Category: Jewish Tradition

Today’s One-Liner (#308)

We boast that we are the descendants of the Prophets, but we are really the descendants of the Jews who stoned the Prophets. –Amos Oz, in Robert Alter, Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon

Riveting

It’s good for me to be the citizen of a state in which there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, and eight and a half million messiahs….

Things Have Changed

The Bible has profound things to tell us, things we clearly ought to know. We now have students in class, even those who have gone to church or synagogue all their lives, who have not…

The Bliss with Books

Back and forth from my desk to my shelves, ten, twenty, thirty times a day. The sources swirl around me. I am  drugged by books. The sweet savor rises from the pages. A delirium of…

Today’s One-Liner (#295)

Studying Torah day and night means positioning oneself at every moment to acquire Torah, which is itself a function of bearing the burden of another. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of…

The Jewish Inheritance

Leon Wieseltier also took pleasure in studying with Wiesel. The two would spend time on the phone analyzing, say, a poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik, or a rabbinical text or midrash. Wieseltier prized the “depth…

Today’s One-Liner (#280)

After [Elie Wiesel’s] death on July 2, 2016, the Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum praised him as an “heir of Jeremiah with his message of rebuke but also of Isaiah with his words of consolation.” –Joseph…

Today’s One-Liner (#264)

We need to be vigilantly alert for any signs of being more focused on the ground we have covered than the path ahead and must regularly renew our fervor for the learning and growth that…

Selective Appreciation

We usually like prophets when they say what we want to hear. They are especially welcome if they heap indictments on our enemies. When they get close to home, it is a different matter. –John…