Critical Quotes by Israel Shenker

Theology emerged not as a course of knowledge but as a feast of homily and imagination and exaggeration in which every man could find…

— Israel Shenker

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…

— Israel Shenker

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

— Israel Shenker

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

— Israel Shenker

One rabbi compared wise men studying the law to children tossing a ball to one another: a first sage said the meaning was this,…

— Israel Shenker

In the Bible, fate was often presented as the handmaiden of morality: sin was succeeded by misfortune, righteousness by prosperity, with reward and punishment…

— Israel Shenker

It was God who dictated what man should believe and do, leaving man the freedom to accept or scoff, to obey or disregard.

— Israel Shenker

The [Jewish] Sabbath was not intended to be simply a desert of prohibitions, but rather an oasis for moral restoration and seemly pleasure-one was…

— Israel Shenker

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,…

— Israel Shenker

Jews are a singular confusion — difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, every…

— Israel Shenker

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

— Israel Shenker

A [Jewish] woman could not divorce her husband, but she could petition for divorce, and the religious courts could force him to grant the…

— Israel Shenker