We already have plenty of fundamentalism and fundamental sects like for instance Rabbi Schneerson and Chabad Lubavitch. They feel more secure because they are in the warm, caring/sharing community. This is the difference between community (Gemeinschaft) and what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft: a kind of setting in which you have no rights to do anything unless you pay for it, and no right to get anything unless you prove that you are 'credit worthy'. In a Gemeinschaft, however, you have a place at the table guaranteed whatever happens.

It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.

Fully "biodegradable" structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.

The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.

The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.

In Montreal, where I taught in 1970, I met many people. The only ones who said to me they were Canadians, were Jews. All the rest were Scotts, Irish, English, French, Swedes.

I worry about younger generations who were born to view their country trampling on humanity of everyone that comes in its way, as the 'normal state of affairs" - because they knew no other. We know how easy it is to shed, under such circumstances, the thin and frail veneer of civilization, not to mention the moral standards of which the Jews were presumed to be the world's teachers.