Jonathan Sacks

It is a moment of the very highest drama. The Israelites, a mere forty days after the greatest revelation in history, have made an idol: a Golden Calf. G‑d threatens to destroy them.

For once Moses, the hero, the leader, the liberator, the lawgiver, is off-stage.

It is hard to understand the depth of the crisis into which the destruction of the First Temple plunged the Jewish people.

The Torah asks, why should you not hate the stranger? Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt.

Only in Judaism was G‑d’s self-disclosure not to an individual (a prophet) or a group (the elders) but to an entire nation, young and old, men, women and children, the righteous and not-yet-righteous alike.

The sages tended to downplay the dimension of the miraculous, even in the case of the greatest miracle of all, the division of the sea.

The best test of a civilization is to see how it treats children, its own and others

To think of history as an arena of change is terrifying. It means that what happened once may never happen again, that we are embarked on a journey with no assurance that we will ever return to where we began.

She is one of the most unexpected heroes of the Hebrew Bible. Without her, Moses might not have lived. The whole story of the exodus would have been different. Yet she was not an Israelite. She had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by her courage.

Teshuvah is the ultimate assertion of freedom. Time then becomes an arena of change in which the future redeems the past and a new concept is born – the idea we call hope.