A New York Minute

“My feet is tired, but my soul is rested,” a 72-year-old woman told Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956 during the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott.

This battle cry of social activism is echoed in Israel. Community leader Miri Shalem, who planned and executed last January’s flash mob in Beit Shemesh — viewed by more than 200,000 people around the world — has established an international organization advocating for full gender equality, Women Dance For a Change.

David Misch is certifiably funny. You don’t have to take his word for it (but he’ll be glad to tell you); you can look it up. A veteran of comedy writing for all the networks, several cable-TV channels and a few movie studios, he’s taught at University of Southern California and University of California Los Angeles, and is now an author. “Funny: The Book.

Daniel Mandell, 23, is an officer with Israel Defense Forces who teaches military ethics. His 13-year-old brother Koby and a teenage friend were stoned to death May 8, 2001, by at least three presumed Palestinians near their home in the Israeli West Bank settlement of Tekoa.

Concurrent with the early Torah portions in Genesis that deal with the life of the patriarch Abraham, Princeton University Press is releasing a book about how the three monotheistic faiths view him. In “Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity & Islam,” Jon Levenson, professor of Jewish studies at the Harvard Divinity School, deals with the question, “Who was the real Abraham?”

Moshe Halbertal, 54, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a professor at New York University School of Law, was among a group of philosophers, lawyers and generals who in 2000 helped draft Israel’s new code of military ethics. He has studied and taught ethics and political theory and fought in the first Lebanese War in 1982.

Not many 17-year-olds have received a presidential endorsement from a New York Times columnist, but Talia Leman has. Nicholas Kristof gave her his vote for the 2044 race when he learned at an awards dinner about her work helping kids like herself raise money for causes including a school in rural Cambodia and wells in African villages.

For the past two weeks, as we navigated the peaks and valleys of the High Holidays, the cherished and time-sanctified liturgy of our tradition has relentlessly assaulted our senses with a consistent message. Our behaviors have consequences. Our lives are terribly flawed, often because of our own failures and shortcomings. The only hope that we have of achieving redemption is to return to the tried and true path of God, Torah, and fidelity to the ancient covenant that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his beloved child in order to protect.