Zitat des Tages von Meir Soloveichik:
As delineated in the biblical book of Leviticus, Israel's atonement was achieved, year after year, through the sacrifices brought on that day by the high priest.
For Jews, the paradigmatic convert is the biblical Ruth, who sought not only a new relationship with God but also a new nationality.
Not only were the Jewish people beloved, but God himself had taken pains to let them know it. Could there be any clearer sign that he continued to believe in their potential, even without the Temple, to achieve forgiveness and ultimately merit the Temple's rebuilding?
Rather than forgive, we can wish ill; rather than hope for repentance, we can instead hope that our enemies experience the wrath of God.
Of all the rabbinic sages of antiquity, perhaps none was more influential or famous than Rabbi Akiva.
The eternal link between Lincoln's life and Passover - the fact that Lincoln's death, marked in the Hebrew calendar, coincides with Passover every year - is certainly fitting, and perhaps even part of the providence that Lincoln began to see in his own life and the life of his nation.
A society that is all self-interest and no comradeship is not a society at all. But a society that is all comradeship and no self-interest is also not a society; it is a sect - or, on the largest scale, totalitarianism.
I am humbled and deeply honored to have been asked to serve the congregants of Shearith Israel, a congregation with an incomparable history, where some of America's most distinguished rabbis have pastored and preached.
If R. Akiva was perhaps overly generous in judging his generation, it can perhaps be ascribed to the belief, based on his own experience, that everyone is capable of a dramatic life change.
We live in an age in which the biblical-moral traditions that have guided us for centuries are increasingly being forgotten.
Jews seek to cleave to the will of God as set forth in the Bible and, particularly, the Pentateuch, with its rabbinic commentaries, the Mishnah and Talmud.
Religious relativism is not the answer to disagreement between faiths; yet relativism, and a blurring of religious distinctions, all too often result when two deeply believing faith communities engage each other in the public arena on theological issues.
The practice of shaving makes its first appearance in the Bible in connection with the story of Joseph, who as a young man was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, where he was subsequently imprisoned on false charges.
The election of the Jewish people is the result of God's falling in love with Abraham and founding a family with him.
Jews focus on the Torah, the embodiment of God's will; Christians, on an embodied God.
The giving of the Torah is a story of God seeking to provide humanity with the opportunity to make moral decisions.
We Americans unite faith and freedom in asserting that our liberties are your gift, God, not that of government.
How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.
By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth. By encouraging Jews to grow beards, it reminds them that they will not be young forever, that they must prepare the ground for those who come after, just as their fathers did for them.
Traditional Judaism has always embraced the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the ultimate resurrection of the dead.
God can desire to enter into a relationship with us; he can be drawn to some aspect of our identity.
