The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it...
Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that...
We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional exc...
Our views of the natural are shaped by our ideas of the supernatural.
Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be. Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will.
What Jacob learned – and what we learn, hearing his story – is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved.
Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place.
Homo sapiens, discovering God singular and alone, discovered the human being singular and alone. There is no greater dignity than that
Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.
Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the...
When a human being makes many coins in a single mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same image, His image, yet they all emerge different.
The rabbinic account of how God taught Adam and Eve the secret of making fire is the precise opposite of the story of Prometheus. God seeks to confer dignity on the beings He made in His image as an a...
The Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away. It happened in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe: the Europe of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Br...
It is as if the man said to him, In the past, you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau’s heel. In the future you wil...
If this is so, then the placement of the Mishkan at the heart of the camp suggests that societies need, in the public domain, a constant reminder of the presence of God. That, after all, is why the Mi...
Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of God, and society into a home for the Divine Presence.
Follow your passion. Nothing - not wealth, success, accolades or fame - is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don't enjoy.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the ex...
The royals - all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles - have done outstanding work with the faith communities.
Century