holy seperate

In Judaism kadosh, holy, means separation. To sanctify is to separate. Why? Because when we separate, we create order. We defeat chaos. We give everything and everyone their space. I am I and not you. You are you and not I. Once we respect our difference and distance, then we can join without doing damage to one another...The most beautiful symbol of the problem and its resolution is the ceremony of havdalah at the end of Shabbat and especially the havdalah candle. The wicks are separate but the flame they make is joined. So it is between husband and wife. So it is between parent and child. And so it is, or should be, between brothers.

Rabbi J. Sacks

God Said and it was

Judaism marks the world’s first transition on a national scale from an oral to a literate culture. Hence the unique significance it attaches to the spoken and written word. We discover this at the very beginning of the Torah. It takes the form of the radical abandonment of myth. G-d spoke and the world came into being. There is no contest, no struggle, no use of force to subdue rival powers – as there is in every myth without exception. Instead, the key verb in Genesis 1 is simply leimor, “G-d said [vayomer], Let there be . . . and there was.” Language creates worlds.

The Chief Rabbi J. Sacks

Ear versus Eye

Perhaps the most profound difference between the two civilizations of antiquity that are most responsible for the culture of the Western world ancient Greece and ancient Israel Is their focus: the Greeks were the supreme masters of the visual arts: art, sculpture, architecture and the theatre. Jews, as a matter of profound religious principle, were not.

For Israel G-d, the sole object of worship is invisible. He transcends nature. He created the universe and is therefore beyond the universe. He cannot be seen. He reveals Himself only in speech. Therefore the supreme religious act in Judaism is to listen. Ancient Greece was a culture of the eye; ancient Israel a culture of the ear. The Greeks worshipped what they saw; Israel worshipped what they heard.

Chief Rabbi J. Sacks