Life-changing ideas.

What is Judaism?

A religion, a faith, a way of life, a set of beliefs, a collection of commands, a culture, a civilization?

It is all these. But it's emphatically something more.

It's a way of thinking, a constellation of ideas, a way of understanding the world and our place within

it. Judaism contains life-changing ideas. This is what I want to talk about in Covenant and

conversation in the year 5778. Too few people think about faith in these terms. We know that terror maintains command, 613 of them. We know that Judaism has beliefs. Maimonides formulated them as the 13 principles of Jewish faith. But these are not all that Judaism is. Nor are they what's most distinctive about it. Judaism was and remains a dazzlingly original way of

thinking about life. Take one of my favorite examples, the American Declaration of Independence,

and its most important sentence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created

equal, that they are endowed by

their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the

pursuit of happiness. This is arguably the most important sentence in the history of modern

politics. It's what Abraham Lincoln was referring to in the opening of the Gettysburg Address when he said,

four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty

and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

The irony of this sentence, as I've often noted, is that these truths are very far

indeed from being self-evident. There would have sounded absurd to Plato and Aristotle, both of whom

believe that not all men are created equal, and therefore they do not have equal rights.

They were only self-evident to someone brought up in a culture that had deeply

internalized the Hebrew Bible and the revolutionary idea set out in its first chapter that we are

each, regardless of color, culture class or creed in the image and likeness of God. This was one of

Judaism's world-changing ideas.

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