In recent years, scientists have developed a technology known as CRISPR, which allows for the manipulation of an organism’s genetic code. Medical researchers have already experimented with using CRISPR to treat diseases, and it promises to yield many breakthroughs in the coming years. If applied to what are known as germ cells, this technology could also be used to halt the transmission of heritable diseases, create “designer babies,” or even engineer children of abnormal height, strength, and so forth. J. David Bleich, a rabbi and halakhic authority, Edwards Burns, the dean of Einstein Medical School, and Neville Sanjana, a cancer researcher, discuss the ethical implications of gene editing, touching on such questions as whether Judaism has a conception of natural law and if there is, indeed, anything immoral about playing God. (Audio, 75 minutes.)

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.