Israel Shenker

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

— 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…

— Israel Shenker

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

— 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…

— Israel Shenker

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

— Israel Shenker

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

— Israel Shenker

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

— 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…

— Israel Shenker

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

— Israel Shenker

At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a…

— Israel Shenker

A second-century rabbi said that if 999 angels gave a bad account of a man and one angel reported favorably, God would…

— Israel Shenker

Fundamentalists are less concerned to be systematic and rational than to be humble and faithful, accepting God's commandments because they come from…

— Israel Shenker

At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when…

— Israel Shenker

God's greatest blessing is children. The only problem is that you have to support them. It's a problem, not a disadvantage.

— Israel Shenker

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

— Israel Shenker

Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning…

— Israel Shenker

America has a way of inventing tradition each morning and erasing the past by nightfall, and thehold of ancient custom is endangered…

— Israel Shenker