Israel Shenker Quotes

Jews are a singular confusion - difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, every pain - nothing is spared them.

One rabbi compared wise men studying the law to children tossing a ball to one another: a first sage said the meaning was this, another said the meaning was that, one gave his opinion, another begged to differ.

Embracing and rejecting tradition, bound and liberated by faith, torn between obscurantism and reason, self-assured and self-critical, they were a kaleidoscope of fragments, positions held and abandoned, images formed and shattered, God-fearing Jew, God-denying Jew, passionate and indifferent, hero and villain, yea-sayer, nay-sayer.

The suggestion that Jews were selected from among all nations of the earth to be God's chosen people suggested a kind of group arrogance, especially when the good news was first reported by Jews. However, the choice was interpreted not as tribute to superior virtue but as divine challenge.

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored.

A second-century rabbi said that if 999 angels gave a bad account of a man and one angel reported favorably, God would hear the one angel; even if 999 parts of that one angel's report were unfavorable, God would hearken to the favorable part.

In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness.

Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a supreme being.

Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.