Shlomo Quotes

Peoples, populations, native populaces, tribes and religious communities are not nations, even though they are often spoken of as such.

If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.

A Nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors. —Karl Deutsch, Nationality and Its Alternatives, 1969

Behind every act in Israel's identity politics stretches, like a long black shadow, the idea of an eternal power and race.

A PERSON WHO has gained peace of mind has gained everything. To obtain peace of mind, you need to be at peace with the people in your environment. You need to be at peace with yourself, with your emotions and desires. Furthermore, you need to be at peace with your Creator. —RABBI SHLOMO WOLBE (1914–2005)

Imperfection is Perfection. Small errors required to display the true quality of gaps in between to create meaning and essence of reality. What good is anything if it isn't flawed and produces only that which emit ideal situations.

To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign “ethnos” of invaders from afar but rather an autochthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.17

the term “Land of Israel” was a later Christian and rabbinical invention that was theological, and by no means political in nature. Indeed, we can cautiously posit that the name first appeared in the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew.

Another historical irony: there were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belong to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that the people known in the world as Jews (as distinct from today's Jewish Israelis) have never been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew-hater.

I believe neither in the past existence of a Jewish people, exiled from its land, nor in the premise that the Jews are originally descended from the ancient land of Judea.

Die Abgrenzung Jahwes als einzigem Gott von seiner vormaligen, bunten Familie - seiner Frau Aschera, selbst eine Göttin des Bodens, und ihren begabten Kindern, dem wilden Baal, der promisken Astarte, der Jägerin Anat und dem Meeresgott Jam - erscheint als Sysiphosarbeit.

One of the secrets of the Muslim army's power was its relatively liberal attitude toward the religions of the defeated people-provided they were monoththeists, of course. Muhammad's commandment to treat Jews and Christians as "People of The book" gave them legal protection.

You might think that employees have especially good information about their firm’s future prospects, but a careful study by Shlomo Benartzi (2001) finds otherwise. Specifically, there is no correlation between the allocation to company stock and subsequent stock performance.

I concluded that the Zionist “return” was, above all, an invention meant to arouse the sympathy of the West—particularly the Protestant Christian community, which preceded the Zionists in proposing the idea—in order to justify a new settlement enterprise, and that it had proven its effectiveness.

Dans chaque démocratie libérale s'est élaboré un imaginaire de citoyenneté au sein duquel la projection dans l'avenir est devenue plus significative que le poids du passé. Cet imaginaire s'est traduit par des normes juridiques, et a même pénétré par la suite à l'intérieur du système éducatif étatique.[...] La souffrance du passé justifie le prix exigé de la part des citoyens dans le présent. L'héroïsme des temps qui s'éloignent promet un avenir rayonnant pour l'individu, du moins sûrement pour la nation. L'idée nationale est devenue, avec l'aide des historiens, une idéologie optimiste par nature. De là, notamment, vient son succès.

Shlomo Goren said. I believe he was the Senior Intelligence Officer and Coordinator of Government Operations in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District. Anyway, he said, ‘We are now entering the long, dark tunnel that will lead to the kingdom someday. We already hear the footsteps of Messiah as we begin our dark experiences!

The person residing in the Land of Israel must always remember the name Canaan, indicating slavery and submission

Una delle massime priorità della pedagogia statale è la trasmissione di memorie indotte, il cui cardine è proprio la storiografia nazionale.

In no text or archaeological finding do we find the term “Land of Israel” used to refer to a defined geographic region. This

If you can't bear it, dare it.

There is a larger lesson here: we need to treat attention as a literal resource.

CUNNINGHAM: Defense calls Sigmund Freud, Your Honor. BAILIFF: Name! SIGMUND FREUD: Doctor Sigmund Shlomo Freud. CUNNINGHAM: Doctor Freud, would it be accurate to say you qualify as an expert in the field of modern psychiatry? SIGMUND FREUD: Fräulein—I AM modern psychiatry. EL-FAYOUMY: Objection, Your Honor!—the witness is boasting! JUDGE LITTLEFIELD: Overruled!

The lesson is simple: human attention has become the sweet crude oil of the twenty-first century. If you can control the levers of human attention, then you can essentially charge whatever you’d like.

