Jewish Wisdom Quotes

Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" Rabbi Stern

The Message of Mohammad is not a set of metaphysical phenomena. It is a complete civilization.

This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.

arrogance is knowledge minus wisdom

One of the main reasons Jesus wanted Mari [Mary Magdalene] to start her own following of female disciples was because in those times, Jewish women had no probative value in society and were therefore not even given a basic education. Their intellect was considered decidedly inferior to men's and apart from this, women's far superior intuition was interpreted as a characteristic that associated them to the devil since the men could not quite understand this inner knowledge or find a plausible explanation for it...

I love to help children's souls shine.

You said I could be anything I wanted when I was older', I said. She smiled and said, 'And you can be. But it's not very easy to become Jewish.' 'I know,' I said forlornly, 'I need a number.' And she suddenly stopped smiling.

Why do you think the Bible has survived thousands of years of tumultuous history Why is it still here Is it because its stories are such compelling reading Of course not...but there is a reason. There is a reason Christian monks spend lifetimes attempting to decipher the Bible. There is a reason that Jewish mystics and Kabbalists pore over the Old Testament. And that reason Robert is that there exist powerful secrets hidden in the pages of this ancient book...a vast collection of untapped wisdom waiting to be unveiled.

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, "Where there is no money, there is no learning." The rabbis explain that unless people's stomachs are full and satisfied, they cannot study, grow spiritually, and do good works.

Look to the Bible for the answer. Ancient Jewish wisdom says, “Delight in serving other people.” This is the best career advice you will ever get.

Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world. 1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized. 2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce. 3.He married his cousin. 4.He had an estranged relationship with his son. 5. He had his first child out of wedlock. 6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people. 7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement.

People often ask me, what my religion is. I tell them, I am a Christian to the Christian, a Jew to the Jew, a Muslim to the Muslim, a Hindu to the Hindu, an atheist to the atheist, but the brightest nightmare to the fundamentalist.

I’m drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent—forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I’m sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us.

Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.

Genius cannot simply float in the clouds, it must also operate down on earth.

The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.

Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity. The Old Testament contains some genuine wisdom. However, it is very clear that the Hebrew prophets and rabbis gradually destroyed all trace of the Divine Feminine and worshiped the Demiurge. The same applies to the other main patriarchal religions: Islam and Christianity.

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, “When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children.” She exclaimed, “You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars].” But Rabbi Hiyya replied, “There is a wheel which revolves in this world.” —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b

The ruach blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but cannot tell from where it comes or where it goes. God is He, He is Ruach (Spirit) and Ruach is speaking to our ruach (spirit) revealing great mysteries, knowledge, wisdom, understanding and joy.

One Jewish lady was talking to the neighbor, and she said, “The psychoanalyst who is treating my son has said that my son suffers from an Oedipus complex.” And the neighbor lady said, “Oedipus schmoedipus! Doesn’t matter as long as he is a good boy and loves his mother!

Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.

Ecclesiastes 9:10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither you go.

Hanukah is over, we’re not Jewish anymore,” she tells me.

A broken heart is a whole heart. A leaning ladder is a straight ladder.

Only God can give us credit for the angry words we did not speak. —Rabbi Harold Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, page 187

Whoever cannot survive without taking charity, such as an old, sick, or greatly suffering individual, but who stubbornly refuses to accept aid, is guilty of murdering himself…yet one who needs charity but postpones taking it and lives in deprivation so as to not trouble the community, shall live to provide for others." —Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575), Shulkhan Arukh (The Code of Jewish Law), Yoreh Deah 255:2

Black and white come together. Brown and blue come to gather. Boys and girls come with love. Straight and gay come as a dove. Jewish and Muslim, open your mind. Christian and Hindu, be very kind. Sikh and Buddist come with the sun. All children, let's have some fun. We are your children; we are the future. Let us love and trust each other. Let not the gun, let not the shored, But let peace and love win this world.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.

If you follow these simple truths, you will gain control over your financial future, and probably be able to accumulate millions and millions of dollars. These truths are not just about money, but about self discipline and the proof of love between yourself and your family. While I have gleaned these truths from the wisdom of the Jewish people, they will work for anyone in any setting regardless of religious background or income level. This is the oldest financial system in history and the only one that has survived the test of time.

The idea that Wisdom could be a divine hypostasis—an aspect of God that is a distinct being from God that nonetheless is itself God—is rooted in a fascinating passage of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 8. ... God made all things in his wisdom, so much so that Wisdom is seen as a co-creator of sorts.

Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of “prayer”, as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not: At any rate they do require standing in a crowd and uttering constant and uniform incantations. This is ordered by one religion to take place five times a day, and by other monotheists for almost that number, while all of them set aside at least one whole day for the exclusive praise of the Lord, and Judaism seems to consist in its original constitution of a huge list of prohibitions that must be followed before all else. The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not making him into a woman (or a Gentile), while the Jewish woman contents herself with thanking the almighty for creating her “as she is.” Presumably the almighty is pleased to receive this tribute to his power and the approval of those he created. It’s just that, if he is truly almighty, the achievement would seem rather a slight one. Much the same applies to the idea that prayer, instead of making Christianity look foolish, makes it appear convincing. Now, it can be asserted with some confidence, first, that its deity is all–wise and all–powerful and, second, that its congregants stand in desperate need of that deity’s infinite wisdom and power. Just to give some elementary quotations, it is stated in the book of Philippians, 4:6, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that “he is the rock, his work is perfect,” and Isaiah 64:8 tells us, “Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Note, then, that Christianity insists on the absolute dependence of its flock, and then only on the offering of undiluted praise and thanks. A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or, at the very least, a pathetic misunderstanding. It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine. And this, sad to say, opens religion to the additional charge of corruption. The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment. Eventually, and after a bitter and schismatic quarrel, practices like the notorious “sale of indulgences” were abandoned. But many a fine basilica or chantry would not be standing today if this awful violation had not turned such a spectacularly good profit. And today it is easy enough to see, at the revival meetings of Protestant fundamentalists, the counting of the checks and bills before the laying on of hands by the preacher has even been completed. Again, the spectacle is a shameless one.

When we face challenges and medicalize them, are we not being beastly? We feel anxious, so we drink a glass of wine. Or we take anti-anxiety meds. We do not consider and reflect on the underlying issues causing our anxiety. We do not seek God and his wisdom to grow into a holistic peace--something known as "shalom" to the Jewish people.

The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who 'reduced to absurdity' 'the wisdom of this world' (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah–that is essentially Jewish.

Apollos had been influenced by the Jewish Wisdom tradition that had been preached originally by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. It was based on a personal devotion to Sophia, “Divine Wisdom,” an attribute or emanation of God.24 This spirituality had enabled Jews who felt humiliated by living under imperial rule to recover a sense of dignity, because they had achieved a wisdom that was superior to that of their rulers.25 Thanks to Apollos, the despised artisans and laborers of Corinth had become intoxicated by similar fantasies, believing that because they were perfected human beings, they could now claim a noble lineage, worldly honor, and social distinction without being corrupted by these worldly attainments.

If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.

It is unwise to trust your own judgment. “He who trusts in himself is a fool, but he who lives by wisdom will escape” (CJB, Proverbs 28:26). Many people have made bad financial investments because they based their decisions on their own judgment and pride. The Tanakh warns, “Pride goes before destruction, and arrogance before failure” (CJB, Proverbs 16:18). “Before being ruined, a person’s heart is proud” (CJB, Proverbs 18:12). The

Man is homo religiosus, by “nature” religious: As much as he needs food to eat and air to breathe, he needs a faith for living…. But—and this is the challenging word of Jewish-Christian faith—so long as he pursues this quest in self-sufficiency, relying on his own virtue, wisdom, or piety, it will not be God that he finds, but an idol—the self, or some aspect of the self, writ large, projected, objectified, and worshiped.—Will Herberg, Protestant–Catholic–Jew

Once we rescue this substitution from its pagan captivity, it can resume its rightful place at the heart of the Jewish and then the messianic narrative, the story through which—in 8:4 as elsewhere—humans are rescued not so they can “go to heaven,” but so that “the right and proper verdict of the law could be fulfilled in us, as we live not according to the flesh but according to the spirit.” Humans are rescued in order to be “glorified,” that is, so that they may resume the genuine human existence, bearing the divine image, reflecting God’s wisdom and love into the world.

Contrary to the other three hundred days of the year, when you’re running and doing and building and constructing, the Jewish holidays provide a kind of in-built way to pause and to gather yourself and regenerate. . . . Our lives can become so full of activities and to-do tasks that, in some sense, the soul becomes overwhelmed. We need to defragment our souls. We can be pulled in so many different directions, but the holidays help that part of us that needs meaning and connection and great purpose. . . . Holiday rituals are ancient technologies that carry contemporary wisdom. Judaism works.

INSIGHT FOR BUSINESS: Make sure you understand the business environment in which you are working, from the lowliest job to the most complex one. You don’t need to be able to do every task, but you must understand everything that happens inside the organization. While it is important to delegate responsibilities, never abdicate supervision. It is important that you keep tabs on the entire process from top to bottom and from bottom to top. INSIGHT FOR LIFE: Keep all aspects of your life in balance. Extremes in any direction lead to setbacks in another. Make sure to be involved in your own life by not allowing decisions to be made for you by others—but at the same time, take the opinions of friends and family seriously.

The 6 feminine elements in a man are: His human mother. This is the actual woman who was his mother, she with all her idiosyncrasies, individual characteristics, and uniqueness. His mother complex. This resided entirely inside the man himself. This is his regressive capacity which would like to return to a dependency on his mother and be a child a gain. This is a man's wish to fail, his defeatist capacity, his subterranean fascination with death or accident, his demand to be take care of. This is pure poison in a man's psychology. His mother archetype. If the mother complex is pure poison, the mother archetype is pure gold. It is the feminine half of God, the cornucopia of the universe, mother nature, the bounty which is freely poured out to us without fail. We could not live for one minute without the bounty of the mother archetype. It is always reliable, nourishing, sustaining. His fair maiden. This is the feminine component in every man's psychic structure and is the fair damsel. It's is Blanche Fleur, one's lady fair, Dulcinea in Don Quixote, Beatrice to Dante in the Comedia Divina. It is she who gives meaning and color to one's life. Dr. Jung named this quality anima, she who animates and brings life. His wife or partner. This is the flesh and blood companion who share his life journey and is a human companion. Sophia. This is the Goddess of Wisdom, the feminine half of God, the Shekinah in Jewish mysticism. It comes as a shock to a man to discover that Wisdom is feminine, but all mythologies have portrayed it so. 49-50

The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism". Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies--we can call them totalitarian for now--attract the same types of people. Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as the economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary". What mattered to him was German identity politics.

