Quotes About Judaism

Hebrew for "poor, humble." The "pious poor" of Judaism. After the Exile in Babylon (587 BC), a social class of Jews who returned were known as much for their commitment to the Torah* and the temple as for their economic poverty. Their situation led them to trust in God and to pray for him to establish his justice in the Land. Accordingly, this group was one in which hopes for the Messiah flourished

By the first century, Samaritans were the stereotype enemy of Judaism, the embodiment of heretical faith, and the denier of Jerusalem-centered hope and faith. They still exist today at the same location.

Zealots: a Jewish movement in the first century AD that focused on the use of violence to restore the Land and establish the kingdom of God.

Thus for me, the principal meaning of being a Jew was something people reliably held against me, a barrier to overcome.

I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I'd say my religion was more surfing than Judaism - that's what I spent most of my time doing.

Don't get caught.' This from a man who'd stolen a Jew.

el judaísmo no dejaba de ser una etiqueta,...

The Jews are forbidden to leave their houses when it rains or snows.34 Jewish women are obliged to expose their faces in public.35 They must cover themselves with a two–coloured izar.36 The men must not wear fine clothes, the only material permitted them being a blue cotton fabric. They are forbidden to wear matching shoes. Every Jew is obliged to wear a piece of red cloth on his chest. A Jew must never overtake a Muslim on a public street. He is forbidden to talk loudly to a Muslim.

Jews fled deep into the Sahara and lived there among the Berber tribes, some of whom they later converted to Judaism. Ironically, it was a Cyrenaican Jew, Mark–the St. Mark of the Gospels–who converted to Christianity and founded

In the Fifth Century, Yemen adopted Judaism as its religion. King Ab Karib As'ad, the ruler of the Himyarite kingdom, introduced the change after converting to Judaism himself under the influence of Jews at his court. Many south Arabian converts to Judaism followed; Jewish rule in Yemen lasted almost a hundred years.

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

You are blinded and you serve the God of the Jews, who is not the God of love but the God of hatred. Why don't you listen to Christ Himself, who said to the Jews: "Ye are of your father the devil!"

The faith of ancient Israel, according to some scholars, was not Judaism or even Yahwehism but "Davidism.

Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.

Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.

Jews have deep respect for the Queen and the royal family. We say a prayer for them every Sabbath in synagogue. We recite a special blessing on seeing the Queen.

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.

One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different prohibition.

To the Judaic mind this is paganism, and it is never morally neutral. God creates order; man creates chaos—and the result is inevitably destructive.

Poverty is not, in Judaism, a blessed condition. It is, the rabbis said, "a kind of death"3 and "worse than fifty plagues" (Bava Batra 116a). They said, "Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, because he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.

This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended to think of language as conveying information. What matters is whether it is true or false.

The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is God.

What would be seen as charity in other legal systems is, in Judaism, a strict requirement of the law, enforceable by the courts.

In a previous essay, I pointed to the strange fact that biblical Judaism, a religion of 613 commands, contains no word that means "obey." Instead, it uses the word shema, which means, to hear, to listen, to attend, to understand, to internalise, and to respond.