David Novak

Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair. ”

If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic. ”

A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists. ”

Cultural synthesis is how a compromise between various opinions is worked out. But truth does not change, and truth is not arrived at by some sort of compromise. ”

The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms. ”

The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. ”

The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter. ”

When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it. ”

The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now. ”

Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same. ”