Not everybody can simply wake up one morning, brush his teeth, drink a cup of coffee and kill a god! To murder a deity you need to even stronger than the god as well as infinitely malicious and evil. Whoever murdered Jesus, a warm-hearted deity radiating love, he must have been stronger than he and also shrewd and abominable. Those accursed god-killers were only able to kill god on condition that they really possessed monstrous resources of strength and wickedness. And so that is indeed what the jews possess in the deepest recesses of the Jews-hater's imagination. We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas. But the truth, my young friend, the real truth, we can behold before our very eyes here in the land of Israel: the modern Jew who has sprung up here, just like his ancient predecessor, is neither strong nor malicious, but hedonistic, with an ostentatious of wisdom, boisterous, confused and consumed by suspicions and fear. Yes indeed. Chaim Weizmann once said, in a moment of despair, that there can never be such a thing as a Jewish state, because it contains an inbuilt contradiction: if it is a state it will not be Jewish, and if it is Jewish it will certainly not be a state.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “T hey shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23 ESV). This is perhaps our oldest Christmas carol. Historians say its roots go back to the 8th century. In its earliest form, it was a “plain song” or a chant and the monks sang it a cappella. It was sung or chanted in Latin during the seven days leading up to Christmas. Translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851, we sing it to the tune “Veni, Emmanuel,” a 15th-century melody. Many churches sing it early in the Advent season because of its plaintive tone of expectant waiting. Traditionally Advent centers on the Old Testament preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will establish his kingdom on the earth. When the words form a prayer that Christ will come and “ransom captive Israel,” we ought to remember the long years of Babylonian captivity. Each verse of this carol features a different Old Testament name or title of the coming Messiah: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” “O come, Thou Wisdom from on high.” “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse.” “O come, Thou Day-spring.” “O come, Thou Key of David.” “O come, Thou Lord of Might.” “O come, Desire of Nations.” This carol assumes a high level of biblical literacy. That fact might argue against singing it today because so many churchgoers don’t have any idea what “Day-spring” means or they think Jesse refers to a wrestler or maybe to a reality TV star. But that argument works both ways. We ought to sing this carol and we ought to use it as a teaching tool. Sing it—and explain it! We can see the Jewish roots of this carol in the refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. But Israel’s Messiah is also our Savior and Lord. What Israel was waiting for turns out to be the long-expected Jesus. So this carol rightly belongs to us as well. The first verse suggests the longing of the Jewish people waiting for Messiah to come: O come, O come, Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appears The second verse pictures Christ redeeming us from hell and death: O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan’s tyranny From depths of Hell Thy people save And give them victory o’er the grave This verse reminds us only Christ can take us home to heaven: O come, Thou Key of David, come, And open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. Let’s listen as Selah captures the Jewish flavor of this carol. Lord, we pray today for all those lost in the darkness of sin. We pray for those who feel there is no hope. May the light of Jesus shine in their hearts today. Amen.

The Wisdom Goddess drew on precedents from other cultures the Hebrews had been exposed to, “seeing wisdom as an Israelite reflection or borrowing of a foreign mythical deity — perhaps Ishtar, Astarte, or Isis.”[38] Following the period where the Wisdom Goddess occurred in texts, around the third century BCE to the second century CE, camer the naming of wisdom as the Shekinah in the first-second century CE Onkelos Targum. Contemporary with the Shekinah and drawing on some of the same earlier sources we see the Gnostic wisdom goddess, Sophia.  There are many parallels between these two goddesses which suggest cross-fertilisation of ideas, which we will explore in more detail in subsequent chapters.  It seems apparent that both the Shekinah and Sophia influenced perceptions of the Christian Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, seen in textual references to titles and motifs.  The Islamic figure of Sakina is clearly derived from the Shekinah, both through her name and also the references to her in the Qur’an, as we will demonstrate. Ancient textual evidence does not link the Sumerian goddess Lilith to the Shekinah.  However allegorical references made in medieval Kabbalistic texts have encouraged us to consider the changing cultural perceptions of Lilith from Sumerian myths through to medieval Jewish tales to determine the extent of her influence on the portrayal of divine feminine wisdom.

...he [Perry Hildebrandt] broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He'd come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advise from, as it were, two professionals. 'I suppose what I'm asking,' he said, 'is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.' Reverend Walsh [Trinity Lutheran] and the rabbi [Meyer] exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old. 'Adam may have a different answer,' the rabbi said, but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?' 'That would suggest,' Perry said, 'that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.' 'That's the idea,' the rabbi said. 'In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly. He could seem like quite the hard-ass--striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of the Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.' 'So, in other words, it doesn't matter what a righteous person's private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God's commandments?' 'And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a -mensch.- I'm sure you see this, too, Adam--the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be what Perry is asking about.' 'My question,' Perry said, 'is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you're smart enough to think about it, there's always some selfish angle.' The rabbi smiled. 'There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we "bring in God," as you say--for the believer, of course, it's God who brought -us- in--to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don't need to police every little private thought we might have.' 'I think there's more to Perry's question, though,' Reverend Walsh said. 'I think he is pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it's like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capability to recognize true goodness, but we're also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.' 'Exactly,' Perry said. 'How do I know if I'm really being good or if I'm just pursuing a sinful advantage?' 'The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is--whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer's. The reason we need faith--in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ--is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we're lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.

