Sublime

Even the false argument over why the United States “tilts” toward Israel while the rest of the world is even-handed is often tinged with a not-so-subtle anti-Semitism. “The Jews control America,” it is claimed, and that is why the United States is so pro-Israel.

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

Preferably, I thought, Israel should have unilaterally applied the Bush-Sharon letter, building only within those areas we could keep in any peace deal—Jewish Jerusalem and the settlement blocs—and signaling our seriousness about creating a viable West Bank Palestinian state.

No: if anything, the liberal democracies of the West are abandoning the very values that were once known as the Judeo-Christian tradition. The family, the community, the sanctity of human life, the concept of an objective set of moral values, the idea of a covenant linking the present to the past—these are ideals in danger, not reigning

As Herzl was writing in German in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the best-known Jew in the English-speaking world was Israel Zangwill.

The options are these: become an academic, a rabbi, or Orthodox.

Living according to the Torah means, in this view, aligning yourself with the forces that make for human flourishing, especially if you are a tiny people surrounded by enemies.

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