The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all famili...
Keriat haTorah therefore means not reading, but proclaiming the Torah, reading it aloud. The one who reads it has the written word in front of him, but for the rest of the gathering it is an experienc...
In an age in which rulers wrote history in the form of triumphal inscriptions, the Israelites alone recorded their failures more vividly than their successes.
The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety.
There's always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.
The recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The
[The message of listening to and wrestling with God] is conveyed in a series of passages whose meaning does not lie on the surface of the text, but discloses itself only to those who listen to what is...
Torah – God’s law and teaching – was not a code written by a distant king, to be imposed by force. Nor was it an esoteric mystery understood by only a scholarly elite. It was to be available to, and i...
Torah is God’s book of humanity, and each of us is a chapter in its unfinished story.
To the Judaic mind this is paganism, and it is never morally neutral. God creates order; man creates chaos—and the result is inevitably destructive.
This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended...
This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to ma...
The story has a sequel. In 1989, the Polish mathematician Martin Nowak produced a programme that beats Tit-for-Tat. He called it Generous. It overcame one weakness of Tit-for-Tat, namely that when you...
The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961
The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.
The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fu...
The book of Exodus is the West’s meta-narrative of hope. It tells an astonishing story of how a group of slaves were liberated from the mightiest empire of the ancient world. Theologically, its messag...
Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.
Power destroys the powerless and powerful alike, oppressing the one while corrupting the other. If we are to build a society with a human face, we must always choose the way of Exodus, with its messag...
Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It...