To be a leader, you do not need a crown or robes of office. All you need to do is to write your chapter in the story, do deeds that heal some of the pain of this world, and act so that others become a...
The law of the sin offering reminds us that we can do harm unintentionally, and this can have consequences, both physical and psychological. The best way of putting things right is to make a sacrifice...
The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon – that we have it either all the time or none of the time – blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and...
The Torah, in other words, offers a striking way out of the dilemmas of multiculturalism. It suggests that the citizens of a nation see themselves as co-creators of society seen as the home we build t...
It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words ‘...
In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated this idea into the famous words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed...
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...
Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour...
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.
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...
Although we looked hard at all the available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more...
A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. Leaders must have the strength to know what they cannot be if they are to have the courage...
A fundamental principle of Jewish leadership is intimated here for the first time: a leader does not need faith in himself, but he must have faith in the people he is to lead.
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.
The simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion fo...
All the bad things that had happened to him were necessary if the intended outcome was to occur.
The degree of unity aspired to in the total society is incompatible with human freedom and the right to disagree. Politics should be the mediation, not the suppression, of conflict.
That is because speech is much more than the conveying of information. It is the substance of relationship, and when this is poisoned, trust and the social bond are undermined. We use the phrase chara...
Sacrifice is at the heart of both politics and family. Both parent and citizen understand themselves as subject to a demand for sacrifice. They recognise the demand as legitimate because they live in...