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...
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...
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...
But it is surely no coincidence that Israel became the first – indeed the only – nation in history to receive its laws before its land. A law that could be easily written and read, and that could be t...
A survey carried out across the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity.
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
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.
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 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...
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...
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...
It is terrifying in retrospect to grasp how seriously the Torah took the phenomenon of xenophobia, hatred of the stranger. It is as if the Torah were saying with the utmost clarity: reason is insuffic...
In Gwoza, Nigeria, one of the survivors of a massacre by the Islamist group Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. ‘They told us they were d...
Everything I have learned about faith in a lifetime tells me that the science of creation – cosmology – wondrous though it is, takes second place to the sheer wonder that God could take this risk of c...
Do not think the connection between the law and the reason for the law is always direct, palpable, and immediate. He had taught his students to search for taamei hamitzvot, the reasons for the command...
Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.
All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. P...