Quotes from Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

When God saw that people, instead of turning to God, were turning to the medicine cabinet, God made himself available in the medicine cabinet.

Ultimately, our questions must emerge not from mental categories, but from deep within the heart. They must rise to the surface of our beings as we sit in silence, so that they are not just the old questions which we raise whenever we have nothing else to talk about or just for the sake of argument. They need to be the questions which make a difference in our lives.

elders serve as conduits between the divine realm and the mundane world, making the abstract truths of spirituality accessible to the community by embodying them in their everyday behavior.

God is always present. The question is, how present are we?

Do not exalt any path above god. There are many paths that lead to god. So people are capable of finding and following the ways that suit them, provided they do not stand still.

We make God the steward of morality and build up expectations, expectations that sooner or later are bound to be shattered. If instead we strive to accept all sides of the equation, if we could get into a Möbius strip mentality in which both sides of the page, good and evil, are one and the same, then we start to get a real sense of that famous phrase from Adon Olam: "Ve-hu echad ve-ein sheini," God is one, there is no other.

True prayer is a bursting forth of the soul to God. What can be more natural and more human than turning to God's listening presence with our thanks and our burdens?

Indeed, religions might be seen as elaborate, multilayered metaphors, with layers upon layers of submetaphors, constructions that point beyond themselves toward the primary experience of ultimate reality but do not capture it.

she has carried this sacred sense of community building into

Theodicy, the philosophers call it: the problem of God's justice. The

No one who hasn't taken a vigil for the night and had it out with God can get to the place where their love and faith become real. We

Don't regard yourselves as the final recipients of [...] music [...]. Instead, offer your ears and heart to heaven. Let your experience of [...] music go up to God.

own voice or have a friend do it for you. When recorded in your own

Anyone who has had a truly "spiritual" moment, a moment of breaking through our day-to-day reality and touching the divine, knows how difficult it is to communicate that experience to others—or even to recapture it later for ourselves. The

In our daily meditations, we pray to the Divine who fills the world, and fills our hearts, and moves us from rung-to-rung, until we arrive at where we have always been. And then we take another step so that the soul can come to encompass the vastness of the knowable as well as the unknowable.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one sight, one knowledge, and one love.

As our elders teach us how to find more inner satisfaction, we'll decrease our reliance on consumerism and live in greater harmony with the Earth and its resources.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, of what value am I?

Peaceful death is really an essential human right," he writes, "more essential perhaps even than the right to vote or the right to justice; it is a right on which, all religious traditions tell us, a great deal depends for the well-being and spiritual future of the dying person.… There is no greater gift of charity you can give than helping a person to die well.