My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they've cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.

You save your soul by saving someone else's body.

I think anti-Semitism is the meal ticket of the organizations that fight it.

A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers.

I write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

When you turn the discussion onto talk of religion, you will soon start to reveal a whole range of views ranging from the ardent supporter to the ardent atheist.

How can a rabbi not live with doubt? The Bible itself is a book of doubt.

On campuses, and when I speak to the younger intelligentsia, I am getting a hunger for the text - the authentic text for Jewish knowledge.

The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.

Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.

They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.

God primes the pump of obligation.

I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.

Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.” “Yeah,” said the voice from under the table, “you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.

Sometimes a mind is like a mouth: you just got to shut it.

Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep