Israel Shenker Quotes

Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a supreme being.

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored.

The [Jewish] Sabbath was not intended to be simply a desert of prohibitions, but rather an oasis for moral restoration and seemly pleasure-one was to eat, drink, even be merry.

At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was two per square world.

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness.

Theology emerged not as a course of knowledge but as a feast of homily and imagination and exaggeration in which every man could find his image and his portion. And yet there were limits.

Jews are a singular confusion — difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, every pain — nothing is spared them.

America has a way of inventing tradition each morning and erasing the past by nightfall, and thehold of ancient custom is endangered by a thousand cicumstances.

God's greatest blessing is children. The only problem is that you have to support them. It's a problem, not a disadvantage.

It was God who dictated what man should believe and do, leaving man the freedom to accept or scoff, to obey or disregard.