Quotes from Dennis Prager

The ancient Rabbis associated the names Adonai and Elohim with two characteristics: mercy (Adonai) and justice (Elohim). Their reasoning was that both are necessary for the world to function.

The bad may have money, power, and fame, but they do not have friends (though they may well have sycophants).

Did God dictate every single word [in Torah]? I don't know!

There is work for us to do to be God's partner as it were and to continue. There is something for every one of you to do as a partner with God in this world. He has rested and as it were now, we take over. Later, God does not intervene quite as much as obviously as God did with the Exodus of Egypt.

Remembering—the good others have done, the evil others have done, and one's moral obligations—is an indispensable aspect of a good and meaningful life. Who are we, if not our memories? I

In my view, both opinions are valid. But I side with the minority. It is extremely difficult to be decent when living among indecent people. Few people have the moral courage to reject their environment.

Unfortunately, most English-language Bibles, going back to the King James translation, have translated this verse as "Thou shalt not kill." This has led to many people using this commandment to defend pacifism and to oppose capital punishment for murder. (There may be valid reasons to oppose the death penalty for murder, but the

The believer has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.

If you build a society in which children honor their parents, your society will long survive. And the corollary is: a society in which children do not honor their parents is doomed to self-destruction. In our time, this connection between honoring parents and maintaining civilization is not widely recognized.

One reason is the subject of the Torah is all mankind, not just the Jews. That, too, is a major feature of the Torah and this commentary.

A simple test to ascertain how much you enjoy and derive meaning from your work is to ask yourself whether you would continue doing it if you won the lottery.

Judaism has consisted of four components: God,Torah, Israel, and Chosenness; that is, the God introduced by the Jews, Jewish laws, Jewish peoplehood, and the belief that the Jews are God's chosen people. Jews' allegiance to any of these components has been a major source of antisemitism because it not only rendered the Jew an outsider, but more important, it has often been regarded by non-Jews as challenging

If people with anger issues were offered a million dollars to significantly reduce the number of times they expressed excessive anger over a six-month period, most would become adept at controlling their temper. But in the absence of million-dollar incentives, people destroy marriages, family relationships, and friendships—things worth far more than a million dollars.

needs to be emphasized because many people see fear of God as onerous rather than liberating.

As if the above were not enough, Judaism has also held from the earliest times that the Jews were chosen by God to achieve this mission of

While shared values aren't sufficient for friendship, friendship is impossible without shared values. In fact, one reason people are hurt by those they had considered friends is that friends are too often chosen without attention to their values.

From its earliest days, the raison d'être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, "to repair the world under the rule of God"). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly

I have a simple rule that is of great value in identifying whom to trust: Do not choose friends on the basis of personality, 'chemistry,' or enjoyment alone. Know their character (i.e. their values and whether they act on those values) before you trust them.

they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbors aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. As a result of these factors, the quality of life of the average Jew, no matter how poor, was higher than that of a comparable non-Jew in the same society (see

The most important thing to understand when it comes to our baser parts is not only how normal and natural it is to have them but that there is nothing wrong in having them. Bad is doing bad, not thinking bad (there are exceptions—see the next chapter), and it is certainly not merely having bad tendencies.

In 2008, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama told an audience, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.

A faith based on miracles will quickly fade, dependent on the next miracle. Such an attitude cannot even be called faith.

The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.

How a society channels male aggression is one of the greatest questions as to whether that society will survive. That's why I am not against violence in the media, I am against the glorification of immoral violence.