It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament. For religious people who, in the solitude of winter, continually seek ultimate light on their religious problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually deformed. The wretched people strive to extract truths from these Jewish chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs. It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German people should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo-jumbo. So long as the wisdom, particularly of the Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result of studying the Bible. But since the Bible became common property, a whole heap of people have found opened to them lines of religious thought which—particularly in conjunction with the German characteristic of persistent and somewhat melancholy meditation—as often as not turned them into religious maniacs. When one recollects further that the Catholic Church has elevated to the status of Saints a whole number of madmen, one realises why movements such as that of the Flagellants came inevitably into existence in the Middle Ages in Germany. As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by Jewish filth and priestly twaddle, that they were little different from the howling dervish of the Turks and the negroes, at whom we laugh so scornfully. It angers one to think that, while in other parts of the globe religious teaching like that of Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed offers an undeniably broad basis for the religious-minded, Germans should have been duped by a theological exposition devoid of all honest depth.

The heart is the center of the human microcosm, at once the center of the physical body, the vital energies, the emotions, and the soul, as well as the meeting place between the human and the celestial realms where the spirit resides. How remarkable is this reality of the heart, that mysterious center which from the point of view of our earthly existence seems so small, and yet as the Prophet has said it is the Throne (al-‘arsh) of God the All-Merciful (ar-Rahmân), the Throne that encompasses the whole universe. Or as he uttered in another saying, “My Heaven containeth Me not, nor My Earth, but the heart of My faithful servant doth contain Me.” It is the heart, the realm of interiority, to which Christ referred when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21), and it is the heart which the founders of all religions and the sacred scriptures advise man to keep pure as a condition for his salvation and deliverance. We need only recall the words of the Gospel, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8) […] In Christianity the Desert Fathers articulated the spiritual, mystical, and symbolic meanings of the reality of the heart, and these teachings led to a long tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church known as Hesychasm, culminating with St Gregory Palamas, which is focused on the “prayer of the heart” and which includes the exposition of the significance of the heart and the elaboration of the mysticism and theology of the heart. In Catholicism another development took place, in which the heart of the faithful became in a sense replaced by the heart of Christ, and a new spirituality developed on the basis of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Reference to His bleeding heart became common in the writings of such figures as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Catherine of Sienna. The Christian doctrines of the heart, based as they are on the Bible, present certain universal theses to be seen also in Judaism, the most important of which is the association of the heart with the inner soul of man and the center of the human state. In Jewish mysticism the spirituality of the heart was further developed, and some Jewish mystics emphasized the idea of the “broken or contrite heart” (levnichbar) and wrote that to reach the Divine Majesty one had to “tear one’s heart” and that the “broken heart” mentioned in the Psalms sufficed. To make clear the universality of the spiritual significance of the heart across religious boundaries, while also emphasizing the development of the “theology of the heart” and methods of “prayer of the heart” particular to each tradition, one may recall that the name of Horus, the Egyptian god, meant the “heart of the world”. In Sanskrit the term for heart, hridaya, means also the center of the world, since, by virtue of the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the center of man is also the center of the universe. Furthermore, in Sanskrit the term shraddha, meaning faith, also signifies knowledge of the heart, and the same is true in Arabic, where the word îmân means faith when used for man and knowledge when used for God, as in the Divine Name al-Mu’min. As for the Far Eastern tradition, in Chinese the term xin means both heart and mind or consciousness. – Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chapter 3: The Heart of the Faithful is the Throne of the All-Merciful)

The heart is the center of the human microcosm, at once the center of the physical body, the vital energies, the emotions, and the soul, as well as the meeting place between the human and the celestial realms where the spirit resides. How remarkable is this reality of the heart, that mysterious center which from the point of view of our earthly existence seems so small, and yet as the Prophet has said it is the Throne (al-‘arsh) of God the All-Merciful (ar-Rahmân), the Throne that encompasses the whole universe. Or as he uttered in another saying, “My Heaven containeth Me not, nor My Earth, but the heart of My faithful servant doth contain Me.” It is the heart, the realm of interiority, to which Christ referred when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21), and it is the heart which the founders of all religions and the sacred scriptures advise man to keep pure as a condition for his salvation and deliverance. We need only recall the words of the Gospel, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8) […] In Christianity the Desert Fathers articulated the spiritual, mystical, and symbolic meanings of the reality of the heart, and these teachings led to a long tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church known as Hesychasm, culminating with St Gregory Palamas, which is focused on the “prayer of the heart” and which includes the exposition of the significance of the heart and the elaboration of the mysticism and theology of the heart. In Catholicism another development took place, in which the heart of the faithful became in a sense replaced by the heart of Christ, and a new spirituality developed on the basis of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Reference to His bleeding heart became common in the writings of such figures as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Catherine of Sienna. The Christian doctrines of the heart, based as they are on the Bible, present certain universal theses to be seen also in Judaism, the most important of which is the association of the heart with the inner soul of man and the center of the human state. In Jewish mysticism the spirituality of the heart was further developed, and some Jewish mystics emphasized the idea of the “broken or contrite heart” (levnichbar) and wrote that to reach the Divine Majesty one had to “tear one’s heart” and that the “broken heart” mentioned in the Psalms sufficed. To make clear the universality of the spiritual significance of the heart across religious boundaries, while also emphasizing the development of the “theology of the heart” and methods of “prayer of the heart” particular to each tradition, one may recall that the name of Horus, the Egyptian god, meant the “heart of the world”. In Sanskrit the term for heart, hridaya, means also the center of the world, since, by virtue of the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the center of man is also the center of the universe. Furthermore, in Sanskrit the term shraddha, meaning faith, also signifies knowledge of the heart, and the same is true in Arabic, where the word îmân means faith when used for man and knowledge when used for God, as in the Divine Name al-Mu’min. As for the Far Eastern tradition, in Chinese the term xin means both heart and mind or consciousness. – Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chapter 3: The Heart of the Faithful is the Throne of the All-Merciful)

