Home
Welcome
About the Rabbi
Lectures
- Listen
- Read
- Watch
Writing
Archive
Leadership
Contact
- Thanks

Contact

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

CONTACT
Thanks

We spend four years—and more—in college to train ourselves for a career…in self-respect and conscience, we must spend at least one year working full-time at becoming a mensch…Only a year of full time student of Torah, deepened by encounter with the holiness and pulsating life of Jerusalem and Israel, can begin to give the inspiration and knowledge of authentic Jewish living to illuminate a lifetime.

This is the heroic age of the Jewish people, an age of resurrection and rebirth. It is simultaneously an age of awakening and new hope for humanity.

The educational challenge is no longer how one [Jewish] world can reshape itself to be integrated into the other; rather the question is how do the two worlds [Jewish and non-Jewish]—standing side by side—correlate, integrate or confront each other? The time has come for a two-way conversation of equals, not a one-way conversation between a dominant and a minor culture.

My thinking and my institutional leadership have been driven by the messages and friendship that the audience and co-workers have communicated to me, nonverbally as well as verbally. And when I have gone through periods when I felt that I could not go on (there have been such times), the people have renewed my strength…and propelled me onward. This is as it should be. A leader should not simply follow, but should be sustained by the people.

It is likely that this event [the Holocaust] will turn out to be a fundamental turning point in human history, not just in Jewish history. The Holocaust represents a crisis of credibility for the dominant culture in which we live.

I believe that contemporary civilization is one of the great cultures of all time; that is why it is so appealing. The greatness of the culture embodies some of the finest Jewish values as well.

If you can get people of such decency and quality who are willing to really criticize themselves and determined to change their own religious teaching in order to make it a vision of love… this is the key to breaking anti-Semitism.

All halachic behaviors are dramatic/mimetic gestures articulating a central metaphor of living. Grasping the metaphor adds depth to action and joy to life.

Still I know that although Shabbat does not last all week, I would like to make the world look more like Shabbat. I would like to make the Jewish people a little closer to Shabbat.

If the principal makes the day school into such a covenantal community—in imitation of God—then the student will experience a dignity that anticipates the Messianic world promised by Judaism and modernity.