As the lawless killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer has seized America’s attention, it is worth turning to a sermon given in 1966 by Rabbi Norman Lamm, who died on May 31 and was one of the outstanding American Orthodox thinkers of our time. When Lamm delivered this homily, barely over a year has elapsed since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and less than two years would go by before Martin Luther King’s assassination. He began by contrasting Abraham’s famous reply to God’s call—“Here I am!”—with Adam’s attempt to hide himself from God in the Garden of Eden, before moving on to questions of conscience and responsibility, and then to topical issues:

In his first interview after leaving office, the former head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, admitted that he had erred in believing that Israel could come to some sort of accord with Hamas. In his own words: