The market economy is deeply congruent with the values set out in the Hebrew Bible. Material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task. Work is a noble calling.

We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast.

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.

Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say.

Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.

Sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith. For me, it was reading about how the Catholic Church wrestled with itself in the 1960s. Pope John XXIII set Nostra Aetate - the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions - in motion. It changed the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Today, Jews and Catholics meet as friends. If you can do that, after the longest history of hatred the world has known, that empowers you as a Jew or a Muslim to wrestle with your faith.

What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.