Top 95 Judaism Quotes

The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question.

I grew up in a reform Jewish family in St. Louis. Our idea of Judaism was no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree that had a skirt at the bottom embroidered with the names of my grandparents.

I sometimes wonder why I talk about Judaism so much in my act, and the reason is that it’s such a huge part of who I am, and I only make fun of stuff that I care about.

Indeed if we Christians so tell our story that Judaism is silenced, then we have not spoken rightly of Christ.

I wear the Jewish star, but I’m not – I haven’t converted to Judaism, and I’m not – I’m not – I’m not Jewish in the conventional sense because the Kaballah is a belief system that predates religion and predates Judaism as an organized religion.

Archaeologists have made discoveries that challenge fundamental traditions of Judaism as well as those of Christianity and Islam.

Judaism is a way of thinking, more than anything else, that I think is entirely distinct, and the more you know of it, the more you can enter into that kind of thinking.

It therefore become essential for the future of Judaism itself that its advancement should be correlated with a similar effort to advance the cause of religion generally.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I’ve always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

I think you can’t really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child, whether it’s New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can’t escape it, even if you completely disagree with it, you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.

I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I’m happy to be one – or proud to be one.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity – I admire wise men. Some of my favorite forms of history are religious history, what the sages say from the top of the mountain and how they view life.

I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I’d say my religion was more surfing than Judaism – that’s what I spent most of my time doing.

I searched for answers to life’s meaning and, though I was raised a Presbyterian, I converted to Judaism around 1983.

Judaism is the best basis for democracy. The debate between the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai, the constant debate, has been a tradition of ours for thousands of years.

We realize that Judaism as a faith can survive only in an atmosphere of general faith.

What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I’m a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don’t think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.

The key to Judaism’s survival is the emotional attachment to the religion.

Judaism is a big part of my background, obviously, and my reality.

Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story – as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation – but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.

First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.

Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother’s parents were very steeped in.

The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

In certain strains of Judaism, there’s a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can’t possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we’re off track.

Judaism doesn’t recognize gay marriage, just as we don’t recognize milk and meat together as kosher, and nothing will change it… I’m not a hypocrite; I state my positions.

When Jews left Judaism, they didn’t stop being religious. They simply swapped God-based Judaism for godless secular humanism and leftism. For left-wing Jews, Judaism is their ethnicity; leftism is their religion.

As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern with Jews and Judaism.

The relation between Judaism, Zionism, and Messianism is one that is often hard for Jews to get straight. Needless to say, it is even harder for non-Jews.

Abraham is such a fascinating figure. Three world religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – all claim him as a patriarch. He was raised in a religious home. And yet he rejected religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with God.

So much of Judaism is about suffering, survival, and pathos.

I don’t hide my being Israeli. I say it in every interview. I put out a record with songs in Hebrew. The people who signed me have no connection to Judaism or Israel.

My belief is that I wasn’t born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.

Steve Bannon is a friend of Israel and he is a friend of Judaism.

We have to protect and do our utmost to fortify the walls of Judaism in the land of Israel through legislation that will guard the unique Jewish character of the state of Israel.

I super strongly identify with marginalized communities. I’m not at all religious, but I feel super, super Jewish. I can’t even describe the feeling, but it actually feels really similar to being gay, the kind of kinship that you feel with the LGBTQ people. That same sense of community is there with Judaism.

In Judaism, there are a lot of rules – everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex.

We have to find a way to try and reconcile our beliefs – and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally seen homosexuality as a sin – with the reality of life in modern, pluralistic, secular societies in which gay people cannot be wished away or banished from sight.

Judaism is my home. Judaism is super important to me, in death and in life.

Judaism, I would argue, does demand love for our fellow human beings, but only to an extent. ‘Hate’ is not always synonymous with the terribly sinful.

Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.

Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.

I think that Judaism has been, throughout its history since A.D. 70, a diaspora culture that’s all about being a minority. In fact, being a small minority. When I’m in Israel, I cannot get used to the notion that we’re all Jewish. It doesn’t seem to me that we’re supposed to all be Jewish.

Judaism is in all my books.

The Orthodox believe in Jewish literacy, and most of the rest of us couldn’t care less. Rabbis and other creatures have a monopoly on Judaism. This is a turnoff in a world that is increasingly secular and that has turned away from religion. Jews are simply turning away from Judaism.