Malchut is also the Alma D’Itgalya, “the Revealed World.” Here our latent potential is actualized through behavior and expression.

It is the Shechina that funnels the waves of creative potential into a revealed, finite world.

Whether one is looking at the so-called Age of Reason, the Middle Ages, the modern age, or the pre-Christian era, gnostic philosophy remains the same dynamic, liberating power. Existing in time, it points beyond time. It calls us to wake up from materialist vision to a more profound, higher, and more centered perception. Whether the expression of the gnosis is apparently Christian, classical, Jewish, magical, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern, or Western, the wisdom of the ages speaks to us as it did to our ancestors—if we choose to listen.

Real change only comes from consistent, daily practice.

ONE’S COMPASSION SHOULD extend to all creatures, and one should neither despise nor destroy them, for the wisdom above extends to all of creation—inanimate objects, plants, animals, and humans. —RABBI MOSHE CORDOVERO (1522–1570)

Peshat is the plain sense reading. It looks to the surface meaning of the text, drawing on knowledge of word meanings, grammar, syntax, context, cognate Semitic languages, archaeology, and history. Remez is the allegorical, or symbolic, reading. It looks for parallels between the scriptural text and more abstract concepts. This kind of reading sees biblical characters, events, and literary compositions as standing for other truths. Derash is the inquiring or interpretive reading. It looks for further layers of meaning. Midrash, the Jewish tradition of interpreting the scripture through creative storytelling, derives from this way of reading. Sod is the mystical reading. It looks at the biblical text as a symbolic code, which with piety and effort will yield hidden wisdom and personal connection with the Divine. The Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah relies on complex symbolic interpretation of each individual letter of the biblical text.

These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persistent religious chaos introduced by centuries of Greek and Roman ways. That’s why I wear my Yankees jersey in Phillies country. I do it, at great risk to myself, to let the world—the world, mind you—know that I am different. I belong to another tribe. I am special.

don’t want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren’t exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity. Biblical scholars write books about it. Who knows, perhaps a future episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have Midge’s mom stressed out about how exactly to prepare the Passover lamb.

The tradition based on the old Jewish bible recounting about how the Jews were used for forced labor and the construction of the great monuments of Egypt such as the Great Pyramids is impossible since these were created in the predynastic age, thousands of years before Abraham, the supposed first Jew, ever existed. Although this biblical notion is very limited in scope, the significant impact of Ancient Egypt on Hebrew and Christian culture is evident even from the biblical scriptures.

It is almost incredible that towards the end of the twentieth century, biblical fundamentalism made such a comeback in America. No less astounding is its alliance with the small body of Jewish fundamentalists in Israel to further their respective apocalyptic dreams.

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

Adolf Hitler banned Mickey Mouse cartoons from German theatres. His “reasoning”: Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

The ultimate reward for Christ’s disciples, however, will be the praise of God himself, when he says, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” (Matthew 25:21, 23) for our willingness to serve his Son’s mission of redeeming the Father’s precious world. Wisdom

The realization that a decline in the moral state impedes the flowering of literature is a feeling unique to the Jewish people. Only we realize in truth that in order to improve the quality of literature, there is a necessary prerequisite, that the writers first cleanse their souls. We feel in ourselves the great need for penitence so that we might rise to the sublime heights of the noble literature that is uniquely ours, that stems from the wisdom of Israel, whose source is holiness and purity, faith and spiritual heroism.- Kook, Lights of Penitence, p. 118.

the oblation of the Eucharist is not a carnal one, but a spiritual; and in this respect it is pure. For we make an oblation to God of the bread and the cup of blessing, giving Him thanks in that He has commanded the earth to bring forth these fruits for our nourishment. And then, when we have perfected the oblation, we invoke the Holy Spirit, that He may exhibit this sacrifice, both the bread the body of Christ, and the cup the blood of Christ, in order that the receivers of these antitypes may obtain remission of sins and life eternal. Those persons, then, who perform these oblations in remembrance of the Lord, do not fall in with Jewish views, but, performing the service after a spiritual manner, they shall be called sons of wisdom.

