Mezuzah Quotes

They produced a piece of jewelry, handed it to him, and asked what it was. A mezuzah, the old man said. It matches the one on the door, the cops said. Don’t these things belong on doors? The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said. The inscription on the back says “Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World.” It’s in Hebrew. You speak Hebrew? Do I look like I speak Swahili? Answer the question. You speak Hebrew or not? I bang my head against it sometimes.

They produced a piece of jewelry, handed it to him, and asked what it was. A mezuzah, the old man said. It matches the one on the door, the cops said. Don’t these things belong on doors? The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said.

But it was the gold necklace and the Star of David with a golden mezuzah on his neck that told me here was something more compelling than anything I wanted from him, for it bound us and reminded me that, while everything else conspired to make us the two most dissimilar beings, this at least transcended all differences.

Sure, we had mezuzahs (a kind of ornament that contains a page of the Torah) on our door frames, and once a week we lit candles and said three prayers, but who in their right mind would invite a stranger into the place that they slept? Even in shul (synagogue) no one talked about God, or if they did it was in Hebrew, which didn’t count since no one knew what it meant.

it is interesting to investigate how the mezuzah was turned onto an amulet which can guard the house against evil.[171] Historical and archeological research found that pagan nations from Mesopotamia used to mark their entries with different kinds of “mezuzahs”, which carried symbols of idols. Amulets of this kind were also found in Egypt, where this practice was made in order to keep the inhabitants of the home from all sorts of evil.[172

Look for it in the wintertime, if you want to find The Light Of The Season—the real light, not the Hallmark one. Look for the location of resistance. Look for the darkness in which you can be a spark. Look for the opportunity to be bright, to light someone else’s way, to warm their hands, to shuttle them safely through the dark. Look for the crack you can fill or the shadow you can dispel by bringing a little bit of the light of resistance, carefully and precisely, to just the place where it is needed. Look for the place of being bright—of being bright and present outside your own house, or in the window, on the opposite side to the mezuzah, letting anyone who passes know. We are here.

There is an elaborate North African mezuzah case that dates to sometime in the 1700s, and by the nineteenth century Jews in Russia, eastern Europe, and Morocco were shaping mezuzah cases out of silver, creating miniature arks and fish and other pretty symbols in which to house their slices of parchment.

where he landed after being released from Ellis Island with six cents, a tiny mezuzah his mother gave him, and a grapefruit that was handed to him by a kind Negro fruit vendor who saw him crying on Delancey Street and felt sorry for him. Yakov had never seen a grapefruit before. The Negro had to show him how to peel it, and when he bit into it, it was so sour and tangy his eyes filled with even more tears and he realized he must give his life to spreading the Jewish Word lest he end up like this odd American, consigned to doling out fruit that caused weeping. He

Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anything…Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. (“When you go to sleep we’re gonna eat your fucking cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn’t kidding.

If one moves out of a home, what should be done with the mezuzot—remove them or leave them? If one knows that another Jew will be moving in, it is proper to leave the mezuzot. If one knows or has reason to believe that a non-Jew may be moving into the premises, it is best to remove the mezuzot. The reason is that the non-Jew may not treat the mezuzah as a sacred object and may himself possibly remove it or desecrate it. Should a non-Jew request that the mezuzah be left on since he regards it as some sort of “lucky charm” that might bring him good fortune, this is an unworthy attitude toward the mezuzah and the mezuzah should still be removed.

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