Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.