Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
God has a special relationship to Israel yet ultimately remains the Lord of all the vast universe, the Lord of Lords. Therefore, the covenant is not restricted to Jews. The covenant was offered before there were Jews in the world.
Irving Greenberg • The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays
Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian, once observed that of all the peoples of the world from three thousand years ago, it is only the Jews who live in the same place, speak the same language, and practice the same religion.
Daniel Gordis • Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn
Jews are one quarter of 1 percent of the world population. Yet they make up almost 30 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. Such achievement is not bred in the genes. It is a product of centuries of insistence on the gift of the human mind. The great heroes of Jewish spirituality always include scholars and sages.
David J. Wolpe • Why Be Jewish?
Abraham ibn Daud.
Dara Horn • People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
As we have seen, the name Tanahh reflects a three-part ("tripartite") organization of the Bible; for Jews, this is the standard division of the Bible.
Marc Zvi Brettler PhD • How to Read the Bible
for Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it.
Shai Held • Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life
Yet Herzl’s vision of a sovereign state had meaning, increasing numbers of Israelis believed, only if those new Jews rooted themselves and their humanity in the tradition they had inherited. Herzl without Ahad Ha’am was merely political sovereignty—and that, Israelis began to sense, was simply not enough. Theodor Herzl. Ahad Ha’am. Two radically di
... See moreDaniel Gordis • Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn
ONE MAJOR DEVELOPMENT WAS the rise of the Mizrachim to a place of social and cultural prominence in Israeli life. Mizrachi religiosity had always manifested itself differently than the philosophically more rigid Ashkenazi variety, and now secular Israelis were being exposed to its worldview. Mizrachi Jews admired rabbis more than their Ashkenazi co
... See moreDaniel Gordis • Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn
After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl ’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way t
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