History can be ironic, particularly with regard to the invention of traditions in general and traditions of language in particular. Few people have noticed, or are willing to acknowledge, that the Land of Israel of biblical texts did not include Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, or their surrounding areas, but rather only Samaria and a number of adjacent areas—in other words, the land of the northern kingdom of Israel. Because

The head of the Israeli military intelligence, Shlomo Gazit (whom we met as the first coordinator of the military rule after 1967), explained that this destruction of the infrastructure was intentional. Israel wanted the Palestinians to ‘face unemployment and a shortage of land and water and thus we can create the necessary conditions for the departure of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza’.32 On top of all of these measures during the period when the official mentality in Israel was that the occupied people had to be punished, there was yet more licence for the settlers’ violence and intimidation. In periods like this, the courts were particularly lenient in their attitude to the killing of Palestinians by settlers. Of the forty-eight cases concerning the killing of Palestinians between 1988 and 1992 by settlers only one culprit was charged with murder.

My main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish “historical right” to the Land of Israel and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory.

the Jews have always comprised significant religious communities that appeared and settled in various parts of the world, rather than an ethnos that shared a single origin and wandered in a permanent exile, does not deal directly with history.

Perhaps, despite everything we have been told, Judaism was simply an appealing religion that spread widely until the triumphant rise of its rivals, Christianity and Islam, and then, despite humiliation and persecution, succeeded in surviving into the modern age.

Names of regions and countries change over time, and it is sometimes common to refer to ancient lands using names assigned to them later in history. However, this linguistic custom has typically been practiced only in the absence of other known and acceptable names for the places in question.

Only in the early twentieth century, after years in the Protestant melting pot, was the theological concept of “Land of Israel” finally converted and refined into a clearly geonational concept. Settlement Zionism borrowed the term from the rabbinical tradition in part to displace the term “Palestine,

Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands)—that is to say, a state that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.

Canaan, therefore, would serve as a spiritual bridge between the faith born in the northern Fertile Crescent and the cultures of the Mediterranean region. Jerusalem would become the first stop in the mighty theological (Jewish-Christian-Muslim) campaign that would eventually conquer a large portion of the earth.

The fine and varied literature that I read was almost all in translation: from classic works by Jack London, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, to detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, not to mention fascinating pornographic books. I also appreciated the biblical stories that contained all three genres.

It is an irony of history that, had it not been for the 1948 war, which truly was initiated by Arab leaders, the newly established State of Israel would have to have included a large Arab minority that would have gained strength with the passage of time, ultimately counteracting the state’s Jewish isolationist nature and possibly even its very existence.

History is the most dangerous product that the chemistry of the mind has developed. Its properties are well known. It makes people dream; it intoxicates them and generates false remembrances; exaggerates their responses; keeps open old wounds; torments them in their rest; leads them to deliriums of grandeur or persecution; and makes nations bitter, proud, intolerable and vain.

Our genetic endowments, coupled with many early environmental impacts, establish our childhood intelligence. An environment lacking a sufficient level of stimulation stifles our mental development. An environment with a sufficient level of stimulation enables our genetically different abilities to flower, and at the same time often sets into motion positive social and cultural pressures that reinforce our improvement.

according to a recent paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients failing to properly take their medication cost society somewhere between $100 billion and $289 billion every year.36 (It’s estimated that nearly 50 percent of prescriptions for chronic diseases are not used as prescribed.)37 Obesity, meanwhile, adds another $190 billion in direct health care costs. Drunk driving? $114 billion.38 Smoking? Nearly $290 billion.

The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place.

Everything’s going fine and then, all of a sudden, I’m in despair. As soon as I feel a little joy, something inside me closes up immediately. It’s like an inner flaw; I call it “the survivors’ disease.” It’s not typhus, tuberculosis, or the other diseases that people sometimes caught. It’s a disease that gnaws away at us from within and destroys any feeling of joy. I have been dragging it about with me ever since I spent that time suffering in the camp. This disease never leaves me a moment of joy or carefree happiness; it’s a mood that forever erodes my strength.

After all, behavioral economists have spent years demonstrating the clear relationship between making something easy to do and getting people to actually do it. My very good friend and longtime collaborator Richard Thaler puts it this way: “My number-one mantra from Nudge [his book, cowritten with Cass Sunstein, on the application of behavioral economic principles to public policy] is, ‘Make it easy.’ When I say make it easy, what I mean is, if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, ‘Make it easy.’ It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss.”7

The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political entity in tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem was a fortified stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a dynasty known as the House of David. An inscription discovered in Tell Dan in 1993 supports this assumption, but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior to the kingdom of Israel to its north, and apparently far less developed. The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan—Shechem and Jerusalem—and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The plentiful archaeological finds unearthed in the West Bank during the 1980s reveal the material and social difference between the two mountain regions. Agriculture thrived in the fertile north, supporting dozens of settlements, whereas in the south there were only some twenty small villages in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The kingdom of Israel was already a stable and strong state in the ninth century, while the kingdom of Judah consolidated and grew strong only by the late eighth. There were always in Canaan two distinct, rival political entities, though they were culturally and linguistically related—variants of ancient Hebrew were spoken by the inhabitants of both.

