Best 118 quotes in «jewish quotes» category

Marginalised and abused children are often overlooked even today, and risk becoming marginalised and abused adults who may never receive acknowledgment or respect for the immense physical and emotional burden they carry from childhood or indeed have their full potential realised.

Messianic Judaism is not Christianity.

Mohammad never assigned himself a status more than a common man and a messenger of God. People had faith in him when he was surrounded by poverty and adversity and trusted him while he was the ruler of a great Empire. He was a man of spotless character who always had confidence in himself and in God's help. No aspect of his life remained hidden nor was his death a mysterious event.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

Moses Luzzatto always said to be patient during the hard times, that they would have to endure and make sacrifices while they waited for better times to come. He urged Simone and the other Jewish boys not to provoke the Venetians, saying they should remain separate and focus on their work. He said their traditions were crucial to their identity, just as they were for their fathers before them.

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Of course a carp is just a carp, waiting to become either your pet, or a gefilte fish. But am I wrong to also see this body lying in a pool of blood, being fibbed about in plain sight, as a metaphor for all the corpses and blood never discussed?

No fim perguntei ao avô: Por que é que temos de estar encostados? Depois de o povo de Israel ter saído do Egipto deixou de ser um povo de escravos. Só um povo livre é feliz, só um povo livre tem bem estar e comodidades. É por esta razão que nos encostamos.

One afternoon Walter brought Izzy to the house for lunch and, pointing to me, he said to Izzy, “He’s one of your tribe.” Dobkins lifted his head to look at me and after a few seconds said, “I don’t see it.” “The mother’s a Jew,” Walter answered, as if he were describing the breeding of a mongrel dog. “Then you are a Jew,” Izzy said, and sort of blessed me with his salami sandwich.

[On famous Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr] [Niels] Bohr's sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately, humankind in general, are common traits of the Jewish intellectual. So too is a well-fortified atheism. Bohr ended with no religious belief and a dislike of all religions that claimed to base their teachings on revelations.

Oskar is the fruit of those fantasies -- the idea that what needed to be saved was not just lives but hope.

Oskar's particular blessings are blessings that only a major cosmopolitan city can bestow on a refugee. They represent all our potential to survive and even thrive in the face of great loss.

Prior to the monotheistic Yahweh, the gods made sense, in that they had familiar, if supra-human appetites—they didn’t just want a lamb shank, they wanted the best lamb shank, wanted to seduce all the wood nymphs, and so on. But the early Jews invented a god with none of those desires, who was so utterly unfathomable, unknowable, as to be pants-wettingly terrifying. So even if His actions are mysterious, when He intervenes you at least get the stress-reducing advantages of attribution—it may not be clear what the deity is up to, but you at least know who is responsible for the locust swarm or the winning lottery ticket. There is Purpose lurking, as an antidote to the existential void.

People often ask me, what my religion is. I tell them, I am a Christian to the Christian, a Jew to the Jew, a Muslim to the Muslim, a Hindu to the Hindu, an atheist to the atheist, but the brightest nightmare to the fundamentalist.

Sarucha (age 8): "Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!" she exclaimed.

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, “When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children.” She exclaimed, “You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars].” But Rabbi Hiyya replied, “There is a wheel which revolves in this world.” —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b

She walked down the basement steps. She saw an imaginary framed photo seep into the wall - a quiet-smiled secret. No more than a few meters, it was a long walk to the drop sheets and the assortment of paint cans that shielded Max Vandenburg. She removed the sheets closest to the wall until there was a small corridor to look through. The first part of him she saw was his shoulder, and through the slender gap, she slowly, painfully, inched her hand in until it rested there. His clothing was cool. He did not wake. She could feel his breathing and his shoulder moving up and down ever so slightly. For a while, she watched him. Then she sat and leaned back. Sleepy air seemed to have followed her. The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet. They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder. They breathed. German and Jewish lungs.

Strange, how the name Israel, God's own chosen nation, who don't believe Jesus to be the Messiah, sounds almost the same as saying "is He real?

Shimmel: “NEVER TRUST THE GOYIM. They are just like these other weird dangerous people, Messianic Jews! How dare Jews become “Christian-like”, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!

Sure, Bob Dylan had some good songs. But he could have been a doctor.

The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.

The degradation of most civilizations, contain a common thread. The 'synagogue of Satan' is behind all weaponized ignorance and hate.

The character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation. Of which I will state only one instance: When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows (Numbers xxxi. 13): 'And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, 'Have ye saved all the women alive?' behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, 'kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women- children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for Yourselves.' Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters. Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner: let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear.

