Mazel Tov Quotes

I flip open my phone to text Jessica:
Me: Guess who's pregnant?
Jess: u?
Me: Get real.
Jess: ur mom?
Me: yep
Jess: Mazel tov!?
Me: Don't congratulate me, plz
Jess: Could b worse
Me: How?
Jess: Could be u?
Me: I'm a virgin.
Jess: Nobody's perfect. ~ Simone Elkeles

People should allow themselves the opportunity to really know what the unity of God means. To grasp a part of the nondivisible union is to grasp the whole. ~ Baal Shem Tov

He who is full of joy is full of love. ~ Baal Shem Tov

Fear builds walls to bar the light. ~ Baal Shem Tov

Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba-al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot - secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms.

All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba-al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man, and he choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn't remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn't even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba-al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously - how utterly - he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept.

All right, you're hired, the Ba-al Shem said.

But I don't understand, the ma ~ Alan Lew

Whenever feeling downcast, each person should vitally remember, "For my sake, the entire world was created." ~ Baal Shem Tov

Telling the proper stories is as if you were approaching the throne of Heaven in a fiery chariot. ~ Baal Shem Tov

We should learn and reflect to the best of our capacity, but when we reach a point where we are unable to make
sense of life, we should supplant faith for understanding, and reflect again on what we do know. ~ Baal Shem Tov

Before you can find God, you must lose yourself. ~ Baal Shem Tov

When a father complains that his son has taken to evil ways, what should he do? Love him more than ever. ~ Baal Shem Tov

If the Bible didn't show us the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities , the sins of our heroes, we might have deep questions about their true virtue. ~ Baal Shem Tov

For any of us to come to the understanding that we are common and unlearned is the accomplishment of a lifetime. ~ Baal Shem Tov

Mind is the foundation of man. ~ Baal Shem Tov

Everything above and below is one unity. ~ Baal Shem Tov

I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night. ~ Amos Oz

Freneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It's the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis' - le Mazel released the word carelessly - 'it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide. ~ Jean Lorrain

Unless we believe that God renews creation every day, our prayers grow habitual and tedious. ~ Baal Shem Tov

Everybody is unique. Compare not yourself with anybody else lest you spoil God's curriculum. ~ Baal Shem Tov

From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven, and when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, the streams of light flow together and a single brighter light goes forth from that united being. ~ Baal Shem Tov

We should not laugh at the person who becoming caught up in his prayer bends his body or moves about in strange ways. Perhaps he moves in this manner to wave off unwelcome thoughts that would interrupt the prayer. Would we find it funny if we saw a person drowning going through strange motions doing whatever was necessary to save his life? ~ Baal Shem Tov

We Jews created the concept of good luck. Luck in Hebrew is mazel, which is not actually a word. It is an acronym for three words:
1. makom = place
2. zman = time
3. lamud = work ~ Celso Cukierkorn

Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292) ~ Rebecca Goldstein

The central aspect of worship is the feeling of being at one with God. ~ Baal Shem Tov

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

Look, de Mazel, you've known him for years - hasn't he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?'

'Forty hours?'

'Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards fell again into his torpor. And Freneuse had a strange horror of sleep; there was some abnormal phenomenon associated with it, some lesion of the brain or neurotic depression.'

'The troublesome cerebral anaemia which results from excessive debauchery. Another myth! I've never believed, myself, in the supposed debauchery of that poor gentleman. Such a frail chap, with such a delicate complexion! Quite frankly, there was no scope in him for debauchery.

'Pooh! About as much as Lorenzaccio!'

'You associate him with the Medicis! Lorenzaccio was a Florentine impassioned by rancour, a man of energy slowly brooding over his vengeance, caressing it as he might caress the blade of a dagger! There is not the slightest comparison to be drawn between Lorenzaccio and that gall-green, liverish creature Freneuse. ~ Jean Lorrain

Pleasures are manifestations of God's name. ~ Baal Shem Tov

I am going out one door, and shall go through another. ~ Baal Shem Tov