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

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.

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.

So what is the meaning of life?…The Jews faced that question and they concluded that life is a partnership between God and humanity. Life is making sense of this world and improving it and doing tikkun olam (repairing the world) in one’s own time.

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.

In the history of brit, with the passage of time, God intervenes less and less openly, and gives humans more and more freedom. I believe that we are living through the climax of that process. In this era, God does not strike you dead for sin; God does not stop the rain if a people do not obey. Genuine freedom is scary.

Great leadership is not always crowned with success. In order to be a great leader, you have to be willing to fail.

The covenant becomes a treaty with all the generations. Each generation will have to do its share of redemption and pass it on to the next generation until the redemption is complete.

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.

People remember Hillel’s famous statement of the basis of Torah, what you do not want the other one to do you, do not do to the other. People forget that Hillel continued with the instruction: ‘go study [and apply] the rest.’ All these issues require a lifetime of application and wrestling.

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.