Sublime

wrote a bestselling book about his experience, Radical, and coauthored another, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, with Sam Harris. He is a lion of human transformation, and I am proud to call him a friend.

of center and Israel’s center-right.

for Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it.

The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

it’s fair to say that the Jewish tradition is less ambivalent about the religious significance of family, friends, and community; our more local loves are the stuff out of which broader, more universal commitments may emerge.

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

cold-blooded need for control.

the faith of a man who has considered the very real possibility that chaos and bloodshed are simply all there is.