Judaism Key Quotes

God’s truth is not in a “holy” book, is not delivered by prophets, has no connection with churches, synagogues and mosques, with commandments and religious prohibitions, with customs, rules, regulations, restrictions on diet and clothing etc. God’s truth is within us and our task is to find the key that unlocks the direct knowledge of God. Everyone has the key, but many will never use it.

Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba-al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot — secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms. All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba-al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man, and he choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba-al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously — how utterly — he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept. All right, you’re hired, the Ba-al Shem said. But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah. So the Ba-al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba-al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax — the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, where he may be — the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.

Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth, was created as God’s temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in that temple.

It is important that the reader takes note of where we get our knowledge of the Judaism of this time. There is no magical key to understanding Judaism during this era. We are all dependent on a handful of sources from which most of our knowledge comes. After the introductory chapter, the next four chapters look at various `currents' or streams within Judaism. By treating them as moving streams we begin to see the dynamic aspect of Jewish history and realize that much of it is produced by the interaction of various movements.

Something tells me that if the mystics were in charge of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the world would be a very different place.

Though demonized by his Jewish and British enemies, Hajj Amin al-Husayni in fact cooperated well enough with the mandate administration. Only gradually did he use his religious authority to achieve a position of significant political influence contrary to British interests. It was a potent mix. The key event in this transformation was the so-called ‘Western Wall riots’ in 1929. The Western Wall was the only revealed section of what remained from the massive retaining wall built by Herod. This wall allowed Herod to enlarge the platform on which the Second Temple stood before being destroyed in 70 CE. Given this association, the wall became Judaism’s most important place of pilgrimage and prayer. The wall also was part of a Muslim religious trust (waqf): Muslim attachment to the wall and to the al-Haram al-Sharif (or ‘Noble Sanctuary’, as the Temple Mount is known in Arabic) is due to their association with the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. The wall is known to Muslims as al-Buraq, because Muhammad tethered his horse there, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century, are two of Islam’s most revered buildings.

As Meier observes, ‘Perhaps one reason that we have so little from the historical Jesus on sexual topics is that, apart from the two special cases of divorce and celibacy, where he diverged from mainstream Judaism, his views were those of mainstream Judaism.’14

Prophecy is the ability to predict future events with one hundred percent accuracy. Only God can do this. Each of the false religions and cults has a story about how things were created and how the world will end. Any good science fiction writer can do this with ease. But when we look at the holy books of these religious bodies, do any of them have historically verifiable prophecies written centuries ago but fulfilled in our life-time?   Only one holy book does that. It is the Bible! In the following chart you can see that none of the world’s false religions have any prophecy in their writings. Some do not even have a written history. This leads us to the conclusion that we can only look to Judaism and Christianity for the truth. We will look at a few of the modern prophecies fulfilled since Israel was reestablished as a nation in AD 1948. There have been over fifty prophecies fulfilled since 1948!   Since all of these prophecies are from the Old Testament, one might think that Judaism holds the key to complete truth; but when we look at the Old Testament prophecies about the coming of the Messiah, we can only conclude that Jesus fulfilled those prophecies. Thus, we must look to Christianity for the answers.

For those curious souls in need of a little more substance and a little less nonsense, Ancient Greece had a full menu of spiritual alternatives that proved more satisfying than the traditional fare. At the core of the mystery religions was “an immediate or mystical encounter with the divine,” involving “an approach to death and a return to life.”15 Like the mystics that would infiltrate Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the millennia to come, the Greeks knew the ancient secret of dying before dying. However this one-on-one meeting with God was engineered, it’s what Aristotle meant by the initiates descending on Eleusis not to learn something, but to experience something.

One of the impediments to an acceptance of the myth theory is the apparent incredibility of the proposition that faith in Paul's Jesus the Son (and by extension, the Gospel Jesus) could have arisen with no historical basis. But we have to realize how much the educated ancient Jew lived within his holy books, as did many of those gentiles who attached themselves to Judaism. The Jewish scriptures offered a universe in themselves, in which the avid scholar and prophet could move and breathe. He governed his life by the writings. Like the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, he could construct whole philosophies from elements of scripture, aided at times by mystical experiences. [...] God's plan had to reside in scripture, for that was how he communicated with the world. All it needed was the right key, the right inspiration through the Spirit to unlock that coded information. [...] Paul's conviction that the Spirit was guiding him as he sought meaning from the sacred texts guaranteed that he would get the message he was looking for.

The whole concept of religion has been used by political power for a political agenda to keep the population ignorant and dependent. The key is one’s own personal spirituality via education and knowledge. That is what the real Biblical story is all about.

Faith is vision, sensitivity and attachment to God; piety is an attempt to attain such sensitivity and attachment. The gates of faith are not ajar, but the mitsvah is a key. By living as Jews we may attain our faith as Jews. We do not have faith because of deeds; we may attain faith through sacred deeds. A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought.

Access to God became universal, and far more easily attainable: the answer lay in belief. This key Christian concept—the notion of faith in one personal redeemer, the representative of God’s logic in the universe—broadened the appeal of Judaism to billions of people over history in a way Judaism never would have: Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense.

Hannah Arendt, drawing on an intuition of Max Weber and Bernard Lazare, tackled the ‘ambiguous semantics’ of Jewish political history head-on in order to forge a new concept: pariah Judaism. Invisibility, exclusion from the public space and ‘worldlessness’ were for her its key features, despite the cultural richness it had demonstrated.25 She set out on this basis to decipher totalitarianism by analysing its emergence as the product of the crisis of the system of nation-states. In a certain sense, Jewish modernity coincided with the trajectory of pariah Judaism. The obsession of Zionism, the child of nineteenth-century nationalisms, was to put an end to this ‘ambiguous semantics’, so that Jews would accede to a ‘normal’ existence: nation, state, sovereignty.

The key to the Jewish calendar is Nature.

It doesn't matter what path you choose to reach it. Be it Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, quantum physics, Taoism, atheism—what matters is to find what works for each of us, and since each one of our minds is a universe on its own, it's not surprising that each of us would need to find a different way to reach his own state of inner peace. No one thing is better than another; no one religion is more effective or more valid than another. The key is to find one's own way.