But Jesus didn’t stop at claiming to be eternal and omniscient. In Matthew 28:18, we find this additional claim: 18b“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” In the theological and cultural milieu of first-century Israel, Jesus is claiming to be omnipotent. Furthermore, he tells his followers in the very next two verses that his claim to be omnipotent is the reason why his followers are to spend the rest of the church age telling the world about him: 19“Therefore, as you go, disciple people in all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. And remember, I am with you each and every day until the end of the age.” Of course, the last sentence of that statement is a reiteration of Jesus’ claims in Matthew 18:20 to be omnipresent. For Jesus to be able to be present with everyone whoever believes in him throughout the centuries to come until the end of human history requires him to be omnipresent, omniscient, and eternal. There can be no escape from the claim: Jesus claimed to be God, and this truth was the foundation stone upon which he would build his Church. In Luke 10:22, Jesus claims that his divine attributes had been granted by God his Father in eternity past. By this claim, Jesus is saying that God his Father has given him all authority in the Universe: 22“All things have been entrusted to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and the person to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” It is apparent from what Jesus has to say about how things are going to go with respect to his followers throughout the centuries to come that Jesus’ claim to possess divine attributes isn’t going to be some mere theoretical exercise. In Luke 21:12b-15, Jesus warns his followers about persecution that will happen to them in years to come: 12“They will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake, 13in order to give you an opportunity to testify. 14So purpose in your hearts not to prepare your defense ahead of time, 15because I will give you the ability to speak, along with wisdom, that none of your opponents will be able to resist or refute.” Besides reiterating Christ’s claims that he possesses the divine attributes of omnipresence, eternal existence, and omniscience, this remarkable statement also demonstrates that Jesus claimed to be able to bring a practical, real-life application of those divine attributes to his persecuted followers: he claims that he will communicate—what today we might call “in real time”—his wisdom right at the very moment that wisdom will be needed most. As a result, Jesus claims, those who oppose his followers will not be able to refute the arguments raised by those followers, whom Jesus claims will have received their wisdom directly from him. But only God himself can provide wisdom such as described by this claim. And so this passage also requires us to conclude that Jesus is claiming to himself attributes that only God can possess. CLAIM 4 |   JESUS DEMANDED LOYALTIES OF LOVE AND DEVOTION THAT IN THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING RIGHTLY MAY BE GIVEN ONLY TO GOD, SINCE TO GIVE THEM TO CREATED BEINGS WOULD VIOLATE THE FIRST AND SECOND COMMANDMENTS.

There is, however, an important concept to keep in mind when talking about humility. There is a big difference between being humble and being a doormat. The latter is only harmful to any enterprise. We should not allow others to tread on us. We are all obligated to stand up for our rights.

Building a business is somewhat like creating the universe: it involves both an inner and an outer will. You cannot go wrong if you follow God’s example, for God is the ultimate entrepreneur and His enterprise is the universe.

Contemplating the extinction of Christian communities, others might also be moved to consider profound issues of meaning, which recall the agonized dilemmas of Jewish thinkers seeking to reconcile the fact of the Holocaust with the existence of a just God. In the presence of such horrors, why did the skies not darken? One might even see the failure of churches as a potent argument against the truth of Christianity. If in fact the religion is true, if God intends his church to carry a message to the utmost ends of the earth, why would he ever allow that church to die? Is God silent, or nonexistent? Christians have always believed that God guides all earthly affairs. An ancient hymn prays to Christ as incarnate Wisdom: O come, Thou Wisdom from on high, Who orderest all things mightily. But did that mighty “ordering” include the annihilation of many of the world’s churches, the persecution or defection of their believers?

—Repentance and good works are the aim of all earthly wisdom.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Of great interest is the metempsychosis of the Cabala. How this doctrine, already espoused by the Egyptians, Pythagoreans and Plato, came into Jewish mysticism, is not yet fully explained.

Marc Z. Brettler: The Pentateuch; The Historical Books; The Poetical and Wisdom Books, The Canons of the Bible [with Pheme Perkins]; The Hebrew Bible's Interpretation of Itself; Jewish Interpretation in the Premodern Era Michael D. Coogan: Textual Criticism [with Pheme Perkins]; Translations of the Bible into English [with Pheme Perkins]; The Interpretation of the Bible: From the Nineteenth to the Mid‐ twentieth Centuries; The Geography of the Bible; The Ancient Near East; Time [with Pheme Perkins] Carol A. Newsom: The Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books; Christian Interpretation in the Premodern Era; Contemporary Methods in Biblical Study; The Persian and Hellenistic Periods Pheme Perkins: The Gospels; Letters/ Epistles in the New Testament; The Canons of the Bible [with Marc Z. Brettler]; Textual Criticism [with Michael D. Coogan]; Translation of the Bible into English [with Michael D. Coogan]; The New Testament Interprets the Jewish Scriptures; The Roman Period; Time [with Michael D. Coogan]

I believed the challenges of inclusion must be dealt with on a moral level by the wider community.

What we fail to teach our children and what the community fails to see is that we need inclusion and acceptance, not superficial chesed. I’m not looking for someone to come and sit with my child, call her cute and feel like they’ve done something good. No, I need people to come alongside us during the hard times as well. You don’t just get to host my child for a meal or a night and check a box that you’ve done integration. True acceptance is completely integrating my child in all aspects of society.

