Sublime

I believe the core reason Hadar succeeded is because it did not attempt a big-picture reinvention of Jewish tradition or practice.

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.”

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.

In the aggadic realm, differing views can be legitimate; but in the halakhic realm, communal cohesion requires a single, normative view. God delights in both of these scenarios, and fittingly it is Elijah who tells how God acts and feels about each of them.

For the rabbi in distress—and for his oppressed and colonized people—Elijah breaks the rules of the game, in which the Romans governing Palestine (or the Persians governing Babylonia) always win and the Jews always lose. Elijah in disguise opens unpredictable possibilities.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–1993) boldly insists that in this amazing encounter, Moses serves as a paradigm for what is true of every human being: to be created in the image of God is to be assigned a specific task by God.

the “halakhah,” meaning “the way” or “the path”—the overall body of Jewish law—or as Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson describes it, “the systematic effort of the rabbis to translate the Torah into action.”

The way forward is clear and everything unfolds in faith.

the error of assuming that kabbalah and Ḥasidism are “one entity expressed in different forms.” In an effort to correct this miscalculation, he explained that the former is the study of esoteric matters by a limited group of people, the elect (yeḥidei segullah) of a given generation, whereas the latter is about publicizing these secrets to afford e