The Truthful Project

 As appeared on Jewish News Syndicate and my Times of Israel blog.   The major Jewish holiday of Shavuot represents the revelation when God communicated directly with the Israelites and gave them the Torah, including the Ten Commandments. This established Israelites as a people bound by a divine covenant. A n interesting observation was made by the late Sir Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948 – 2020) z”l , Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. In his book A Letter In the Scroll he states: “Christianity and Islam are also religions of revelation, but in neither does God reveal Himself to an entire nation. In one he appears to the ‘son of God,’ and in the other to his prophet. In neither does the revelation have the public character of Sinai, an experience shared by men and women, young and old, righteous and ordinary alike. The difference between revelation to a holy individual and to a nation as a whole is fundamental and defines the unique character of the Jewish project.” ...

 Appeared in Jewish News Service (JNS) and my Times of Israel blog.   In the early 1970’s, a New York University finance professor of mine said to our senior class, “give me one set of numbers and I will give you two sets of answers.” For most of my professional business career this has been true. Against that mantra, which I have lived by for many decades, I am going to offer a few sets of numbers and only one set of answers. Because there is only one answer. 1. The ‘land’ set of numbers. There are about 1.978 billion Muslims in the world today out of approximately 8.2 billion people. Seventy-two percent (72%) of Muslims live in countries where either the Islamic religious symbol (crescent moon) is on its national flag, Islam is the official state religion, and/or more than 70% of that country’s population identifies as Muslim. The total area of these Islamic countries is 10.8 million square miles (28.1 million square kilometers) or 21.6% of the world’s total landmass. Chr...