The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of caring for the less fortunate by allowing them access to resources left behind in agricultural practices.
Jonathan Sacks highlights a compassionate principle from the Hebrew Bible that mandates the leaving of certain portions of crops for the poor. This action reflects a deeper societal responsibility to ensure that all individuals, especially those in need, can have access to food and resources. It emphasizes the ethical duty to support and uplift the less fortunate in our communities.
In practice
In a community service meeting discussing food distribution, this quote could emphasize the necessity of provisions for the poor.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?
A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul? When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate, and just after learning to walk, we are tripped, and just for wanting to love, we are hated, and for no more than touching, we are hurt, which of us hasn't started to arm himself, to make himself sharp, somehow, like a knife, to pay back the hurt?
Lord, let me find my life in thee, and not in the mire of this world's favour or gain.
Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?
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