorff puts it, we will have to answer “for the ingratitude and haughtiness involved in denying ourselves the pleasures that God has provided.”

Rabbis ensured that the core truths of revelation would not be forever trapped in the specifics of ancient laws developed for an ancient people.

As Rabbi Elliot Dorff observed of the Rabbis’ approach to understanding God, “Their way of thinking typically prefers truth to consistency, describing experience in all its fullness even if the facts do not fit neatly together.”

Judaism emphasizes our obligations to those on the margins.

Rabbi Max Kadushin deemed this approach “normal mysticism”—the habit of infusing daily life with a sense of the sacred, and transforming it from a succession of unremarkable acts we mindlessly perform to a series of wonders in which we delight.

From earliest rabbinic times there were such institutions as the tamchui, or mobile kitchen, which distributed food daily to whoever applied,

the Rabbis actually regarded someone who committed a sin and then did teshuvah to be in a better position than one who never committed that sin in the first place.

The late eighteenth-century Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov teaches us, “If you want to return to God you must make yourself into a new creation. You can do this with a sigh.”9