Sublime

Could it be that today’s society has made Jewish identity superfluous?

All he must do is view his employer as one of his customers.

Bias: To believe in G-d’s ultimate goodness, to know that blessings await us beneath the surface of our experience, no matter how bleak, to actively seek those blessings out, and to spread their light to the world beyond.

There must be justice not only in how the law is applied, but also in how the means of existence – wealth as God’s blessing – are distributed. That is tzedakah.

“Empowered Judaism.” This is a Judaism in which people begin to take responsibility for creating Jewish community, without waiting on the sidelines.

How we treat the poor is how we treat God. Honoring one is honoring the other; deriding one is deriding the other.

Judaism’s “possibilism” about human nature, its conviction that we can choose the good even if we often don’t.

We are calling it a yeshiva to reclaim the cultural valence of the term—an intellectual and spiritual center where Torah radiates forth into the broader community, and the community feeds back into the yeshiva.

Every rabbi had his “yoke”—a Hebrew idiom for his set of teachings, his way of reading Scripture, his take on how to thrive as a human being in God’s good world.