Quotes About Judaism

To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters—which were not all that important, anyway—was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.

The Jews were the first monotheistic culture in history. They believed in one God and one God only. The Greco-Roman world of Herod's day was polytheistic. They believed in many gods, and much of their worship was sexual in nature.

The central Jewish confession of faith is the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength" (Deuteronomy 6:4–5).

When people speak in the same tone of voice about a "personal deodorant," a "personal trainer," and a "personal Savior," I suspect that what they really mean is "private." I've got mine; too bad about you. But Christianity, like its ancestor Judaism, is inescapably communal.

The Essence and Character of a People, his overriding message was that Judaism is an "eternal countercultural." In his book, Hertzberg declares, "Abraham, the first Jew, is the archetypal Jewish character. As the leader of a small, dissenting minority living precariously on the margins of society, he defines the enduring role of the Jew as the outsider. The recurring themes of Jewish history—otherness, defiance, fragility, and morality—are present in his life.

This idea of "becoming a Jew" indicates ceremonial distinctives are in view rather than moral ones. No one "becomes a Jew" by not killing, not committing adultery, or not coveting (keeping the moral aspects of the Law). They do "become a Jew" by undergoing the ceremonial distinctives which marked the Jews off from the Gentiles (circumcision, food laws, cleansing rituals, and so forth).

El autor habla allí de los primeros principios sobre los cuales han sido instruidos los lectores cuando primeramente se convirtieron en cristianos. Estos primeros principios son: arrepentimiento, fe, bautismo, imposición de manos, resurrección y juicio eterno. Ahora bien, los judíos no tenían que ser instruidos en estos asuntos elementales puesto que los conocían desde el comienzo.

Many verses in the Quran can be construed as including Christians and Jews in the Muslim community, because Muhammad saw himself at first as a missionary to all peoples but later narrowed his intended audience to pagan Arabs. Muhammad became disillusioned with the People of the Book and condemned them as "unbelievers." Conflict with the Jews led to the redefinition of Islam as a new confessional religion and led to new laws and rituals to provide Muslims with a separate identity.

It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.

From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.

Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing.

Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.

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.

The Orthodox believe in Jewish literacy, and most of the rest of us couldn't care less. Rabbis and other creatures have a monopoly on Judaism. This is a turnoff in a world that is increasingly secular and that has turned away from religion. Jews are simply turning away from Judaism.

My dad's Israeli. He was born in Baghdad to Iraqi Jews. Then, at age two, his parents wanted to move to their homeland and he grew up in Israel. I've been there twice, once as a baby and once when I was 15.

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

Well yes, my son was bar mitzvahed last April, after I made this film.

For Jews, the paradigmatic convert is the biblical Ruth, who sought not only a new relationship with God but also a new nationality.

Jewish sovereignty and governance over our ancestral home are, I believe, important goals that every Jew ought to support.

Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.

I don't believe in God. I do believe in Judaism. I believe in ethics, morals.

Judaism is a way of thinking, more than anything else, that I think is entirely distinct, and the more you know of it, the more you can enter into that kind of thinking.

If Christians see Mormonism as a dramatic deviation from a millennia-old, biblically-based faith, Jews see Christianity in the same light.

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.