Judaism is not, per se, a religion in the sense most Americans think of. Even if you don’t adhere to the various precepts, you’re still a Jew.

When my, British-Church of England mother married my, Canadian-Jewish Father, the deal was that she would embrace Judaism, but wouldn’t give up her Christmas tree. So, I grew up with Christmas every year. I loved it then and I love it now.

Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.

I really believe in the way the energy can consolidate in certain geographical spots. You can find it in a lot of different places, beautiful natural spots, or if you look at Islam or Judaism or Christianity, these ideas of holy places.

While there are corporal descriptions of what the afterlife is like in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, what’s going on there is the finite trying to describe the infinite. If God knows everything, started everything and is the only one who knows how it’s going to end, how can any human know what God wants?

My two most fervent interests are pop music and traditional Judaism. Hell of a pair of fervent interests.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.

I studied Judaism a lot. I studied religion in general, and I have never imposed my Judaism on my kids. They are what they want to be. I think… you must care for others. That’s the correct religion, I think.

I wear my Judaism on my sleeve – and my face for that matter.

Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us.

I want to do everything in my power to ensure the equality between all movements of Judaism in the state of Israel: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. In conversions, in budgets, in the eyes of the law. No one can claim ownership over the Jewish God.

The observant Jew has his own sense of values. Torah Judaism is his blueprint for this life, his target for existence.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

I still believe there is a lot of truth in Orthodox Judaism, but not the whole truth. Each person has his truth that he has to discover. You don’t necessarily have to mold yourself to another idea of who you are.

As a journalist, I’ve always treaded carefully about being Jewish and caring a lot about Israel and having that not become too big of an issue that could affect my journalism. But I also don’t think it’s essential to my Judaism, as I think it might be for some other people.

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would’ve hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

Judaism is a brilliant religion, and the main function of Judaism is to learn and read.

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate – the very act itself – was part of religion.

Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn.

Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.

I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

In Judaism, there are 613 biblical commandments, and the Talmud says that the chief commandment of all is study.

From a constitutional point of view there is an advantage to democracy and it must be balanced and the Supreme Court should be given another constitutional tool that will also give power to Judaism.

Traditional Judaism has always embraced the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the ultimate resurrection of the dead.

I’ve never been from a certain group. I’ve always reserved a space for myself where I’m unattached to any group, but the part of Judaism that I really take away, that means something to me, is the part about community.

These are the themes in life which are consistent in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism – of being grounded in who you are and being engaged in an unjust world.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.

Judaism is one of the last of the world’s matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don’t spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey.

Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.

Evangelicals too often fall short in their actual teachings about Judaism.

Every fundamentalist movement I’ve studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

I believe that our democratic values are also born out of our Jewish faith, a ‘love for the stranger,’ and equality before the law – these are not foreign values: this is Judaism.

Judaism is a whole line of values that have existed for thousands of years, but the democratic idea is a new idea, and significant parts of it stand in contradiction to Judaism.

To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world’s worldview.

Judaism shouldn’t be the jailhouse of ideas but a liberator of ideas; not a disintegrator of people but what brings people together.

I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.

I really find that with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.

There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam… but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control.

I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism – whatever it may be.

Religion triggers a lot of emotions in me, most of which stem from being raised Jewish in a very Baptist community in the South. I didn’t believe any of it from an early age – the clubby quality of whatever religion or church you belonged to, Judaism included. It just struck me as foolish.

The more we can do to support and promulgate the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic faiths – of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – the better armed we will be to fight fundamentalism.

So much of Islam is Judeo-Christianity. It’s impossible to divorce them. Islam is 600 years after Christ. Thousands of years after Judaism. Christ, Moses, Abraham – they are all in the Koran.

I find its attention to living this life rather than the next one exhilarating because I think even independently of Judaism that that’s the right way to go about life.

I have a great identification with Judaism as a religion and as a culture, and all the values that created such a great history, and the Jewish contribution to the betterment of all humanity.

For years, Judaism has been a sort of product put on the religious shelf, and on holidays, we would take it off the shelf and let seculars play with it for a bit. Now, Judaism is going back to being something that more closely touches everyone.