Top 111 Rabbi Quotes & Sayings

I want a priest, a rabbi and a Protestant minister. I want to hedge my bets.

Direct religious experience is threatening to organized religion, which often mediates it with a rabbi or priest.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

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 cases of doubt.

To me designing has never been a job or profession. It's a way of life, like a priest or rabbi.

The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses, but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.

The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.

The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.

I went through a little hippy dippy program at Brandeis and was bat mizvahed by the rabbi who married my parents. We celebrated the High Holidays and had the traditional Rosh Hashanah dinner.

A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim mullah all walk into a bar, and the bartender says: - What is this, a joke? - ?hurch is the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members.

I was born in Waukegan a long, long time ago. As a matter of fact, our rabbi was an Indian.

My brothers were rabbis. My grandfather was a rabbi.

Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq.

Everyone needs a spiritual guide: a minister, rabbi, counselor, wise friend, or therapist. My own wise friend is my dog.

I have referred to [Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] on occasion, but I doubt that you will find his name in any of my indices. In my view, he is important in the history of interpretation; and that is a subject I have not approached directly.

[ Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] was the greatest commentator [of the Bible] we ever had.

Jesus must have been married to have been called a rabbi.

I wanted to be a soccer player. And then I wanted to be a rabbi.

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution.

I'm not a practicing kabbalist. I'm not a spiritual master. I'm not a rabbi. I don't - but it's part of who I am.

A rabbi told me that when you have two problems - one near, one not so near - concentrate on the immediate one.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

I was thinking a lot about the aftermath of bad choices, how people deal with the trauma of having survived trauma, if that makes sense, and so I wrote about this character's last day on the job, how after spending 15 years pretending to be a rabbi, he'd in effect become a rabbi.

I know I would have learned a huge amount had I read the bible with my rabbi. But I also would have missed a huge amount, and I would have been guided down the narrow paths where the rabbi led me, not the paths that I chose for myself.

It is easy for a rabbi to establish prohibitions, but a rabbi's real strength is to teach Torah and rule on lawwith an emphasis on what is permitted.

My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

You can't appreciate a great day unless you've experienced bad ones." - Rabbi Glassman

Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it

Of all the rabbinic sages of antiquity, perhaps none was more influential or famous than Rabbi Akiva.

If I see any politician or a priest or an imam or a rabbi in the Paradise, I will give up believing in God!

My parents were Zionists born in Poland. My father was a rabbi who didn't know much about science and ran a grocery store in the neighborhood with my mother's help.

I think Jewish history did away with a priesthood when the Temple was destroyed, and it became, supposedly, a religion of scholars. A rabbi is just a scholar.

Perhaps we would do well to listen to the likes of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed.

The dangers is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says "I have the ultimate truth." Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts. In fact, you are the only one who is responsible.

How can a rabbi not live with doubt? The Bible itself is a book of doubt.

I was born in Jerusalem with a religious background and a rabbi as a father... it was rather poor, but what we did have, we did have books.

The level of study that I was at, I was probably only about two or three years away from being ordained as a rabbi, so I really needed to figure out in my head where I wanted to go with things. And I just couldn't do it habitually anymore.

A rabbi should not despair if people do not do as much as they should. Every parent has that with children. God is merciful.

I knew nothing about professional comedians when I became a comedian. I was a rabbi. So I had no professional comedians to learn from.

Rabbis throughout the ages, from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook onward, strictly prohibited going up on the Temple Mount. And now there is a minority group of rabbis encouraging Jews to go.

In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.

Rabbi means teacher, and I see the role of chief rabbi as chief teacher.

'Rabbi' means 'teacher,' and I see the role of chief rabbi as chief teacher.

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

Of course, afterward, I studied [commentary on the Bible by a Rabbi Moshe Dessauer] more closely. But, in truth, it doesn't touch me. It doesn't change my attitude toward the text.

Every time I go into a new venture, I find a "rabbi" who has the business acumen to help me understand the mechanics of that industry, the costs involved in developing a product, and what you need to do in order to make a profit.

I feel very privileged indeed to be appointed to be the next Chief Rabbi.

Last night I didn't realize I said "abortion" in my stand up comedy act instead of "circumcision." No wonder I got blank stares at "rabbi got faint at sight of blood."

I was thinking very carefully about going into education, becoming a teacher, maybe becoming a rabbi.

I would like now to shed light in your heart on the truth of things, for it was not my will, but that of the Father and my Rabbi, which was done that faithful night.

I knew there was only one place to go. I sank down into the center of my soul, grew still, and listened to the Rabbi's heartbeat.

The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.

I went to Temple Emanu-El, and my rabbi, Rabbi Landsberg, was a huge influence on me. When I was 7 and went to kindergarten, there he was, a young rabbi who didn't wear a yarmulke and rode a motorcycle.

there comes a time in every rabbi's life when he thinks he's Moses.

The beth din is the court of the chief rabbi. I see myself taking an active role within the beth din.

If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman

I would become a priest or a rabbi or a monk or whatever the hell was necessary to perform miracles such as taking money from someone else's pocket and putting it into mine, still remaining within the confines of the law.