Quote collection
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"There is Israel, for us at least. What no other generation had, we have. We have Israel in spite of all the dangers, the threats and the wars, we have Israel. We can go to Jerusalem. Generations and generations could not and we can."
"What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is - to use a word scholars love - problematic. Let's say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That's a historical issue."
"The Bible is interpreted by the Talmud. Except, in Rabbinic tradition, a Talmudic law has the weight of the Biblical law. Sometimes we say in a prayer, "Blessed are Thou, O God, who has ordered us and commended us," to do something. But you don't find that "something" in the Bible; you find it in the Talmud. So Talmudic law becomes as important as Biblical law."
"Judaism is in a sense a Rabbinic, Talmudic religion, rather than a Biblical religion."
"In my town we studied the five Books of Moses, but rarely the prophets. We studied the Talmud so much that I sometimes knew the prophets because of the prophetic quotations in the Talmud. We almost never studied the prophets themselves."
"For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship."
"I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake."
"In Talmudic literature, certainly in the beginning, he was like a human being - except he was a serpent. But he was talking and walking and probably dreaming."
"I say to myself, if the text was good enough for my father and grandfather, it must be good enough for me. I admit, that is a rather personal way of approaching the text - or a prayer."
"In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?"
"I became one of [Moses Mendelssohn] defenders. But then I heard the words "Biblical criticism" again. And, of course, afterward, I studied it more closely."
"If life is not a celebration, why remember it ? If life --- mine or that of my fellow man --- is not an offering to the other, what are we doing on this earth?"
"I developed an anger at [Moses] Mendelssohn. Later, I read the book. I realized there was nothing subversive in it."
"Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves."
"Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?"
"And to write is to sow and to reap at the same time."
"Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways."
"Paris: city of encounters, of furtive and painful discoveries. All isms converge there, including the anti-isms, all the revolutionaries too, including the counterrevolutionaries ."
"It always hurts when you lose a secret."
"Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity."