Sublime

In other words, the command to love the stranger “is not an act of universalization but rather a response to a particular condition of vulnerability.”

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.

After the end of the War of Independence, Shtrikman changed his family name to Sharon and started to work on his PhD dissertation at the faculty of agriculture in Rehovot. Thereafter, he joined the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, was promoted to the rank of professor, and gained a worldwide reputation based on his research on lectins and carbohydrat

and guides us in valuing what is difficult, what is different

human love and companionship are a blessing, not a concession to weakness. We are social animals all the way down, meant to live in relationship with others.

Brenner, complex though he was, was perhaps the cultural icon of the Second Aliyah. His work, still considered brilliant, surfaced issues with which Israel continues to wrestle. He would have undoubtedly done even more than he managed in his brief life, but he was murdered by an Arab mob in the 1921 Jaffa riots.

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.