David Novak Quotes

55 quotes in 735 categories

• The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
• Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to…
• We Jews who willingly and happily confirm our covenantal status and its attendant rights and duties must take the question of mission seriously: either to…
• A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions…
• Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral.
• Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.
• The common moral praxis of Jews and Christians is most definitely theologically informed by the doctrine we share in common: The human person, male and…
• A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in…
• The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
• When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.
• As a traditional Jew, I have benefited personally from the hospitality of Chabad Hasidim on many occasions, and I marvel at how many Jews Chabad…
• Even when God chose Israel, he did not create the people of Israel as he created its human members, as natural beings. Instead, God formed…
• Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
• God chose us to live both in body and in soul, but the body functions for the sake of the soul more than the soul…
• The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.
• Historically, Jews only accept converts rather than actively seeking them.
• If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that…
• Cultural synthesis is how a compromise between various opinions is worked out. But truth does not change, and truth is not arrived at by some…
• A fully positive relationship between Christians and Jews is one that would elide all differences.
• As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern…

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