Ghetto Prayer Quotes

Entrepreneur Sheila Brooks, who was raised in a ghetto, told me most of the kids she grew up with are dead, in jail, or still impoverished, but she “beat the odds” through hard work and an unshakable faith in a Higher Power. “I truly believe that all things are possible with God. Every day I spend time in meditation and prayer. I thank my Higher Power for everything He has given me. When I do that, I know that no matter how bad things are, I can overcome.

While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the posh suburbs are home to more subtle demonic forces--numbness, complacency and comfort. These are the powers that can eat away at our souls.

I moved from one part of the city to another as though turning from an Ashkenazi fable to a Bedouin tale, with equal delight, and I didn't need to be a conscientious objector to distrust policies requiring armed struggle and sermons based on hatred. Gazing upon Jerusalem's sacred structures was enough to persuade me to oppose everything that might injure their enduring grandeur. And still today, beneath its surface holiness, the city is like an odalisque longing for her lover, ready to burst into sensuous joy. It frowns unhappily upon the uproar of its citizens, hoping against hope that enlightenment may come and deliver their minds from their dark torment. By turns Olympus and ghetto, muse and concubine, temple and arena, Jerusalem suffers from an inability to inspire poems without inflaming passions. It's crumbing, heavyhearted, breaking up like its prayers amid the blasphemy of guns....

Post-Holocaust philosophical thought can occur today because there was already a resisting philosophical moment – what he calls a tikkun [mending] – during that event, by Kurt Huber and the “White Rose” in Munich (the German-Catholic resistance group). Post-Holocaust Christianity is possible now because of the resistance of one such Christian as Bernhard Lichtenberg, who responded to Kristallnacht with a public prayer in behalf of Jews. And post-Holocaust Jewish life is possible for Jews because of the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, the Buchenwald Hasidim, and honorary Jews such as Pelagia Lewinska. All this is to say that the testimony by witnesses of acts of resistance, and in particular the “indispensable testimony” of