The ground is still filled iwth rings, and money, and pictures, and Jewish things. I was only able to find a few of them, but they fill the earth." The hero did not ask me once what she was saying. I am not certain if he knew what she was saying, or if he knew not to inquire.

The highly cancerous, irrational and delusional concepts of (supposed) Jewish supremacy & White supremacy are two prime examples of toxic ideologies derived from mythological Creationism and hyper Racism. The believers and practitioners of both ought to snap out their stupidity.

The height of human achievement and glory, Muhammad.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement.

There, a simple headstone marked the grave of Eva Saloman Johansen, "beloved wife and grandmother." Tess was intrigued to see a phrase in Hebrew characters. Her paternal grandmother had apparently been Jewish. Beside that was a marker for Erik Karl Johansen, inscribed, 'Measure his life not by its length but by the depths of joy he brought us. He jumped into life and never touched bottom. We will never laugh the same again.

The Message of Mohammad is not a set of metaphysical phenomena. It is a complete civilization.

There is more that unites us than divides us. So make it a point to talk with someone who is different from you. You may find that you have more in common than you think

The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.

There is no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel's statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination." New York Times, 1975

The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.

There is no rule without an exception except for this one. (Which, of course, makes it an exception to the rule)

There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert.

. . . there was little to choose between Jews and Catholics. The Jews had holidays that turned up out of the blue and the Catholics had children in much the same way.

The ruach blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but cannot tell from where it comes or where it goes. God is He, He is Ruach (Spirit) and Ruach is speaking to our ruach (spirit) revealing great mysteries, knowledge, wisdom, understanding and joy.

To me God’s voice and inspiration is stronger, of greater importance and authority than that of any fairy or any other spirit like creature from above or below earth. My Spirit Tales are stories based on truth and inspired by His writings. Stories about YHWH and His great wonderful acts are definitely not fairytales but Spirit Tales.

This undying vigilance is such a part of the Jewish psyche that it might as well be genetic. Nomads we are, and nomads we remain. Cars replaced caravans, tents calcified into houses, yet the wanderings of old course through us, simmering under the surface.

The women at Dachau knew they were about to be gassed when they pushed back the Nazi guard who wanted to die with them, saying he must live. And sang for a little while after the doors closed.

Violet believed that Jewish people made good doctors and lawyers, a thought that came to the front of her head suggesting she might need one.

We are connected, Elizabeth. Of that there can be no doubt. It is something akin to your love of nature, of soil and roots and water and sunlight. Your seedlings could not thrive without one of these components…as I could not thrive without you.

What Can Be Learned From a Thief The saintly Rabi Zusya was originally a disciple of the tsaddik Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritsh. Once he asked his master to teach him the secret of worshipping the Creator. “There’s no need for me to teach you,” replied Rabbi Dov Baer, “because you can learn it from any child or thief.” “Why, how can I learn it from a child?” asked the astounded disciple. “In three ways,” replied his master. “First, a child needs no reason to be happy. Second, a child always keeps busy. And third, when a child wants something, it screams until it gets it.” “And what,” asked Rabbi Zusya, “can I learn from a thief?” “From a thief,” answered Rabbi Dov Baer, “you can learn seven things. First, to apply yourself by night and not just by day. Second, to try again if at first you don’t succeed. Third, to love your comrades. Fourth, to be ready to risk your life, even for a small thing. Fifth, to attach so little value to what you have that you will sell it for a pittance. Sixth, not to be put off by hardship and blows. And seventh, to be glad you are what you are instead of wanting to be something else.

When we put his kippah into the museum, everyone was talking about how much money it was worth and the embroidery by some famous artist and how it was a national relic, and all this -- but I was just thinking of Shabbat, and seders, and -- and it didn't mean any of those things to me. It meant lighting candles. It meant he'd hid the afikomen in the palace for me and joking with his advisors as he waited around for me to find it so he could give me a new book. National treasure? I--' She blinked away new tears, but this time the look on her face was one of indignation.

Whoever cannot survive without taking charity, such as an old, sick, or greatly suffering individual, but who stubbornly refuses to accept aid, is guilty of murdering himself…yet one who needs charity but postpones taking it and lives in deprivation so as to not trouble the community, shall live to provide for others." —Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575), Shulkhan Arukh (The Code of Jewish Law), Yoreh Deah 255:2

Whole branches of Judaism may wither and fall, but the trunk remains,

2017 is the Year of Jubilee! Receive its blessings in your spirit! Forgive and be forgiven. Reconcile and be reconcilable. Revival is due!

Why not?