Sublime

Among American Jews, there is a significant demand for meaningful, engaged Jewish life.

An Empowered Judaism framework recognizes that demand is strong among the general population and responds to that demand by building communities and institutions that offer direct engagement with Jewish life. Responding to this demand is the real challenge of our time.

As Naftali Loewenthal surmised, the selective employment of Lurianic concepts by Shneur Zalman was an attempt “to make the teachings of the Maggid and the Baal Shem Tov rationally meaningful to a Hasidic following which was composed of scholarly men who, in the main, made no claim to pneumatic attainment.”

1. A person who trusts in Hashem for income will more readily adhere to the Torah's laws of upright conduct in commerce and all other transactions. 2. A person who trusts in Hashem won't resort to high-pressure methods in his or her dealings and therefore will be more affable. 3. A person whose sincere orientation is Torah-learning and Divine service

through which he is best known to tradition: Moshe Rabbenu, the leader as teacher. Leadership is not a gift with which we are endowed at birth. It is something we acquire in the course of time, often after many setbacks, failures, and disappointments.

The prohibition on embarrassing another is one of Judaism’s cardinal sins, they say, and one should sooner die than transgress

Maimonides lays out: learn the truth from whoever says it.37

What is wrong in Jewish life today is that we have forgotten Zis gut zu zein a Yid, “It’s good to be a Jew.”

ethics is about responding not to human beings in general but to human beings in particular—and in all their particularity.