Top 85 Torah Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

I think when people speak about faith, they always get stuck when they're starting to speak about the terrible things that happen in the world, and I always know, even in the Torah, they're always speaking about it, that if there is fifty percent of love, there is fifty percent of hate, they are always in perfect balance.

For many people during many centuries, mankind's history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, [the Torah] the sacred writings of the Jewish people ... They were the first to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No other people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources.

We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a "paper pope." The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself.

Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God. Beloved are Israel, for they were called children of God. Beloved are Israel, for unto them was given the desirable Torah

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

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 always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There's no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.

We must stop using the Bible as though it were a potpourri of inerrant proof-texts by which we can bring people into bondage to our religious traditions...We must no longer use the Bible as the Pharisees used the Torah when they gave it absolute and final status. Christian biblicism is no different from Jewish legalism. It is the old way of the letter, not the new way of the Spirit.

For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the Jewish holy scriptures - the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books - were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation.

I love the people of Israel. I love the land of Israel. I love the Torah of Israel. I love the Israel Defense Forces. I love our soldiers. If you feel the same way I do, you have a home.

I've studied Kabbalah, as you know, for many years, so there are a lot of things I do that one would associate with practising Judaism. I hear the Torah every Saturday. I observe Shabbat. I say certain prayers. My son was bar mitzvahed. So this appears like I'm Jewish, but these rituals are connected to what I describe as the Tree of Life consciousness and have more to do with the idea of being an Israelite, not Jewish.

If I were one of the gods who just wound up supervising humans, I'd want to influence the decision-makers to live according to the morals that Israel would eventually get in the Torah, and to teach those same principles to their people. I'd also want to make sure they worship no other god but the Most High.

I'm sentimental about Jesus on the cross. Jesus was a Jew, and also I believe he was a catalyst, and I think he offended people because his message was to love your neighbour as yourself; in other words, no one is better than somebody else. He embraced all people, whether it was a beggar on the street or a prostitute, and he admonished a group of Jews who were not observing the precepts of the Torah. So he rattled a lot of people's cages.

If we move in the direction of biblial absolutism how can we escape turning the New Testament into a Christian Torah and the gospel into a new law? Once we do that, religious fascism with all its sectarian ugliness cannot be far away. Far better a mistaken Christian (a heretic) who has somehow caught the Spirit of Christ, than an orthodox Protestant who thinks that the Spirit is mediated to him through the letter of correct theology.

To be Christian means to find the decisive revelation of God in Jesus. To be Muslim means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Koran. To be Jewish means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Torah, and so forth.

God did everything necessary to get Herod's attention. He sent messengers from the East and a message from the Torah. He sent wonders from the sky and words from Scripture. He sent the testimony of the heavens and the teaching of the prophets. But Herod refused to listen. He chose his puny dynasty over Christ. He died a miserable old man.

The delight of the Torah is ignited by an inner awareness. A man begins to sense the great tapestry of each letter and point. Every concept and content, every notion and idea, of every spiritual movement, of every vibration, intellectual and emotional, from the immediate and general to the distant and detailed, from matters lofty, spiritual, and ethical according to their outward profile, to matters practical, obligatory, seemingly frightening, and forceful, and at the same time complex and full of content and great mental exertion - all together become known by a supernal holy awareness.

I don't do Jewish stuff because I don't want people to be left out. If I mention the Torah in Alabama, it's not going to go down that well. I used to do some Jewish jokes because when I started, I used to play lots of Jewish country clubs.

Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates ... I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers. Yet their passion for this land stemmed from the Book of Books ... [The Bible is] the single most important book in my life.

The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of The Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah, Talmud, Mussar, Cabala.

There is a very beautiful expression in the Hebrew language that's borrowed from spoken Torah... 'All is predicted, and permission is given at any point to change anything.' I think I live by this idiom in the sense that there is always a goal; there is always something to look forward to in life and my creative search, and that goal is there.

How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.

Cain slew Abel. On that much the Torah and the Bible and the Qur'an agree, although in the Qur'an these first sons of Adam and Eve are Qabeel and Habeel. Cain, which is to say Qabeel, wandered eastwards from Eden to the Land of Nod with a mark of some kind on him, a curse.

I assume as a child Jesus had to learn how to do carpentry, learn Torah, learn all the things a human child had to learn. If He was human in all ways except that He did not sin, this must have been the case.