Anyway, the thing is that we need to understand that with all — frankly, with all due respect for the requirements of international law, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, a peace process is a political enterprise. And there are things that governments can do and things that they cannot do, because if you do things that leave you without political support, then you can do nothing. You can write poetry, not make peace.

Shlomo Carlebach used to say, if he meets a student who says he is a Protestant, he knows he is a Protestant; if he meets a student who says he is a Catholic, he knows he is a Catholic. If he meets a student who says he is a human being, he knows he is a Jew.

For instance, Reinecke found that levels of education were statistically related to preferred levels of colorfulness, as people with graduate degrees preferred Web sites with little color.

All historical writing that is not aware that the actions and plots related do not coincide with past reality is potentially the bearer of a mythological dimension. It may well be a serious narrative full of references and quotations, distinguished by its “exactness” and abstaining from any polemic, yet it remains nonetheless that that belief of the author, whether naive or not, associates him or her with many propagators of myth history who continue to swell the tanks of discipline today. A living myth is not a lie; it is a story about the past or the future whose veracity cannot be established in a rational manner, yet that no-one can imagine rejecting. It remains valid, in the eyes of believers, until heretics succeed in refuting it. Even in this case, however, the belief is not necessary shaken; myths in fact tend to preserve themselves as long as they are needed, or else until other myths come along to replace them. In history all societies need myths to ensure their coherence and preserve their collective identity, in particular, that of elites that revolve around the sovereign power.

I have tried to live my life in a way that would make my parents proud. With the publication of this book, I feel the memory of these resilient heroes will live on and be an example to the world. I am proud to be their son. I have a lot to live up to. Shlomo (Karen's husband)

There is no rule without an exception except for this one. (Which, of course, makes it an exception to the rule)

Pamięć stanowi sposób na zatrzymanie tego, co kochasz, tego, kim jesteś, tego, czego nie chcesz nigdy stracić. — Kevin Arnold

Nie wyrządzam sobie krzywdy, a jednak jestem własnym katem. — John Donne

W nic nie wierzą ludzie tak niezłomnie jak w to, o czym najmniej wiedzą. — Michel de Montaigne

Żadna liczba doświadczeń nie udowodni nigdy, że mam rację; pojedynczy eksperyment może udowodnić, że się mylę. — Albert Einstein

Cokolwiek robisz, potrzebujesz odwagi. Jakikolwiek kierunek działania wybierasz, zawsze znajduje się ktoś, kto ci mówi, że się mylisz. Pojawiają się trudności, które cię skłaniają, abyś uwierzył, że twoi krytycy mają rację. Aby wyznaczyć kierunek działania oraz podążać wybraną drogą do samego końca, potrzebujesz odwagi żołnierza. Pokój odnosi zwycięstwa, ale wywalczać je muszą odważni mężczyźni i kobiety. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Większość z nas przechodzi przez życie, nie decydując się na opanowanie czegokolwiek do perfekcji. Jestem przekonany, że niepowodzenia większości ludzi spowodowane są tym, iż zbyt wielką wagę przykładają do rzeczy błahych. — Anthony Robbins, autor Obudź w sobie olbrzyma

Nigdy nie pozwól, aby szkoła przeszkodziła w twojej edukacji. — Mark Twain

Uważaj, czytając książki poświęcone zdrowiu — żebyś nie umarł z powodu literówki. — Mark Twain

Ważne jest, aby nie rezygnować z zadawania pytań. Ciekawość nie istnieje bez przyczyny. Człowiek może tylko czuć respekt, kiedy podziwia tajemnicę wieczności, życia, wspaniałej struktury rzeczywistości. Wystarczy więc, kiedy będzie próbował zrozumieć zaledwie odrobinę tej tajemnicy każdego dnia. Nie wolno nigdy tracić świętej ciekawości. — Albert Einstein

Jesteśmy wszystkim tym, czym udajemy, że jesteśmy. Uważajmy więc bardzo, co udajemy. — Kurt Vonnegut

