Quotes from Naomi Ragen

Suffering did different things to different people...Some souls became tempered, unshakable in their faith, while others became twisted and mis-shapen, throwing off all connection to God.

Women were naturally pure souls, on so much higher a spiritual plane to begin with than men.

sustains us day after day. But the relentless

That was the custom among Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe. Both bride and groom fasted and prayed on their wedding day. Among the Sephardim, it was the opposite. They plied the girl with sweets the whole day to give her pleasure and energy. But that practice made too much sense to the Ashkenazim, who found holiness in suffering.

welcome him. And in the dark crowded alleyways of the

Forging peace between people always outweighed the truth.

He wrote such profound thoughts in such a deceptively simple way. Right off the bat, first paragraph, he tells you life is hard, that there are no simple answers, and that we should all stop moaning about it and get on with it. Love, he wrote, was action, not emotion.

The Noble Truth of Suffering, dukkha is this: 'Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering--in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.' Samyutta Nikaya 56.11.

No sacrifice is too great for our children. Whatever we do for them comes back to us in blessings a thousandfold.

Most people were good, intelligent, responsible human beings struggling to live decent, useful lives. Why was it so many of them found that almost impossible? Was it because there were just no rules anymore, people making them us as the went along? From her own bitter experience, she saw that most good people were simply lost, bobbing around like castaways in a moral wasteland flooded with debris and ugliness, waiting to be rescued and placed on solid ground.

wasn't it better to feel that when that chaos engulfed you, there was a benevolent God ready to help you through, rather than the emptiness of an indifferent universe?

I understand that you are learning new things, seeing a different way of life and because you are you, you're full of enthusiasm. But let the mother you think knows nothing and is pretty much useless tell you this: people are just people. Nobody is a bigger saint than the next one; they just hide their true selves better. Sooner or later, you'll figure out for yourself that this community you're madly in love with and want so much to be a part of is just like the rest of the world.

Indeed, there was something hard and unforgiving and almost brutal among those who considered themselves the most piously stringent in their observance, something ugly and positively vicious in their unrelenting persecution of those who deviated from their standards.

In the secular world, it was impossible to find a man who had not been infected by the worst accomplishments of feminism: the idea that women should be treated as men not only in their paychecks but also in their physical strength. Yes, she could open her own door, carry her own packages, lift heavy objects. But what woman wanted to be treated like that, unless you were a brainwashed Soviet comrade?

He felt the joy spread down his body like a slow anointing with holy oil, warm and soothing, from head to toe.

And who wanted to live near that dangerous campus up in Harlem anyway?

Or you could say that human society is denying a basic truth that human beings have verified from the dawn of time, and that in removing themselves from the idea of a Supreme Being, man is moving away from all that is spiritual and moral in the world, all that is spiritual and moral in himself.

It is so easy to make mistakes when you are a parent. The easiest thing in the world," Marsha said. "But you can only do what you think is best at the moment. Maybe you will be smarter the next day, or the next month, or in five years. But it doesn't help you at the moment. You need to forgive yourself.

A beginning and an end. That is every day of our lives. That is what we have in common as human beings, Yaakov, every day of our lives. And to every ending, there is a new beginning.

We cannot understand, but that doesn't mean our just and loving God doesn't have His reasons. If we have faith, every experience we undergo in life, good or bad, will bring us closer to Him.

Yes, it is so hard to dream and live and not to find what we want. So much has been given to us, but somehow not what we want. There is always something missing, always something we could have had, should have had. We do not understand why God denies us these things; why He is deaf to our prayers.

There are several ways of looking at this. You could say that mankind is getting smarter, removing itself from superstition and irrationality. Or you could say that human society is denying a basic truth that human beings have verified from the dawn of time, and that in removing themselves from the idea of a Supreme Being, man is moving away from all that is spiritual and moral in the world, all that is spiritual and moral in himself.

Text after text, scholars never tired of trying to compensate for sentencing women to eternal drudgery, which they themselves abhorred, by dreaming up fancy ways of labeling it, easing their consciences and allowing them to view their self-serving little world of men-gods as a fair, nay noble, thing.

She had been brought up to believe in God. To believe in people. To believe that evil didn't really exist, that it was simply an absence of good, the way darkness is an absence of light.