Sublime

Trust in God, but help yourself; demand justice, but take it one step at a time; save the world, but start with your own family; bleed for humanity, but be sure to preserve your own group because “all of Israel are responsible one for the other.”*

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

from a Jewish perspective, there is no self without gratitude, and that I exist in relationship even before I exist as a self.

Those engaged in a life of study know that the consummate orientation to the Jewish tradition is one in which you will never know enough.

The dichotomizing between law and love, so prevalent in some Christian quarters, is utterly alien, and even antithetical, to Judaism.

I find it striking that so many different religious traditions work to expose this sense that “I am the center of the universe” as a dangerous illusion.

Each of us come to Torah with our own yearnings, questions, and needs. In our learning, each of us gets to ask: What is it that we are aiming for? What is it that we seek? Is it greater clarity? Heart-opening? Guidance? Connection?

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.

It’s the fact that the best that secular Jewish Diaspora civilization has produced is about to pay homage to their audacious attempt to create a new secular Jewish civilization in the valley.