After 9/11, when the horror and trauma had subsided, Americans found themselves asking what had happened and why. Was it a disaster? A tragedy? A crime? An act of war? It did not seem to fit the pre-existing paradigms. And why had it happened? The question most often asked about Al Qaeda was, “Why do they hate us?” In the…
Bamidbar is usually read on the Shabbat before Shavuot. So the Sages connected the two. Shavuot is the time of the giving of the Torah. Bamibar means, “in the desert”. What then is the connection between the desert and the Torah, the wilderness and God’s word? The Sages gave several interpretations. According to the Mechilta, the Torah was given publicly,…
Transcript The place of doubt in Judaism is very interesting because most people define faith as certainty. I define faith as the courage to live with uncertainty. We don’t, for a moment, believe that the existence of God is so obvious and overwhelming that you’ve got to be crazy not to believe in God. And this is dramatised in the…
There are leaders who hold no official position at all but who are turned to for advice and are held up as role models. They have no power but great influence. Israel’s Prophets belonged to this category….
Yocheved, Miriam, Shifra, Puah, Tzipporah and Batya were leaders not because of any official position they held… They were leaders because they had courage and conscience. They refused to be intimidated by power or defeated by circumstance. They were the real heroes of the Exodus. Their courage is still a source of inspiration today….
We can only change the world if we can change ourselves. That is why the book of Genesis ends with the story of Joseph and his brothers. It tells on an individual level the story that the book of Exodus tells on a national level. Israel is charged with the task of transforming the moral vision of humankind, but it…
The future is the sphere of human freedom, because I cannot change yesterday but I can change tomorrow by what I do today. Therefore, because Judaism is a religion of the future it is a religion of human freedom, and because Israel is a future-oriented nation, it remains, in the Middle East, an oasis of freedom in a desert of…
I believe that justice is universal. The Exodus story of how the supreme Power entered history to liberate the supremely powerless, is not just for Jews. It is the world’s greatest metanarrative of hope….
When you learn to listen to views different from your own, realising that they are not threatening but enlarging, then you have discovered the life-changing idea of argument for the sake of heaven….