Quotes About Judaism

In Judaism faith is a form of listening – to the song creation sings to its Creator, and to the message history delivers to those who strive to understand it. That is what Moses says time and again in Deuteronomy: Stop looking; listen. Stop speaking; listen.

The entire drama of Torah flows from this point of departure. Judaism remains God's supreme call to humankind to freedom and creativity on the one hand, and on the other, to responsibility and restraint – becoming God's partner in the work of creation.

Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place.

Faith in Judaism is not about ontology (what exists?) or epistemology (what can we know?) but about relationships – about the people with whom we converse.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

Jesus, Christianity, and the New Testament documents are birthed directly out of Judaism, and so whatever else we understand about their meaning must be grounded in this reality. Any reading that ignores this is a decontextualized reading that may bear some fruit but cannot be described as sensitive to the intention of the text.

the 'non-Jewish Jew'. The implosion of the traditional

liberty and the homeland of the Jews. Athenian democracy had shifted to Washington, and ancient Judaism had taken a secular form in the state of Israel.

The Holocaust put an end to an age in which, to use the words of Eric Hobsbawm, Jews underwent an explosion of creativity, like boiling water lifting the lid of a saucepan.82 But the end of pariah Judaism also meant the end of the stage in the history of critical thought in the Western world.

Access to God became universal, and far more easily attainable: the answer lay in belief. This key Christian concept—the notion of faith in one personal redeemer, the representative of God's logic in the universe—broadened the appeal of Judaism to billions of people over history in a way Judaism never would have: Christianity's focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense.

Christianity universalized the message of Judaism. The Gospels were deliberately written in Greek, not the Aramaic used by the Jews of the period. Jesus's story was meant to extend to the entire world. Because Jesus was no longer a Jewish figure in the Christian view, but the material incarnation of the divine, that meant that Jewish law could be abandoned in favor of universalism

Christianity's focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense. The commandments of Judaism are intricate and difficult. Christianity dispensed with the need for them. Faith is paramount.

Judaism is not complete without Christianity and without Judaism,Christianity would not exist

I want to do everything in my power to ensure the equality between all movements of Judaism in the state of Israel: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. In conversions, in budgets, in the eyes of the law. No one can claim ownership over the Jewish God.

The relation between Judaism, Zionism, and Messianism is one that is often hard for Jews to get straight. Needless to say, it is even harder for non-Jews.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world's worldview.

As we learn from the New Testament, the Jews and the Samaritans in the days of Jesus were not agreed on the question which was the proper place of worship, but that there could be only one was taken to be as certain as the unity of God Himself.

From a constitutional point of view there is an advantage to democracy and it must be balanced and the Supreme Court should be given another constitutional tool that will also give power to Judaism.

The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.

Judaism is my life. Everything I do is through the lens of Torah.

How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.