Quotes About Rabbis

long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there—not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.

The Son of God Among Greeks and Romans," Harvard Theological Review 93.2 (2000): 85–100. Two zealous rabbis, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, led an uprising that attacked the Temple and tried to destroy the eagle that Herod placed atop the

Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis. Midrash required them to "investigate" and "go in search" of fresh insight. The rabbis used the old scriptures not to retreat into the past but to propel them into the uncertainties of the post-temple world.

God does not reveal Himself; he only reveals His way. Judaism does not speak of God's self-revelation, but of the revelation of His teaching for man. The Bible reflects God's revelation of His relation to history, rather than of a revelation of His very Self. Even His will or His wisdom is not completely expressed through the prophets. Prophecy is superior to human wisdom, and God's love is superior to prophecy. This spiritual hierarchy is explicitly stated by the Rabbis.

No one in tech has ever been as sexist toward me as teachers and rabbis before I was 12 years old.

Rabbis throughout the ages, from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook onward, strictly prohibited going up on the Temple Mount. And now there is a minority group of rabbis encouraging Jews to go.

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.

Contact with secular and Christian ways of thinking increased Spinoza's dissatisfaction with the biblical interpretations he received from the rabbis, who in turn frowned on his interest in natural science, and on his study of the pernicious Latin language, in which so much heresy and blasphemy had been so engagingly expressed.

The Jewish faith in Jesus' day was dominated by rabbis—teachers of the law. Their doctrine was thorough. Jesus told them, "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life" (John 5:39–40, italics added). They knew the written word of God very well, but not the living Word, even as he stood before them.

Would it surprise you to learn that the rabbis thought that study, and not prayer, was the highest form of worship? They pointed out that when we pray, we speak to God, but that when we study the Scriptures, God speaks to us.

We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family.

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.

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein's monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.

There are sincere and reputable people on both sides. They disagree, but their disagreement has not undone Christianity. And neither side is blowing anyone else up over it. Week in and week out, rabbis, ministers, and priests do not stand before their congregations, preaching about the world to come and exhorting them to seek martyrdom as a fast track to heaven.

The ancient rabbis of the Talmud described it pretty well. The first stage of life, they said, "commences in the first year of human existence, when the infant lies like a king on a soft couch, with numerous attendants about him, all ready to serve him, and eager to testify their love and attachment by kisses and embraces.

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.

I think part of being Jewish is that innate desire to question things. Rabbis sit around all day and question the Torah. Giving yourself the room to question things, in a religion, just breeds thinking.

study, Alan Segal, a scholar of ancient Judaism, argues that early rabbis were particularly concerned about a notion, which was evidently widespread in parts of Judaism, that along with God in heaven there was a second power on the divine throne. Following these Jewish sources, Segal refers to these two—God and the other—as the "two powers in heaven."14 The Son of Man figure whom

Nature is my temple; trees are my priests; birds, my rabbis; rains, my imams! Nature is my only true and eternal religion.

I am humbled and deeply honored to have been asked to serve the congregants of Shearith Israel, a congregation with an incomparable history, where some of America's most distinguished rabbis have pastored and preached.

What did they care if the rabbis who found them with the books of haskala, of enlightenment, called them epicureans, atheists, breakers of the wall? These old epithets they began to take as names of honor. Out of their ranks came the minds and spirits that created modern Zionism. The fact that Zionism was cradled against the separatist learning of the old yeshivas colors the state of Israel to this hour.

Dear rabbis, I'm so sorry, I nuked your circle dude. Here is his head as a souvenir. Yeah, that would fly.