Brooks on the Rise of New York City's Orthodox Jewish Community

An excellent column by David Brooks this morning on the rising strength of New York City's Orthodox Jewish Community.  One highly relevant feature of his piece is the importance of law as a structure that limits choice, and of the beneficent constraining power of law.  You should read the whole piece.  But by far the sharpest line in it is not Brooks's, but belongs to Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth Jonathan Sacks: "The Torah is an anthology of argument with a shared vocabulary of common restraint."  

An analogy is made here (by Brooks and Rabbi Sacks both, it seems) to constitutional law -- that is, a conceptual connection between the shared cultural norms of a common tradition and norms of constitutional interpretation and adjudication.  Amen.