Words matter. These are the best Torah Quotes from famous people such as David Novak, Meir Soloveichik, Nina Tassler, Benjamin Wittes, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now.
Jews focus on the Torah, the embodiment of God’s will; Christians, on an embodied God.
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.
One cannot accept Christ and still be part of the normative Jewish community; one cannot live by Torah and still be part of the Church.
The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah – itself a set of five books of limited length – contains literally all truth.
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.
I think part of being Jewish is that innate desire to question things. Rabbis sit around all day and question the Torah. Giving yourself the room to question things, in a religion, just breeds thinking.
My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.
The giving of the Torah is a story of God seeking to provide humanity with the opportunity to make moral decisions.
There is the illusion of the world and the reality of the Torah.
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.
I was bar mitzvahed, which was hard. I feel it was the hardest thing I ever had to do; harder than making a movie. It was a lot of studying, you know. I wasn’t a perfect Hebrew reader, and also, they say when you’re reading your Torah portion, you’re not supposed to memorize it. It turned out very tricky.
I wouldn’t even dare read the Torah, let alone attempt a witty observation on the Torah.
The observant Jew has his own sense of values. Torah Judaism is his blueprint for this life, his target for existence.
Judaism is my life. Everything I do is through the lens of Torah.
In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
And you can’t make a mistake when you are reading the Torah, so you have men standing around who will correct you if you are reading it incorrectly.
The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it’s now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.
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.
People expect someone with the name ‘Israel Horovitz’ to be a little old man with sideburns carrying a Torah.
The Jewish tradition presents itself as the greatest revelation of God’s truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves ‘the chosen people.’ It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah.
If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.
It’s no coincidence that the word ‘holiday’ suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
I fought tooth and nail: I didn’t want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn’t want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.
Torah values are the ones that inform my life.
