The Addressed Life

Responsibility, Freedom, and Thinking in Jewish Life Today

My work begins from a simple fact: human beings are addressed, and they cannot avoid responding.

Judaism, at its deepest, is not about repeating inherited answers, but about learning how to respond responsibly to new circumstances.

My concern is that much of today’s Jewish leadership no longer thinks in this way. It repeats familiar language, enforces authority, and defends identity — while treating every complex issue as already decided by “tradition,” “security,” or “consensus,” instead of asking the necessary questions: What is actually being asked of us now? What are the moral costs of this decision?

Earlier generations produced figures who wrestled seriously with moral consequence and power. Our task now is not to imitate them, but to recover the courage to think again — because without thinking, freedom becomes empty, and responsibility disappears.

What “The Addressed Life” Means

To live an addressed life is to recognize that we do not begin from choice or preference. We are already being asked something — by history, by other human beings, by events, by responsibility itself.

The question is not whether we will respond, but how.

Freedom matters only insofar as it preserves the conditions that make a responsible response possible. When those conditions are weakened or distorted, responsibility collapses — even if freedom formally remains.

This site is an attempt to think again — not against tradition, but on behalf of responsibility.