Quotes About Judaism

I talked to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which is the same as the difficulty of writing. For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out.

Thus the pagan notion of a trained professional speaker who delivers orations for a fee moved straight into the Christian bloodstream. Note that the concept of the "paid teaching specialist" came from Greece, not Judaism. It was the custom of Jewish rabbis to take up a trade so as to not charge a fee for their teaching.

He says that he is a Jew. They are a people from the East who killed the man whom the Christians regard as their God. This killing took place long ago, but the Christians still cherish a great hatred against the Jews because of it, and like to kill them, and will not accept any ransom for them or show them any clemency. For this reason most of the Jews live in the lands ruled by the Caliph of Córdoba, since in his kingdom the man they killed is not regarded as a god.

Incerteza, secura, silêncio. É nisto que tudo passará. Que tenho de comum com os judeus? Só dificilmente tenho alguma coisa de comum comigo próprio e deveria manter-me muito quieto a um canto, contente por poder respirar.

As a Jew, I recognize the importance of Israel historically, liturgically: its place in our history and in our sacred texts. I fully recognize and appreciate that. I just think that, for me, a sole focus on Israel gets in the way of the pursuit of a relationship with God and a more spiritual existence within Judaism.

We were at a kibbutz, and we were at a Shabbat service, and I opened up the prayer book, and on the first page, it said that the prayer book was in thanks to the sponsorship of this family in a temple in Kansas City. For me, it was a moment when I really kind of connected in a real serious way with my personal identity as a Jew.

Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study.

Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.

In addition, since they were committed to reasoning about God, the Jews were quick to embrace the Greek concern for valid reasoning. What emerged was an image of God as not only eternal and immutable but also as conscious, concerned, and rational. The early Christians fully accepted this image of God. They also added and emphasized the proposition that our knowledge of God and of his creation is progressive. Faith in both reason and progress were essential to the rise of the West.

In our case, as for countless other Jews, the price of integration was the loss of millennia of Jewish tradition. The Torah's instruction gave way to the moral void of modernity, a hectic dance over absence. Many

The dogma of a "chosen people," while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world.

Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.

The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there.

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

There are versions of Christianity that claim to be simply 'biblical' (no versions of Judaism do so), but the reality is that the structures and content of Christian belief, even among Christians who believe their faith to be wholly grounded in the Bible, are organized and articulated differently from the contents of the Bible.

The description of the Bible (warts and all) which follows will necessarily make disconcerting reading for those who idealize it, but I will also show that it is not and cannot be the whole foundation of either Judaism or Christianity.

Reading these books raises what will be a recurring theme: given that they tell a story rather than give instruction on what to believe or to do, the path from the biblical text to religious belief and practice in Judaism or Christianity today is far from straightforward.

Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

he converted not from Judaism to Christianity, of course, but from violent opponent and persecutor of pagan inclusion to nonviolent proponent and persuader of pagan inclusion. That which he persecuted for God was exactly that to which he was called by God.

I think we need a life-loving Palestine living by a Jewish democratic Israel.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Thirdly, we have to raise human beings with a philosophy of ethics. If it's Judaism, wonderful, because it has a basic ethic. If it's Christianity, it has a basic ethic. But we have to raise people with a conscience.

When one set of Jews labels another set of Jews 'anti-Semitic,' they are trying to monopolize the right to speak in the name of the Jews. So the allegation of anti-Semitism is actually a cover for an intra-Jewish quarrel.