A civilisation that had space for science but not religion might achieve technological prowess. But it would not respect people in their specificity and particularity. It would quickly become inhuman...
The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain tha...
The Torah asks, why should you not hate the stranger? Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt. If you are h...
One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different p...
In one of the world-changing moments of history, social criticism was born in Israel simultaneously with institutionalization of power. No sooner were there kings in Israel, than there were prophets m...
History has no more unlikely heroes than the Israelites of Moses’ day. Capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries, they became, in Herm...
Faith is about seeing the miraculous in the everyday, not about waiting every day for the miraculous.
Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said.
Enlightenment thought was marked by two great attempts to ground ethics in something other than tradition. One belonged to the Scottish enlightenment – David Hume and Adam Smith – who sought it in emo...
Dualism is what happens when cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable, when the world as it is, is simply too unlike the world as we believed it ought to be. In the words of historian Jeffrey Russell,...
Camus’s answer is the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the king who stole the secrets of the gods, in return for which he was condemned by Zeus to spend his life laboriously rolling an immense bou...
But beyond a basic minimum, the relationship between income and happiness is slight. Research bears out Maslow’s analysis that the higher needs are love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. T...
A true parent is one who fights battles on our behalf when we are young and defenceless, but who, once we have matured, gives us the inner strength to fight for ourselves.
A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed. But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she h...
A decent society will be one in which enemies do not allow their rancour or animosity to prevent them from coming to one another’s assistance when they need help.
Throughout the contemporary world, the more religious the group the higher its birth rate, and we see the power of religion to sustain community over time.
All the bad things that had happened to him were necessary if the intended outcome was to occur.
Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has lef...
What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of...
We will only understand the Torah if we recall that every other religion in the ancient world worshiped nature. That is where they found God, or more precisely, the gods: in the sun, the moon, the sta...