Sublime

Marc, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, was the first person to ever describe himself to me as a JUBU—a Jewish Buddhist. I’ve since learned that he is one among many, in a long line that goes back at least one hundred years.

We are thus obligated to affirm our own worth.33 “Just as a person believes in God,” the Hasidic master Rabbi Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900) teaches, “one must also34 believe in oneself.”35 How we see ourselves profoundly shapes who and what we become.

Hence the significance of one remarkable feature of Judaism: its principled insistence – like no other civilisation before – on the dignity and integrity of the individual. We believe that every human being is in the image and likeness of God. The sages said that every life is like an entire universe (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:4). The Rambam says that

in the Hebrew Bible, God reveals himself primarily in the form of laws, for Judaism is concerned not just with salvation (the soul in its relationship with God) but also with redemption (society as a vehicle for the divine presence).

5 Now there was a Jew in the citadel of Susa whose name was Mordecai son of Jair son of Shimei son of Kish, a Benjaminite. 6Kish[6] had been carried away from Jerusalem among the captives carried away with King Jeconiah of Judah, whom King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had carried away. 7Mordecai[7] had brought up Hadassah, that is Esther, his cousin,