Rabbi Ross superbly distills the theology of Martin Buber . . . , a consequential Jewish thinker whose focus on making human interactions meaningful influenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail.' . . . An invaluable entry point to a humanist thinker who sought to identify, build, and preserve 'holiness in our daily routines' by putting people, rather than objects, first."—Publishers Weekly

Constantine does not indicate which passage this was, but scholars have plausibly argued that it was Proverbs 8, a text we have encountered on a number of occasions, in which Wisdom (whom Christians identified as Christ) is portrayed as speaking, indicating that she was a fellow worker with God in the beginning, at the time of creation.

Jewish Ideas Daily In Defense of the Nation-State By Diana Muir Appelbaum Friday, October 5, 2012 In [Daniel Gordis’] new book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength, Gordis weaves the work of political theorists and historians into a compelling case for the nation-state in general and Israel in particular. … the governments that have produced human rights such as personal liberty and the rule of law have most often been ethnically based nation-states … Gordis quotes intellectual historian Mark Lilla, who notes that while Western Europeans have forgotten “all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve,” … [Zionism] remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. … European and American opposition to Israel … reflects the fact that Israel is the archetypal nation-state, and nation-states have fallen from favor in intellectual circles. Until recently, republics have arisen only in small city-states and, usually, only briefly. Apart from these cases, in all of human history only a few ways have been found to organize political life. There is the intense and appalling tribalism of Afghanistan. There are empires in which conquering Herrenvolk oppress conquered peoples. There are dictatorships and monarchies in which individuals may have comforts or privileges but not rights. There has been the universalizing ideology of Marxism, which has produced brutality and death on an unimaginable scale. Then there is the nation-state. The nation-state gives no assurances of the universal peace and justice promised by Marxism, Islam, or the human rights movement. It claims merely that it will attempt to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for its citizens. The nation-state does not claim it will bring peace or justice to the whole world, only that it will work to bring these benefits to a particular people living on a particular piece of land.

in a land of freedom. But again and again, the Jewish neshama will try to get up. It will search for excitement, for love, for wisdom, for nourishment. Not knowing where to look, but searching anyway. For all the lost pieces that were thrown away. Thrown away…

The Baal Shem Tov, a legendary eighteenth-century Jewish mystic, taught that to master our sorrows, we must know how to be fully immersed in emotion, yet not ruled by it. I call this process the alchemy of the dark emotions: knowing how to stay connected to the energy of painful emotions, to attend to and befriend it, to surrender to it, mindfully, without being overwhelmed. This is how we listen to the language of the heart.

Sephardic poems: The mind is flawed, the way to wisdom blocked; The body alone is seen, the soul is hid, And those who seek the world find only ill; The servant rises up and kills his lord, And serving girls attack their mistresses. Sons are raising hands against their parent’s will. My friend, from what I’ve seen of life I’d say The best that one can hope is to go mad. However long you live you suffer toil, And in the end you suffer rot and worms. Then finally the clay goes back to clay; At last the soul ascends to join the Soul.

In general, it should be noted, biblical law is evolutionary, not revolutionary...

If you tell this story from the point of view of the good creation, the coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for. Humans were made to be God’s stewards over creation, so the one through whom all things were made, the eternal son, the eternal wisdom, becomes human so that he might truly become God’s steward, ruler over all his world. Equally, if you tell the story from the point of view of human rebellion and the consequent sin and death that have engulfed the world, this again emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for: the eternal expression of the father’s love became the incarnate expression of the father’s love so that by his self-giving to death, even the death of the cross, the whole creation can be reconciled to God. If you put these two ways of telling the story together and cast them into poetry, you will find you have rewritten Colossians 1:15–20. This is the real cosmic Christology of the New Testament: not a kind of pantheism, running under its own steam and cut off from the real Jesus, but a retelling of the Jewish story of wisdom in terms of Jesus himself, focusing on the cross as the act whereby the good creation is brought back into harmony with the wise creator.

Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.

What a wise man knows, therefore, is how to construct a pattern that, given the human situation, is likely to lead to a good life.

The theologia crucis, proceeding from the Destrucktion, is now free to seek God not in what is beautiful, but in what is offensive and repellent; not in what is glorious and magnificent, but in what is weak—i.e., not in the created order as it has always seemed to manifest its Creator, but in the cross and suffering where God is “hidden.” That is, God chooses to reveal himself in suffering, weakness, humiliation, and crucifixion—things that are entirely contrary to the divine nature. But this means that God is not visible in nature at all, contrary to the ancient understanding of creation in both Jewish and Christian traditions; rather, God becomes visible only in the very elements that would serve to hide and obscure the divine being itself. That is, even within the radical immanence of the Incarnation itself, God reveals Himself as deus absconditus. The invisible God’s self-manifestation in visible creation is a revealing that is in fact a concealing, a non-presence, an absence. For Heidegger, then, this theologia crucis would count as nothing less than a radical destruction of what he would come to see as the metaphysics of presence. But what about the innumerable texts in the Old Testament (especially in the Wisdom Books) leading to the opposite conclusion—for example, in the Wisdom of Solomon (13:5), which insists that “through the greatness and beauty of created things, their Creator is correspondingly seen”? Or what of Jesus commending his followers to look at the glory (doxa) of wildflowers in order to see something

The later Logos Christology of the John the Evangelist at the end of the first century and Justin Martyr in the mid-second century represent a genuine development that attempts to flesh out Jesus’ divine functions and to explain them in terms relatable to Greek metaphysics. Yet these developments are based on a logical fusion of Jesus’ preexistent sonship with Jewish wisdom traditions, and so they are not derived from an interface with pagan sources.

