Sublime

Within the limits of human intelligence, we can climb at least part of the way to heaven, but the purpose of the climb is the return to earth, knowing that here is where God wants us to be and where he has given us work to do. Judaism contains mysteries, but its ultimate purpose is not mysterious at all. It is to honour the image of God in other pe

it is a mitzvah for family love to flow outward.

holiness can only be shared and encountered when it is embodied in social and communal structures. The key question is not “What does the Torah say?” but rather “What does God tell us through the Torah?”

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

not to reinvent Judaism, but to execute it a bit better than we had seen it done elsewhere.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s observation that “Judaism is based upon a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation.”

Judaism is not a religion for the individual seeker alone; it is a vision for how human beings ought to live together in pursuit of the right and the good.

Rather than a system of distilled ideas or a code of behavioral ideals, Jewish observance is living Jews living Judaism and interested non-Jews enriching their own path with nuggets of Torah.

As Rabbi Telushkin wrote, “The purpose of Jewish existence is not to eat Jewish foods, or tell Jewish jokes, or use Yiddish*10 words. It is to fight evil and to reduce suffering in the world.”