Quotes by Rabbis

I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.
Chaim Potok
Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.
Rabbi Israel Salanter
Faith is not knowledge of what the mystery of the universe is but the conviction that there is a mystery and that it is greater than us.
Rabbi David Wolpe
Self-understanding rather than self-condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience.
Joshua L. Liebman
In the world to come they will not ask me "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me "Why were you not Zusya?"
Zusya of Hanipoli
God dwells where we let God in.
Menachem Mendel
Stripped of all their masquerades the fears of men are quite identical: the fear of loneliness rejection inferiority unmanageable anger illness and death.
Joshua L. Liebman
Scrolls: write on them what you want to be remembered for.
Joseph Ibn Pakuda
In the world to come they will not ask me "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me "Why were you not Zusya?"
Zusya of Hanipoli
God dwells where we let God in.
Menachem Mendel
Stripped of all their masquerades the fears of men are quite identical: the fear of loneliness rejection inferiority unmanageable anger illness and death.
Joshua L. Liebman
Scrolls: write on them what you want to be remembered for.
Joseph Ibn Pakuda
The mark of a mature man is the ability to give love and receive it joyously and without guilt.
Leo Baeck
If you won't be better tomorrow than you were today then what do you need tomorrow for?
Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav
An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen but great-ens his life.
Stephen S. Wise
Caring about others running the risk of feeling and leaving an impact on people brings happiness.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes but everybody who looks at it sees something different.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
The human heart in its perversity finds it hard to escape hatred and revenge.
Moses Luzzatto
Faith is the capacity of the soul to perceive the abiding ... the invisible in the visible.
Leo Baeck
Failure is something made only by those who fail to dare not by those who dare to fail.
Louis Binstock
A sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive tolerate the unpleasant cope with the unexpected and smile through the unbearable.
Moshe Waldoks
Pain is part of being alive and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever nor is it necessarily unbearable and we need to be taught that.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
Joshua L. Liebman
Tolerance, which is one form of love of neighbor, must manifest itself not only in our personal relations, but also in the arena of society as well. In the world of opinion and politics, tolerance is that virtue by which liberated minds conquer the evils of bigotry and hatred. Tolerance implies more than forbearance or the passive enduring of ideas different from our own. Properly conceived, tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. Tolerance quickens our appreciation and increases our respect for our neighbor’s point of view. It goes even further; it assumes a militant aspect when the rights of an opponent are assailed. Voltaire’s dictum, “I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is for all ages and places the perfect utterance of the tolerant ideal.
Joshua Loth Liebman
God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.
Jonathan Sacks
When an Israelite and a Gentile have a lawsuit before thee, if thou canst, acquit the former according to the laws of Israel, and tell the latter such is our law; if thou canst get him off in accordance with Gentile law, do so, and say to the plaintiff such is your law; but if he cannot be acquitted according to either law, then bring forward adroit pretexts and secure his acquittal. These are the words of Rabbi Ishmael.
Maurice H. Harris
When the Rabbis stated that obedience or disobedience to the commandments depends not on the will of Hashem but on man’s free will, they echoed Jeremiah, who said, “Out of the mouth of the Most High there comes neither the bad nor the good” (Lamentations 3:38). By the bad he meant vice, and by the good he intended virtue, meaning that Hashem does not predetermine any person as bad or good. Since this is so, a person owes it to himself to mourn his sins and transgressions, since he has committed them of his own free will, as Jeremiah says, “For what should a living man mourn? Let every man mourn because of his sins” (Lamentations 3:39). Jeremiah answers his question positively, telling us that the remedy for our disease lies with us. Just as our failings stemmed from our own free will, so do we have the power to repent of our evil deeds.
Maimonides
There comes a time in the development of every ego when it must love its neighbors or become a twisted and stunted personality.
Joshua Loth Liebman
> Why does everything that lives have to die?< So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious.
Chaim Potok
The disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, tell of a dream he had. In the dream, the very incarnation of the Evil Impulse appears in the form of a sinister heart. The Baal Shem Tov seizes the heart and pounds it furiously. He would destroy evil and redeem the world. As he pummels it, he hears an infant’s sobbing emitted from the heart. He stops beating it. In the midst of evil is a voice of innocence; there is goodness entangled in evil.
Harold M. Schulweis
We are afraid of what we will do to others, afraid of the rage that lies in wait somewhere deep in our souls. How many human beings go through the world frozen with rage against life! This deeply hidden inner anger may be the product of hurt pride or of real frustration in office, factory, clinic, or home. Whatever may be the cause of our frozen rage (which is the inevitable mother of depression), the great word of hope today is that this rage can be conquered and drained off into creative channels ……What should we do? We should all learn that a certain amount of aggressive energy is normal and certainly manageable in maturity. Most of us can drain off the excess of our angry feelings and destructive impulses in exercise, in competitive games, or in the vigorous battles against the evils of nature and society. We also must realize that no one will punish us for the legitimate expression of self-assertiveness and creative pugnacity as our parents once punished us for our undisciplined temper tantrums. Furthermore, let us remember that we need not totally repress the angry part of our nature. We can always give it an outlet in the safe realm of fantasy. A classic example of such fantasy is given by Max Beerborn, who made a practice of concocting imaginary letters to people he hated. Sometimes he went so far as to actually write the letters and in the very process of releasing his anger it evaporated. As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of ideas and emotions should be given freedom of speech. If in political life we are willing to grant civil liberties to all sorts of parties and programs, should we not be equally willing to grant civil liberties to our innermost thoughts and drives, confident that the more dangerous of them will be outvoted by the majority within our minds? Do I mean that we should hit out at our enemy whenever the mood strikes us? No, I repeat that I am suggesting quite the reverse—self-control in action based upon (positive coping mechanisms such as) self expression in fantasy.
Joshua Loth Liebman
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
Joshua Loth Liebman
Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)
Harold S. Kushner
The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it
Maimonides
In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.
Chaim Potok
Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.
Jonathan Sacks
It is not enough for the Jew to rest content with his own spiritual ascent, the elevation of his soul in closeness to G-d, he must strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of it – the world of his work and his social life – until not only do they not distract him from his pursuit of G-d, but they become a full part of it.
(R. Menachem M. Schneerson)
In a remarkable midrash (commentary) on Proverbs, we read the following: “All of the festivals will be abolished in the future [the Messianic Age], but Purim will never be abolished.”The miracle of Purim is very different from the miracles mentioned in the Torah. While the latter were overt miracles, such as the ten plagues in Egypt and the splitting of the Red Sea, the miracle of Purim was covert. No law of nature was violated in the Purim story and the Jews were saved by seemingly normal historical occurrences. Had we lived in those days, we would have noticed nothing unusual. Only retroactively are we astonished that seemingly unrelated and insignificant human acts led to the redemption of the Jews. The discovery that these events concealed a miracle could only be made after the fact.Covert miracles will never cease to exist explains the Torah Temimah. In fact, they take place every day. The midrash on Proverbs is not suggesting that the actual festivals mentioned in the Torah will be nullified in future days. Rather we should read the midrash as follows: Overt miracles, which we celebrate on festivals mentioned in the Torah, no longer occur. But covert miracles such as those celebrated on Purim will never end; they continue to occur every day of the year. Purim, probably rooted in a historical event of many years ago, functions as a constant reminder that the Purim story never ended. We are still living it. The Megillah is open-ended; it was not and will never be completed!
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
[I]t is no doubt true that our image of what a messiah might look like may keep us from recognizing the real thing when it stands before us. Could it be that we have embellished the long-awaited event with so many aggadic flourishes that we can no longer recognize the reality when it happens? Could our overly literal reading of our sages’ poetic descriptions have led us to overlook completely the miracle as it happened? One of the dangers of taking the statements and speculations of our sages as literal truth—when they were not meant as such—is the distortion of our expectations.
Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have woundsand scars of their own. They may even be envying us.
Harold S. Kushner
The good will is all — and all the talents are ways to fulfill it.
Abraham Isaac Kook
Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be…to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all…no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.
Harold S. Kushner
We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.
Harold S. Kushner
If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.
Maimonides
If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrationalfeeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everythingthat happens in the world is our doin
Harold S. Kushner
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?
Rabbi Hillel
There is no such thing as passive receiving of Tradition. He who receives, the disciple, is always — must always be — the scene of a creation. To receive is to create, to innovate! 'The petrification of acquired knowledge — the freezing of spiritual things — allowing itself to be placed like an inert content in the mind and to be handed on, frozen, from one generation to another, is not real transmission….' Handing on is 'resumption, life, invention and renewal, a mode without which revealed thinking, that is to say, thinking which is authentically thought, is not possible.
Marc-Alain Ouaknin
Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.
Chaim Potok
An artist is a person first.
Chaim Potok
Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.
Harold S. Kushner
We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.
Jonathan Sacks
Romantic enthusiasm lifts the good aloft and removes it into the dim distance of the incomparable and unattainable; at the same time it portrays the good in a human countenance out of which it looks at us and we can look back at it, face to face, in admiration and ecstasy, and stretch out our arms towards it. Thus the moral good is represented in human, and at the same time superhuman, form; it is of our own kind, and yet above our kind; it confronts us, but makes no demands. IT is not really a standard and lacks the power to issues commandments. Both are given at once: the ethical which one would like to love; and the passive, the romantic, in which one wants to live. As a substitute for constant activity demanded by the ethical commandment, we have adoration in which the romantic impression of the moment in vented, and yearning which need only admire and enjoy but not achieve anything.
Leo Baeck
To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else. If a tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? To which group of people other than shareholders do they owe loyalty? The extreme mobility, not only of capital but also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any group except itself.
Jonathan Sacks
Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.
Chaim Potok
An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.
Chaim Potok
If you are you because you are you, and I am I because I am I, then you are you and I am I.If you are you because I am I, and I am I because you are you, then you and I are not.
Menachem Mendel
Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.
Chaim Potok
This is what itmeans to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not makeup facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does notmake up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us.
Harold S. Kushner
How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of God, and the Rebbe, he should live and be well, the Rebbe made miracles and wonders for me. At night, I tell myself it is a dream and I am afraid to wake up. If it is a dream, better I should not wake up, better I should die in my sleep.
Chaim Potok