Quotes About Rabbis

The rabbis tell us the soul is a mirror of God within us. The soul fills the body, just as God fills the world. The soul outlasts the body, just as God outlasts the world. The soul is one in the body, just as God is one in the world. The soul sees but is not seen, just as God sees but is not seen.

I like his optimism,' I said. 'I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruins of Jerusalem, and the others began to cry, he laughed and said that just as the prophecy of the destruction of the temple was fulfilled, so the prophecy of the rebuilding would also be fulfilled. I like that.

I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed.

This is why the rabbis tell us that a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite.

The Rabbis of that era lived in a time when culture, generally, depended on oral performance, something like good jazz artistry today. The great jazz players never play the same thing the same way twice, even though you can recognize the same song every time they play it.

The great rabbis did not "create" Halakha: what the rabbis did was to codify and clarify the legal teachings, adapting them to changing social conditions. "The Rabbinic Halakha," writes Judah Goldin, "protected legislation from inflexibility and society from fundamentalism

Since God is the King of kings, all men, whether princes or paupers, are His servants. Hence, the rabbis taught that no man should serve another,* for all are servants of God alone. A sign in a café in Jerusalem reads: "Self-service. 'For you are servants unto Me,' saith the Lord.

What do I know from dybbuks? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. The only people in the Lower East Side who know from dybbuks are rabbis. And they're all just gutless bourgeois reactionaries who want us to let the Morgaunts of the world stomp all over us so we can reap our reward in heaven or Brooklyn— neither of which, allow me to point out, has ever been scientifically proven to exist.

the rabbis of Palestine were acknowledged to hold the advantage over those of Mesopotamia in several distinctive ways: they were more open to those who were not themselves scholars; they were better able to incinerate those who displeased them with a single glare; and they were more obsessively alert to the menace posed by menstruating women.

We were a proud people. We lost our country. Our only hope for return was to keep ourselves a people. The only hope to keep ourselves a people was to keep our common faith in one God, a God of our own. That God has been our country and our nation. In sorrow and wailing and woe for all that we have lost has been our union. And our rabbis have so taught us, generation after generation.

It's not what the rabbis say that defines Jewishness but what we Israelis do every day - our actions and our values.

In the Talmud (a record of discussions of Jewish law and ethics by ancient rabbis) it is said that charity is equal in importance to all the other commandments combined, and that Jews should give at least 10 percent of their income as tzedakah.

But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change. For

Thereafter, however, the rabbis, in response to the rise of Christianity, adopted a skeptical view of conversion; they now insisted on ascertaining the sincerity of the prospects' desires to join Judaism, as well as on warning them against the risks of belonging to a small and often persecuted people. In related and characteristic fashion, they rewrote the

The ancient Rabbis associated the names Adonai and Elohim with two characteristics: mercy (Adonai) and justice (Elohim). Their reasoning was that both are necessary for the world to function.

Jews know that although they may make a vow to do something or to refrain from something, they can annul their vow. What most Jews do not know is that, as stated previously, biblical law forbids nullification: once a person makes a vow the person must keep it. It was only in post-biblical times that the rabbis changed the law to allow vow repeals.

They decreed that rabbis were no longer to function as rabbis, that they could not teach, or decide Jewish questions in rabbinical courts, or be paid by their community. Each of them had to announce in the Yiddish press that he had ceased all rabbinical duties and that no one was to consult him about anything. This was to be the end of hundreds and hundreds of years of religious life.

The rabbis have written that when the earth had opened up and consumed Korah with the rest, his sons had by an apparent miracle stood firm above the abyss as though suspended in the air, because they would not depart from the tabernacle, but had admonished their father and his followers to desist from error.

Israel's god dwelt (in principle; and he would do so again) in the Temple; his tabernacling presence ('Shekinah') functioned as had the pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness. He revealed himself and his will through Torah; for some rabbis at least, when one studied Torah it was as though one was in the Temple itself.