Quotes About Judaism

The Jews' greatest contribution to history is dissatisfaction! We're a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.

Judaism is one of the last of the world's matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don't spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey.

My Judaism has always been a great pride with me.

I think that every Saturday, we ought to say, 'My father's a Jew, my mother was a Jew, and I'm a Jew,' with great pride.

The prime minister is not a private individual, but the leader of the Jewish State and the Jewish world as a whole.

I don't know that I believe that God is in control of everything that happens. As a Jew, I believe that we have free will and we are responsible for our actions. But I guess it's something I'm still probing.

I've had a bris, was Bar Mitzvahed and, on occasion, have referred to a temple as a shul. I've never denied it, nor have I disguised it. I am, indeed, a Jew.

I had a bat mitzvah, was confirmed, went to Jewish summer camp, I go to temple for the High Holy Days. I think, like most people in their early 20s, I kind of strayed away from it. I think once I have a family I'll be back into it.

Every Jew has the right to ascend onto the Temple Mount.

The Tambors were conservative Jews, and we attended Temple Beth Shalom at 14th Avenue and Clement Street in San Francisco. We were the only Jewish family for miles. To me, being Jewish meant 'otherness.'

The more important value for Jewish success was a high regard for the cultivation of the intellect…

Their [the Rabbi's] answer to the catastrophe that befell the Jewish community in the Roman period was to embrace life even more intensely than before.

To put it succinctly, in fashioning a Judaism that allowed Jews to survive centuries of subjugation, the rabbis also fashioned a Judaism that allowed Jews to thrive in the modern period.

If Judaism was going to survive, the rabbis would have to take their religion into their own hands and shape it so that it could deal with the reality of exile. The same sense of independence helps explain why the rabbis adopted a high degree of tolerance for each other's opinions on the meaning of God's laws. If the rabbis could argue with God, as they sometimes did, they could certainly argue with other rabbis.

Orthodox Judaism does not place undue emphasis on hellfire and damnation, nor are children specially pressured to search their souls for sin. But the priorities of a cheder education were anything but material. Read, read, read. Study, study, study. These were the objectives of school — and of life itself.

The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

Christian sources, both literary and iconographic, do in fact draw parallels between Orpheus and Christ, just as Jewish art draws them between Orpheus and David. These, however, normally refer to the story of Orpheus as a musician whose playing could tame wild animals. Early Christian texts and images then adapted this theme to describe Christ as a "new Orpheus" who could tame human souls.

Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion (1938) was painted shortly after Kristallnacht—the horrifying, widespread Nazi raid on German Jews. The painting shows a world swallowed up by violence, including the figure of Christ on the cross with a Jewish prayer shawl draped around his loins.

So, Art [Green] said, it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms.

We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza's thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism.

Luke, the theologian of the poor and of social concern; Matthew, the theologian trying to understand the relationship of Christianity and Judaism; Mark, who shows Jesus as the suffering servant. You can make a long list of the distinctive theologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Spinoza was I think a cool, not to say cold, man. His posture toward revealed religion—in particular, Judaism—was simple contempt for the confused ideas underlying revealed religion [which he regarded as] nonsense. His posture I believe is [more] that of the cocksure unbelieving scientist than that of any man of an inner tragedy.

Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice NEVER attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.

Judaism, Christianity & Islam are innovations on fragments from the periphery of the African cultural and spiritual system.