Rabbi Hillel Quotes

That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Law. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.

If not later, when?” My father liked it. “If not later, when?” It echoed Rabbi Hillel’s famous injunction, “If not now, when?

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?

If not now, when?

Where there are no men, be thou a man.

If I am not for myself - who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?

If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.

Who does not grow, declines. —Rabbi Hillel

When the great theologian and philosopher Rabbi Hillel was challenged to explain the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot, he replied, “Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. All else is commentary.

If you are not for yourself, who will be for you? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when? –Rabbi Hillel

As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise,” or Rabbi Hillel’s statement, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.

It stung me when he finally came out with it. Only someone who had completely figured me out would have said it. "If not later, when?" My father liked it. "If not later, when?" It echoed Rabbi Hil-lel's famous injunction, "If not now, when?

Defending affirmative action gave me the chance to reaffirm my deep commitment to the second of the three questions famously articulated by Rabbi Hillel. My work for LGBT equality represented my answer to his first question: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Combating racial prejudice and its lasting effects was my fervent response to his second question: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” But even justly revered sages do not get everything right. Hillel’s third question—“If not now, when?”—can be misleading. The proper reply is “It depends.” That is, it depends on how likely you are to succeed; on whether it will be more helpful to your cause to try and fail, or to hold off for more propitious circumstances; on the impact of settling temporarily for partial success; and on what you can do to improve your chances of ultimate success.

First-century discipleship was expressed as a servant-master relationship (see Matthew 10:24). Once accepted as a disciple, a young man started as a talmidh, or beginner, who sat in the back of the room and could not speak. Then he became a distinguished student, who took an independent line in his approach or questioning. At the next level, he became a disciple-associate, who sat immediately behind the rabbi during prayer time. Finally he achieved the highest level, a disciple of the wise, and was recognized as the intellectual equal of his rabbi.'" 2. Memorizing the teacher's words: Oral tradition provided the basic way of studying. Disciples learned the teacher's words verbatim to pass along to the next person. Often disciples learned as many as four interpretations of each major passage in the Torah. 3. Learning the teacher's way of ministry: A disciple learned how his teacher kept God's commands, including how he practiced the Sabbath, fasted, prayed, and said blessings in ceremonial situations. He would also learn his rabbi's teaching methods and the many traditions his master followed. 4. Imitating the teacher's life and character: Jesus said that when a disciple is fully taught, he "will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:40). The highest calling of a disciple was to imitate his teacher. Paul called on Timothy to follow his example (see 2 Timothy 3:10-14), and he didn't hesitate to call on all believers to do the same (see 1 Corinthians 4:14-16; 1 1:1; Philippians 4:9). One story in ancient tradition tells of a rabbinical student so devoted to his teacher that he hid in the teacher's bedchamber to discover the mentor's sexual technique. To be sure, this is a bit extreme, yet it demonstrates the level of commitment required to be a disciple. 5. Raising up their own disciples: When a disciple finished his training, he was expected to reproduce what he'd learned by finding and training his own apprentices. He would start his own school and call it after his name, such as the House of Hillel.

And what about Hillel’s famous dictum (which, like Pascal’s, has been beaten to death)? Did Hillel not ask, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I understood, of course. I listened respectfully to the rabbis and hospital chaplains. But I remembered my old friend Benny Lévy, the French Maoist leader and personal secretary to Sartre who turned to the study of the Torah, inviting me to ponder the rest of Hillel’s saying. Yes, of course, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But Hillel followed that immediately by asking, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”2 Notice that Hillel said “what,” not “who.” He wanted us to understand clearly that if I am “only for me,” I become a “what,” a neutral being without qualities, a half-being, a thing. If I graze in the meadow of this me, he insisted, if I confine myself within the me-substance and the persevering ego (a specialty of the West that Covid-19 has raised to the Pantheon), then I am not much of anything; I am a subject without a predicate, a thing without qualification. I place myself under the tyranny of the object. Did someone say “the cult of me”?

Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23 It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24 Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” –Rabbi Hillel

God hardening Pharaoh’s heart causes the world to fear God and not think they can sin to the point at which they want to repent.

Gamaliel, at least as portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of “live and let live.” If people wanted to follow this man Jesus, they could do so.9 If this new movement was from God, it would prosper; if not, it would fall by its own weight. If the Romans wanted to run the world, so be it. Jews would study and practice the Torah by themselves. This, broadly speaking, had been the teaching of Hillel, a leading rabbi of the previous generation.

Αν εγώ δεν είμαι για μένα , τότε ποιος θα είναι για μένα; και αν είμαι μόνο για τον εαυτό μου, τότε τι είμαι; και αν δεν είναι τώρα η ώρα, πότε είναι;

Be not like servants who wait upon their master in the expectation of receiving a reward, but be like the servants who wait upon their master in no expectation of receiving reward.”3 Vital, precious, and holy as dedication to Torah is, it is pernicious to study Torah for selfish ends, to study it so that we may be called rabbis, in order to obtain reward either here or in the life to come,4 to make of the Torah “a diadem with which to boast,” “a spade with which to dig.” According to Hillel, “he who uses the crown of Torah to his own advantage will perish; he who derives a profit for himself from the words of the Torah takes his own life.”5 The Rabbis continue to warn us: “He who studies the Torah for its own sake, his learning becomes an elixir of life to him … but he who studies the Torah not for its own sake, it becomes to him a deadly poison.”6 “If you fulfill the words of the Torah for their own sake, they bring you life; but if you fulfill the words of the Torah not for their own sake they will kill you.”7

Exactly.” Rabbi Hillel, one of the early Jewish sages, had been challenged to state the essence of Judaism while standing on one foot. He had said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Proclaiming Clean Slates to restore economic balance – annulling the accumulation of debts when they grew beyond the ability to be paid – kept pre-Roman civilization financially stables. Mosaic Law placed this principle at the core of Jewish religion (Leviticus 25). Yet modern Christianity all but ignores the fact that in Jesus’s first sermon (Luke 4) he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced his mission to proclaim the Year of the Lord, as the Jubilee Year was known. Restoring the Jubilee Year became the basis for early Christians to break away from Rabbi Hillel, whose prosbul clause was used by creditors to force debtors to waive their rights to a Clean Slate. Jesus’s position – reflected also in the Dead Sea scrolls of the Essenes – prompted the wealthy establishment to fight so strongly against him.

Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go learn.

As the Rabbi Hillel said, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?