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26. The catchphrase “God, Torah, and Israel are one” is widely quoted in Hasidic sources in the name of the Zohar. Isaiah Tishby has shown in an article by that name (Kiryat Sefer 50 [1975]: 480-492) that in fact the full identification of the three is not found in any Zohar text and actually appears first only in the early eighteenth-century writings of the Italian Kabbalist and author Moses Hayyim Luzzatto.

27. It is interesting to note that in the Numbers passage, like most others, the second-person pronouns (pronominal suffixes, actually) are in the plural, while those in the first of the ten commandments (as we Jews understand it) are in the singular. It is you, as an individual, whom Y-H-W-H has brought forth from Egypt. But that individual sense of redemption itself serves to underscore one's sense of belonging to the newly liberated tribe.

28. Michael Wyschograd's The Body of Faith (Minneapolis: Seabury Press, 1983) speaks touchingly of God's simply “falling in love” with Abraham, bearing all the irrational character of the ways we humans fall in love.

29. See my discussion of this in Devotion and Commandment: The Faith of Abraham in the Hasidic Imagination, Hebrew Union College, Efroymson Lectures of 1986 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1989). See also Avraham, Avi ha-Ma'aminim, ed. Moshe Halamish et al. (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002).

30. Bereshit Rabbah 42:8.

31. Bereshit Rabbah 39:1.

32. The term “choose” is not used with regard to Abraham or the other patriarchs in Genesis. It does, however, appear in Neh. 9:7. The influence of this text on later Judaism is documented by its presence in the daily morning prayer service.

33. Bereshit Rabbah 39:14. See n. 56 below.

34. One way of understanding the ‘aqedah (binding of Isaac) story is as testimony that Abraham would stand up and argue with God for the sake of others. How much greater, then, is his submission and humility in making no protest when God demands his own.

35. Bereshit Rabbah 67:4; 78:9.

36. T. B. Baba Metsi'a 84a.

37. From avinu malkenu in the High Holy Day and fast day liturgy.

38. The abstract noun yahadut, “Judaism,” is postmedieval and is hardly used before modern times. Yehudi meaning “Jew” (as distinct from designating a southern-kingdom Judaean) begins in the book of Esther (2:5). But the “religion” of such a Jew was long to be called Torah or halakhah, not “Judaism.” Conversion then meant linking one's communal association and personal fate to Israel, in accepting the essential faith claims and (according to Maimonides) certain basic practices of the tribe.

39. Note that this suggestion is quite distinct from the call in Israel for a way of “secular conversion.” There the desire is for a way to join the Jewish people without any requirements of faith or religious practice. I am talking about an Israelite faith, accompanied by some sort of practice, for those who do not quite feel prepared join to join and link their fate to that of the Jewish people.

40. James Carroll's Constantine's Sword (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2001) was a milestone in this ongoing process. The reader may want to see my brief response to Carroll in Catholics, Jews, and the Prism of Conscience (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2001), pp. 27-41. I regret that the voice of this leading Catholic intellectual is not fully heeded in church circles.

41. Protest against the use of “Israel” as the name of the state began with the most prescient writings of Simon Rawidowicz. Much that concerned Rawidowicz in the early days of Israeli statehood (before his death in 1957) has in fact come to pass. See his Bavel vi-Yerushalayim (Waltham, MA: Ararat, 1957). For an English selection of Rawidowicz's writings in this area see his State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1986).

42. I do not, however, support Israel's “Law of Return” in its current form. I believe that the right