Happiness Vs. the Market
"Happiness is about what we have; the market concentrates on what we do not have. Happiness is about the good we do; government is about the good we pay others to do. A world in which there were only states and markets would be efficient. It would also be a world without happiness."
— Celebrating Life
The Ethics of Speech
"Judaism contains some of the most stringent rules ever formulated about the ethics of speech. The Bible commands 'You shall not go as a gossip among your people.' Jewish law condemns 'evil speech' — speaking in a way that reflects badly on others — as a cardinal sin. One who shames a person in public is 'as if he shed blood.' "
— Celebrating Life
A Countercultural Force
"Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural force; when it has no power, only influence, no authority except that which it earns, no claim to people's attention other than by the way it creates values that cannot be found elsewhere. It is then that it loses its perennial tendency to corruption and becomes again what it once was — a startling new voice, redeeming us from our loneliness, framing our existence with meaning, and teaching us to remember what so much else persuades us to forget — that the possibilities of happiness are all around us, if we would only open our eyes and give thanks."
— Celebrating Life
World's First Monotheism
"What makes Judaism significant in a global context is that it was the world's first monotheism, giving rise not only to its own faith but also to the environment from which Christianity and Islam both emerged. Jews, Christians and Muslims disagree on many things, but they also agree on some, not least in tracing their descent, spiritual or biological, from Abraham. My argument has therefore been that by going back to the roots of biblical monotheism we may find, to our surprise, a theological basis for respect for difference, based not on relativism but on the concept of covenant."
— The Dignity of Difference
Narrowcasting
"We narrowcast. Gone are the days where people of different views were forced to share an arena and thus meet and reason with their opponents. Today, we can target those who agree with us and screen out the voices of dissent. Those who wish to make their views known, do so by ways that catch the attention of the news — usually by some form of violence or protest, an event that can be captured by a dramatic image, a soundbite, and scenes of confrontation. Television news especially, with its short attention span, is no substitute for rational debate and serious engagement with contrary views. Conversation, the heartbeat of democratic politics, is dying and with it our chances for civic, let alone global, peace."
— The Dignity of Difference
Global Dispersion
"Judaism was the first religion to wrestle with the reality of global dispersion. . . . For almost 2,000 years, scattered throughout the world, they continued to see themselves and be seen by others as a single people — the world's first global people. That experience forced Jews to reflect on many problems that are now the shared experience of mankind: how to maintain identity as a minority, how to cope with insecurity, and how to sustain human dignity in a world that seems often to deny it. Judaism eventually gave rise to two other monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, that represent the faith of more than half of the six billion people alive today. There is much in common in the ethics of these three faiths, though each speaks in its own distinctive accent."
— The Dignity of Difference
Loving the Stranger
"Nowhere is the singularity of biblical ethics more evident than in its treatment of the issue that has proved to be the most difficult in the history of human interaction, namely the problem of the stranger, the one who is not like us. Most societies at most times have been suspicious of, and aggressive toward, strangers. That is understandable, even natural. Strangers are non-kin. They come from beyond the tribe. They stand outside the network of reciprocity that creates and sustains communities. That is what makes the Mosaic books unusual in the history of moral thought. As the rabbis noted, the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' but in no fewer than 36 places commands to 'love the stranger.' "
— The Dignity of Difference
Global Inequities
" 'Think of a stretch limousine driving through an urban ghetto,' writes Martin Wolf of theFinancial Times.'Inside is the post-industrial world of western Europe, North American, Australasia, Japan and the emerging Pacific Rim. Outside are all the rest.' That is what a globalized planet is rapidly becoming: one in which wealth is ever more unevenly distributed, in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Each year there are more billionaires. Each year millions die of starvation, poverty, and preventable disease. That is the difference between micro- and macro-economics. In each individual transaction, both sides gain. But when the results of billions of transactions are aggregated, their effects can be, and often are, massively inequitable. That is something globalization has magnified, not diminished. It turns the planet into a single market with highly mobile funds and near-perfect information and competition. Investment moves from country to country, seeking maximal returns without regard to human consequences. Our world is getting less equal by the year."
— The Dignity of Difference
Legacy
"The duty I owe my ancestors who died because of their faith is to build a world in which people no longer die because of their faith. I honour the past not by repeating it but by learning from it — by refusing to add pain to pain, grief to grief. That is why we must answer hatred with love, violence with peace, resentment with generosity of spirit and conflict with reconciliation."
— The Dignity of Difference
Faith
"Faith does not mean certainty. It means the courage to live with uncertainty. It does not mean having the answers, it means having the courage to ask the questions and not let go of God, as he does not let go of us. It means realizing that God creates divine justice but only we, acting in accord with his word, can create human justice — and our very existence means that this is what God wants us to do. For one who sets a hard challenge does not do so to punish, but because he believes in the one to whom he sets the challenge. At the heart of his call to responsibility — and this is the meaning of Job — is God's unshakable faith in humankind."
— To Heal a Fractured World
