All Israel Shenker Quotes
- Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes. Affair
- Jews are a singular confusion — difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, every pain… All
- America has a way of inventing tradition each morning and erasing the past by nightfall, and thehold of ancient custom is endangered by a thousand… America
- In the Bible, fate was often presented as the handmaiden of morality: sin was succeeded by misfortune, righteousness by prosperity, with reward and punishment instrumental… Bible
- At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was… Bible
- God's greatest blessing is children. The only problem is that you have to support them. It's a problem, not a disadvantage. Blessing
- A [Jewish] woman could not divorce her husband, but she could petition for divorce, and the religious courts could force him to grant the divorce… Attending
- It was God who dictated what man should believe and do, leaving man the freedom to accept or scoff, to obey or disregard. Accept
- Fundamentalists are less concerned to be systematic and rational than to be humble and faithful, accepting God's commandments because they come from God, not because… Accepting
- 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 held… Abandoned
- 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 variety-of syntax, spelling,… Catch
- A second-century rabbi said that if 999 angels gave a bad account of a man and one angel reported favorably, God would hear the one… Account
- The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored. Faultless
- Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a… Acceptance
- 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 to… Desert
- In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness. Death
- At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next lingered… Arrived
- 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, especially… All
- Theology emerged not as a course of knowledge but as a feast of homily and imagination and exaggeration in which every man could find his… Course
- One rabbi compared wise men studying the law to children tossing a ball to one another: a first sage said the meaning was this, another… Another Begged