Sublime

Times are changing. You were right, he wrote. Jews here don’t want Yiddish theater and Yiddish music and good old frolic and fun anymore. They want American things. They want to be cowboys. Even the Negro jazz musicians have grown difficult. Last night was the last straw.

A medieval sage, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh, 1250?–1327), insists that this mitzvah of receiving people warmly applies not just to one-on-one encounters but also to the way we carry ourselves in public. “Let not your face be angry toward passersby,” he says, “but receive them with a friendly countenance.”48 How we comport ourselves in the world

Judaism’s ideal world is vegetarian but, for now, halacha permits eating meat,

Gott fun Avraham

If life is an overgrown forest whose tangled branches tear at our skin as we race to traverse it, Shabbos is a graceful clearing that makes room for breath and blessing.

Shabbos permits us to live in spacious, expansive time, not in a static eternity but in a mindfully unfolding landscape that welcomes broadly smiling human faces.

To frame Shabbos as mere leisure time, to mistake Shabbos for weekend or day off, is to make a category error.

As the Shabbat comes to a close, Jewish tradition moves to prevent hope from turning into illusion. A sobering note is introduced with the evening service (Maariv) in which a special blessing is recited, asking for the gift of intelligence to discriminate between ideal and reality, and for the strength to resist sin in the coming week. The Jewish

Still another custom is to bake “Mount Sinai cakes”—honey cakes filled with almonds and raisins—to fulfill the dictum: “Taste and see that God is good” (Psalms 34:9).