Quotes from Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

God created everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through" (Paul Valery).

Cavell writes: " 'No one comes' is a tragedy for a child. For a grown-up it means that the time has come to be the one who goes first."27

The Bible is familiar, life is strange. We bring the two together, to shed light on life.

The real subject of this Book of the Wilderness, I suggest, is the longing of the people of Israel to learn directly from God, by learning something new about the Torah, about the world and themselves. What they are developing in their skeptical discourse is a language of imaginative truth, in which the fantasies of return to Egypt will be brought into connection with the miracles of Exodus. In them, traumatic suffering and traumatic revelation seek some subjective expression.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing.…

Without contraries there is no progression" (Blake)—

what we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world."71

God created him first with two faces, and separated them" (1:27).

We invent for ourselves the major part of experience," Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil.