Best 4 quotes of Ovadya Ben Malka on MyQuotes

The fact that good people can be forced to do wrong doesn’t make them less good. But it also doesn’t make the wrong less wrong.

The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones—buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told.

We give to God of our strength, not our weakness. But we also say: “Da lifneh mi ata omed”—Know before whom you stand. We know what we are in the face of that. We see the full picture—God and ourselves. We cannot see ourselves as more than we are because we see how much greater is the reality. But we must not lessen our value in our own eyes either, because we are a necessary part of this reality. It is no small thing that we are able to “stand” and to address that reality. It would be good if we could approach life the way we approach prayer, knowing before whom we stand.

We stand on the edge of the abyss, across whose unknowable face we paint meaning so as not to see into it. It is always there. But we’re here too, and we are no less real than the abyss. We are no less meaningful for being transient creatures caught up in something too big for us. There is still value to our lives. I’ve learned that those things that are most fragile are also the most precious.