A Quote by Bobby McFerrin

I bury my mind in my book, the Bible. Every morning it's the first thing that I do. I've been doing it for years and years. So I want to come back here [to Israel] to see the places that I read about every day. It's very important to my faith to feed [my] spirit in Israel.
As a Christian, Israel has a very special place in my heart. There's no question about that. I grew up with a Bible, and the back of the Bible has all these pictures of Israel in it. And so all these locations are incredibly significant to me personally in my faith.
When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. And, sometimes in very, very different places, because we all come from somewhere, especially here in Israel.
I have made it a practice for several years to read the Bible through in the course of every year. I usually devote to this reading the first hour after I rise every morning. As, including the Apocrypha, it contains about fourteen hundred chapters, and as I meet with occasional interruptions, when this reading is for single days, and sometimes for weeks, or even months, suspended, my rule is to read five chapters every morning, which leaves an allowance of about one-forth of the time for such interruptions.
Which Israel should we recognize? The Israel of 1917; the Israel of 1936; the Israel of 1948; the Israel of 1956; or the Israel of 1967? Which borders and which Israel? Israel has to recognize first the Palestinian state and its borders and then we will know what we are talking about.
In Israel, free men and women are every day demonstrating the power of courage and faith. Back in 1948 when Isreal was founded, pundits claimed the new country could never survive. Today, no one questions that. Israel is a land of stability and democracy in a region of tyranny and unrest.
The Bible is the proper book for men. There the truth is distinguished from error far more clearly than anywhere else, and one finds something new in it every day. For twenty-eight years, since I became a doctor, I have now constantly read and preached the Bible; and yet I have not exhausted it but find something new in it every day.
A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.
I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.
Growing up in Israel, how can I not be an optimist? When you remember what Israel was 50 years ago and you see Israel now, one of the most successful countries in the world, stable, democratic, with an enormously stable economy despite everything that has happened in the global economy in the last few years, how can I not be an optimist?
Ari Shavit's My Promised Land is without question one of the most important books about Israel and Zionism that I have ever read...This is the book that has the capacity to reinvent and reshape the long-overdue conversation about how Israel's complex past ought to shape its still-uncertain future.
Hopefully I get to come back [to Israel] next year. It's really great to see the encouragement [from] my friends, especially within the Hollywood circle, for me to be an ambassador [for Israel]. Because I'm in love with Israel, and I know everyone else will if they just take the opportunity.
As far as YU faculty and students are concerned, the love for Israel is very strong. Probably about three thousand of our graduates have settled in Israel. On average, every year 650 male and female students study in Israel for a minimum of one year.
Israel exists; it has a right to exist in peace behind secure and defensible borders; and it has a right to demand of its neighbors that they recognize those facts. I have personally followed and supported Israel's heroic struggle for survival, ever since the founding of the State of Israel 34 years ago. In the pre-1967 borders Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.
My loyalty to my people, to our people, and to Israel comes first and prevents me from saying anything critical of Israel outside Israel… As a Jew I see my role as a melitz yosher, a defender of Israel: I defend even her mistakes… I must identify with whatever Israel does – even with her errors.
I want to see all the countries in the world and learn all the languages. I want to have thousands of friends and I want all my friends to be different. I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon. I need to practice very hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible. I need to read at least one major book every week. And I need to remember that my seventy years are going to go by too quickly.
Writing is incredibly hard. But I want to do it. That said, I make it the top priority in every day, which for me means the first hours after getting out of bed in the morning. I've been doing it enough years now that I don't even think about waiting for my muse to show up, I just get to work.
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