INSIGHT FOR BUSINESS: Focus on the primary task, which is to make money. Remember, however, to set aside at least 10 percent of the money to make the world a better and more divine place. This approach is good for business because it attracts additional divine energy that brings more success in its stead. INSIGHT FOR LIFE: Try to build your merit. This involves praying, giving to charity, and helping others. The more merit you are able to garner, the more Divine energy you attract and the more successful you will be in every area of life.

John 6 is one of the most theologically complex chapters in the Gospel. There is deep reflection on Jewish liturgical traditions and on many biblical themes: the tree of life in Eden, the manna in the wilderness, Wisdom’s invitation to share in her food. These Old Testament realities help us to understand Jesus and the gift of his body and blood on the cross and in the Eucharist.

it is wisdom to bless Israel and the Jewish people.

Figurines of Apkallus were buried in boxes in the foundation deposits in Mesopotamian buildings in order to avert evil ... The term massare, Watchers, is used of these sets. Likewise the Apkallus were said to have taught antediluvian sciences to humanity and so, too, were the Watchers. As one scholar concludes, however: 'The Jewish authors often inverted the Mesopotamian intellectual traditions with the intention of showing the superiority of their own cultural foundations. [Thus] ... the antediluvian sages, the Mesopotamian Apkallus, were demonised as the 'sons of God' and ... appear as the Watchers ... illegitimate teachers of humankind before the flood.

I don’t want to be Jewish, I want to be British,” she announces in early December.

At the very heart of the message of the New Testament is a Hebraic approach to the Almighty and His Good News. This approach is so vastly different from the Greek (and modern, Western) mindset, that without some basic appreciation of this foundational truth and perspective, the New Testament can be so totally misunderstood and misused as to render it’s central message null and void.   In his book “Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament", Professor Norman H. Snaith make this point very emphatically when he states that:     “The aim of Hebrew religion was Da’ath Elohim (the Knowledge of God); the aim of Greek thought was Gnothi seauton (Know thyself).  
   Between these two there is a great gulf fixed.  We do not see that either admits of any compromise.  They are fundamentally different in a priori assumption, in method of approach, and in final conclusion…
   The Hebrew system starts with God.  The only true wisdom is Knowledge of God.  ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.’  The corollary is that man can never know himself, what he is and what is his relation the world, unless first he learn of God and be submissive to God’s sovereign will.  
The Greek system, on the contrary, starts from the knowledge of man, and seeks to rise to an understanding of the ways and Nature of God through the knowledge of what is called ‘man’s higher nature’.    According to the Bible, man had no higher nature except he be born of the Spirit. We find this approach of the Greeks nowhere in the Bible.    The whole Bible, the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, is based on the Hebrew attitude and approach… “     The great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use" (‘God in Search of Man’ p34)

I propose that a scientifically sound set of hygiene rules could explain why the Jewish God was a jealous, monotheistic God: He could brook no compromise with the filthy practices of rival gods. Famously faceless, abstract, and unsuperstitious, the Jewish God was science.

acknowledged that the Jewish penchant for anxiety probably played a role in their collective attraction to Buddhism. Over the ensuing decades, the Jew-Bus had been a major force in figuring out how to translate the wisdom of the East for a Western audience—mostly by making it less hierarchical and devotional. Mark mentioned that he and some of his peers taught Buddhist-themed seminars around town, where they gave talks and answered questions. “Go to some events,” he advised, “until you get bored.” I laughed. I liked this guy. This man whose picture I had reflexively rejected turned out to be somebody with whom I could see myself being friends. We were a bit of an odd pair, to be sure, but there was a certain compatibility, too. He was a professional listener; I was a professional talker. We both had the whole Boston–New York–Jewish cultural affinity thing.

Far beyond the laws on leprosy, it’s fair to say the Mosaic Law is obsessed with cleanliness, stipulating a lengthy code of personal hygiene and public health—accounting for some 15–20% of the 613 commandments. Though many commandments applied only to priests, the practices often came to permeate Jewish culture, fulfilling the injunction: “ ‘And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ ” (Exodus 19:6). Jewish scholars have written about the importance of ritual hygiene in Judaism for a very long time (it’s one of the oldest themes in written scholarship), and the tight link between physical and spiritual purity led to the religious proverb “Cleanliness is next to godliness.

In light of all this, it seems fitting that one of God’s great covenants with the Jewish people was a medical procedure that helped combat infection: circumcision (Genesis 17:9–14). In 2012, a task force on circumcision organized by the American Academy of Pediatrics published a review of the costs and benefits of male circumcision. In their estimation the primary benefits are a reduction in urinary tract infections among infants; lower transmission of some STDs, such as HIV and HPV; and fewer cases of penile cancer (often caused by HPV infections). To be sure, circumcision does not appear to reduce transmission of all kinds of STDs; the surgical procedure itself carries a small, non-negligible risk of complications; and some people have raised ethical issues with removing a sensitive part of an infant male’s penis. However, in an era when infectious disease was the number one cause of mortality and incurable STDs could easily cause sterility, male circumcision was probably a wise decision.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they become one flesh. —Genesis 2:24