Quotes Tagged "judaism"

If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

The five points of yama, together with the five points of niyama, remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christtian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritual life should be based on these things. They are the foundation stones without which we can never build anything lasting. (127)

We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.

Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely.

As you know, six nights a week we gather together to sing songs we know and love, to dance, to escape our daily lives. But on the seventh night … God created Yiddish theater.

Do you know, the only people I can have a conversation with are the Jews? At least when they quote scripture at you they are not merely repeating something some priest has babbled in their ear. They have the great merit of disagreeing with nearly everything I say. In fact, they disagree with almost everything they say themselves. And most importantly, they don't think that shouting strengthens their argument.

Those readers in search for the ultimate and totally unbiased truth about the three major world religions will wake up to the fact that these are but one religion serving the One God of all humans as one people, which have been referred to in the Qur’an as “People of the Book.

This is a sad story, Of three Brethren kings, Hijackers of the mind, Who obviously need no wings, Three snatchers of religion, Three monarchs with ambition.

On Hijacking of Judaism: My sad story of shock and awe, Began three thousands years ago, When calf worship was high and low, As Ben Nebat, the King of Israel, Took off hijacking Judaism, Which is still hijacked by Zionism, But who in his right mind: Could have ever been imagined? That Ben Nebat's dreadful mission, Was the beginning of a long tradition, Of brutal hijackers with ambition, One hijacker following another; Kingdoms competing with each other, Till they left the promised land, To a never-never land, Where Exodus is open-ended, And the true Torah is suspended, As the Sinai Ark of the Covenant, Has for long been apprehended, And the only true word of God, With no clue, or alibi. Is nowhere to be found; Like a pie in the sky

And finally On All Hijackings of Religion. That was my sad story, Of three brethren kings, Hijackers of the mind, Who obviously need no wings, Exploiters of religion, Three monarchs with ambition. But for now my all-time brothers, And sisters reading my sad story, These hijackers have had their druthers, And some even celebrated their glory; But don't ye grieve or be uptight. So long as we all this time get it right; We must reach out and pull one another, So we all can make it through a very long night, Rising above the abyss of dirt and mud, Remembering that with every daybreak, There is a new beginning with God.

Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.

The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.

Biblical, Talmudic, or Koranic literalists remind me of children wrinkling their noses at Belon oysters and asking for more Chef Boy-E-Dee. They want the world to be as simple as they are.

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.

The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.

The visionary impulse giving rise to apocalyptic eschatology tends to be strongest among those embracing the prophetic promise of Yahweh's restoration of the faithful but at the same time witnessing the political and cultic structures of their nation falling into the hands of adversaries, thereby vitiating the possibility of fulfillment within the existing order of things. The pragmatic or realistic impulse tends to be strongest among those exercising control over political and religious structures; they often actively oppose the visionaries, viewing them as a threat to their position of leadership.