One day [1966] I was sitting in a restaurant on Rehov Yehoshua Bin-Nun (Joshua Son-of-Nun Street) in Jerusalem reading Rashi's commentaries on the Talmud. An American student asked me what was I trying to get from reading millennium old discussions about Jewish law and customs. I told him that the real contribution to modern civilization is not the Bible or the Ten Commandments, important as they are, but rather Jewish Law which came after and which was concerned not so much with how to deal with God, but rather how men should deal with each other. How far away one should plant a tree from a neighbor's yard so that years later there would be less chance of apples falling into his property and possibly causing friction; how high should fences be; where should one dig a water ditch. It is precisely these rabbinic discussions that enabled Jews to live in peace with each other for thousands of years. Sadly Islam has no such tradition; its concerns are not how should man live with another, but how one should live in domination over another.

So now I get to put this banner up in my sidebar: