Joseph Telushkin Quotes

The fact that you are feeling unhappy does not entitle you to inflict your bad mood on others.

hereditary and transmitted through the paternal line. Therefore, a person whose father is not a priest cannot be a priest either. * Though without being as insulting as Shammai was. * An infrequently quoted Talmudic passage teaches that Timna, a female character in the book of Genesis, came from a royal non-Israelite household. At an early age, she became interested in the Israelite faith and sought to convert. But when she approached the patriarchs - at one time or another, all three of

God gave each of us a soul, which is a candle that He gives us to illuminate our surroundings with His light," the Rebbe taught at a 1990 worldwide Chanukah satellite linkup. "We must not only illuminate the inside of homes, but also the outside, and the world at large.

This is what true love is about, the Rebbe told Sharfstein. "It's the small acts that you do on a daily basis that turn two people from a 'you and I' into an 'us.'" Sharfstein

Never use damaging personal information to invalidate your adversary and, by implication, his contentions. ... If you watch your words when you fight, the issue can usually be resolved.

An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.

The cruelty of Plato's thinking, the Rebbe emphasized that day, was not just in breaking up the family unit. It was in depriving children of parental love. For it is the parents, not the state and its functionaries, who have a genuine love for their children. And depriving children of this love, which is their due, was perhaps Plato's greatest cruelty.

Spinoza was a pantheist: He believed that God was within nature, not a separate Being with an independent will. "In Spinoza's system," Jewish philosopher Louis Jacobs has written, "God and Nature are treated as different names for the same thing. God is not 'outside' or apart from Nature. He did not create Nature but is Nature." This doctrine set Spinoza at loggerheads with both Judaism and Christianity. It was absurd in his view to credit God with attributes such as will or intellect; that was like demanding that Sirius bark, just because people refer to it as the Dog Star. Spinoza tried to posit a system of ethics based on reason, not supernatural revelation.

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

As the former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks has expressed it: "If the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, the Rebbe wished to search out every Jew in love.

One year, on Yom Kippur eve, Salanter did not show up in synagogue for services. The congregation was extremely worried; they could only imagine that their rabbi had suddenly taken sick or been in an accident. In any case, they would not start the service without him. During the wait, a young woman in the congregation became agitated. She had left her infant child at home asleep in its crib; she was certain she would only be away a short while. Now, because of the delay, she slipped out to make sure that the infant was all right. When she reached her house, she found her child being rocked in the arms of Rabbi Salanter. He had heard the baby crying while walking to the synagogue and, realizing that the mother must have gone off to services, had gone into the house to calm him.

On the Rebbe's willingness to offer opinions and advice on a large range of issues, including theology, business, family affairs, and even medical questions: "[First] I am not afraid to answer that I don't know. If I know, then I have no right not to answer. When someone comes to you for help and you can help him to the best of your knowledge, and you refuse him this help, you become a cause of his suffering.

Ameikh ami, ve'Elo-hai-ikh Elo-hai - Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

She answered that she loved to read novels. The Rebbe responded that as novels are fiction, what you read in them is not necessarily what happens in real life. It's not as if two people meet and there is a sudden, blinding storm of passion. That's not what love or life is, or should be, about. Rather, he said, two people meet and there might be a glimmer of understanding, like a tiny flame. And then, as these people decide to build a home together, and raise a family, and go through the everyday activities and daily tribulations of life, this little flame grows even brighter and develops into a much bigger flame until these two people, who started out as virtual strangers, become intertwined to such a point that neither of them can think of life without the other. This is what true love is about, the Rebbe told Sharfstein. "It's the small acts that you do on a daily basis that turn two people from a 'you and I' into an 'us.

The Rebbe then elaborated: "All knowledge you'll ever learn, every experience you'll have in life, are the circles. They're not the center. If you don't have a solid center, you'll have jagged circles, incomplete circles, many different circles. I sense that you need that center before you start building your circles.

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