Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

What is unique about the covenant in Judaism is, first, that one of the parties is G-d Himself. This would have been unintelligible to Israel’s neighbors, and remains extraordinary even today.

According to Maimonides, the death of the High Priest has nothing to do with guilt or atonement, but simply with the fact that it causes a collective grief so great that it causes people to forget their own misfortunes in the face of a larger national loss.

A leader who fails to work for change is not a leader. But a leader who attempts too much change in too short a time will fail.

These are important fights, good fights, whose outcome will affect more than Jews.

It is less reason than emotion that lies behind our choices, and it takes emotional intelligence to make good choices.

Leadership is a role. It is not an identity. It is not who we are. Therefore, a leader should never take an attack on their leadership personally.

People with the growth mindset react differently. They don't just seek challenge; they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch.

Adaptive leadership is called for when the world is changing, circumstances are no longer what they were, and what once worked works no more.

Why does the Torah spend so much time describing an event that could have been stated far more briefly by naming the princes and then simply telling us generically that each brought a silver dish, a silver basin and so on?

The wilderness was not just a place; it was a state of being, a moment of solidarity, midway between enslavement in Egypt and the social inequalities that would later emerge in Israel.

The people may be faithless to G-d but G-d will never be faithless to the people.

The Torah commands us in only one place to love our neighbor, but thirty-six times to love the stranger.

According to the Torah, the first month of the year is Nissan. This was the day the earth became dry after the Flood (Gen. 8:13). It was the day the Israelites received their first command as a people (Ex. 12:2).

There are holy times and holy places, and each time and place has its own integrity, its own setting in the total scheme of things.

The disciples of Hillel hold that at a wedding you should sing that the bride is beautiful, whether she is or not.

The most compelling illustration of what the tradition is speaking about when it talks of the gravity of motsi shem ra, slander, and lashon hara, evil speech, is Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello.

Why then was spontaneity wrong for Nadav and Avihu yet right for Moshe Rabbeinu? The answer is that Nadav and Avihu were Kohanim, Priests. Moses was a Navi, a Prophet.

Jews did not abandon the past. We still refer constantly to the sacrifices in our prayers. But they did not cling to the past. Nor did they take refuge in irrationality.

Regardless of guilt and responsibility, if we commit a sin we have transgressed a boundary.

Aaron, according to the most favored explanation, realized that he could not stop the people directly by refusing their request, so he adopted a stalling maneuver.

Art in Hebrew – omanut – has a semantic connection with emunah, faith or faithfulness. A true artist is faithful both to his materials and to the task...

Moses’s motto was: Let the law pierce the mountain. Aaron, however, loved peace and pursued peace and made peace between man and man.

All human authority needs checks and balances if it is to remain uncorrupted. In particular, political and religious leadership, keter malchut and keter kehunah, should never be combined.

It is not what G-d does for us that transforms us, but what we do for G-d.

If G-d does not want slavery, if He regards it as an affront to the human condition, why did He not abolish it immediately?

Admittedly, the Talmud questions how free the Israelites actually were, and it uses an astonishing image.

In Bereishit Rabbah, it is indicated that the division of the sea was, as it were, programmed into Creation from the outset. It was less a suspension of nature than an event written into nature from the beginning, to be triggered at the appropriate moment in the unfolding of history.

That is the context in which we should read the story of Pharaoh and his advisers. This is one of the first recorded instances of the march of folly. How does it happen?

The aspect of G-d that appears in the days of Moses and the Israelites is radically different, and it’s only because we are so used to the story that we find it hard to see how radical it was.

Korach’s motives were wrong. He spoke like a democrat but what he wanted was to be an autocrat. He wanted to be a leader himself.