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:

From March to May, a series of small-scale terrorist attacks claimed the lives of some twenty Israelis, and raised fears that jihadist murder would again become a fact of everyday life in the Jewish state. Hillel Frisch details how a swift campaign waged by the IDF and Shin Bet, employing deliberate and discriminate force, succeeded in restoring the peace: