Sublime

ripostes,

distilled ideas, but a spiritual-ethical discipline that retains the capacity to elevate consciousness, heighten compassion, and inspire righteousness.

In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer suggests that people should live every day with the same moral intensity as they would if it were their last. Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur teach that we should perform every act as if our life depended on it because, in fact, it does.

One of the sources of that resiliency, in his opinion, is the fact that Judaism is decentralized and encourages dissent.

a dream of an intensive, passionate Torah environment for laypeople.

We are thus obligated to affirm our own worth.33 “Just as a person believes in God,” the Hasidic master Rabbi Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900) teaches, “one must also34 believe in oneself.”35 How we see ourselves profoundly shapes who and what we become.

The people of Israel can lose sight of the goal and thereby distort the values of Judaism into self-righteousness or super-preservationism.

In my vision of the future of American Jewish life, the real test of whether a minyan is welcoming is not whether you get offered an aliyah or whether someone hands you a siddur on your way in. It will be defined by the ease in which you are drawn into each other’s homes to share a meal together on Shabbat.

This section explores two signposts for making effective, sustainable change. The first is Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s practice of finding good points, and the second is Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler’s concept of the choice point.