Żyj tak, jakbyś miał umrzeć jutro. Ucz się tak, jakbyś miał żyć wiecznie. — Mahatma Gandhi

Jeżeli potrafisz zmienić zdanie, potrafisz zmienić życie. Przekonania kreują rzeczywiste fakty […]. Największa rewolucja za życia mojego pokolenia wiąże się z odkryciem, że poszczególni ludzie, w drodze zmiany wewnętrznych postaw i przekonań, mogą zmienić zewnętrzne aspekty swego życia. — William James

Każdy pragnie zostać milionerem lub nawet multimilionerem. Otwartą kwestią pozostaje jedynie dylemat, czy jesteś gotów do zrobienia wszystkiego oraz do poświęcenia wszystkich lat, niezbędnych do osiągnięcia finansowego sukcesu. Jeśli tak, to naprawdę nie istnieje nic, co mogłoby cię zatrzymać na tej drodze. — Brian Tracy, Sposób na sukces

Filozofia, jaką wyznajesz, determinuje, czy się zdyscyplinujesz, czy też będziesz nadal popełniał błędy. — Jim Rohn

Jeżeli trafiasz w cel za każdym razem, to znaczy, że albo jest on za duży, albo znajduje się zbyt blisko. — Tom Hirshfield

Jak się zjada słonia? Po kawałku.

Gdybyśmy faktycznie zrobili wszystko to, co jesteśmy w stanie zrobić, szczerze zadziwilibyśmy samych siebie. — Thomas Edison

Najlepsze w przyszłości jest to, że nadchodzi po jednym dniu na raz. — Abraham Lincoln

Ludzie nie przyciągają tego, czego chcą, ale to, czym są. — James Allen

Człowiek uczy się dwojako: albo poprzez czytanie, albo poprzez kontakty z mądrzejszymi ludźmi. — Will Rogers

Uczymy się […] 10% tego, co czytamy, 20% tego, co słyszymy, 30% tego, co widzimy, 50% tego, co widzimy i słyszymy, 70% tego, o czym rozmawiamy, 80% tego, co doświadczamy, 95% tego, czego uczymy innych. — William Glasser

Czyn ludzki raz dokonany płynie przez wieczność do wielkiego rachunku. Nasza nieśmiertelność przejawia się w tym, co robimy, a nie w tym, kim jesteśmy. — George Meredith

Po ciężkim dniu treningu można zjeść grzechotnika. — Elvis Presley

Teoretycznie nie ma różnicy między teorią a praktyką, lecz praktycznie owa różnica istnieje. — Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

Na tym polega uczenie się. Nagle rozumie się coś, co rozumiało się przez całe życie — ale w zupełnie nowy sposób. — Doris Lessing

Trudności to wymówki, których historia nie przyjmuje nigdy. — Edward R. Murrow

Osobiście uważam, że ludzie wymyślili język z powodu naszej głębokiej, wewnętrznej potrzeby narzekania. — Jane Wagner

Dwie podstawowe zasady życiowe brzmią: 1) Zmiany są nieuchronne. 2) Każdy opiera się zmianom. Jedynym człowiekiem lubiącym zmiany jest dziecko, które ma mokro. — Roy Blitzer

Because what if a man walked by the field that you were playing on, and you were running or kicking the ball, and he got to see your knees or your legs,” he answered, “and that man would start thinking about how beautiful you are, or have other inappropriate thoughts about you. That would be your fault. So that’s why it’s better if girls don’t play sports, so they don’t accidentally lead some poor man to sin.” “That makes no sense,” she would say, face tight with confusion. “Why is it my fault if he thinks bad thoughts? If I think bad thoughts, is it Shlomo’s fault, or your fault? Shouldn’t everyone be responsible for themselves and their thoughts? I can’t do anything or play any sports because some random person might think something? That makes no sense,” she would opine.

This is why it’s so important to give your brain a workout. One pioneer in advocating for mental exercise is the Israeli neuroscientist Shlomo Breznitz, who argues that the brain needs a lot of stimulation in order to stay in shape.

Halachic

Between 2010 and 2050, the urban population of the more developed countries will increase by a mere 170 million people, growing at a rate of 0.6 percent per year. During that same period, the urban population of the less developed countries will increase by 2.6 billion people, 15 times that of the more developed countries, and at a rate of 2.4 percent per year, which is 4 times faster than that of the more developed countries (United Nations Population Division 2012, file

If we all have a sufficiently stimulating environment, then our inherent abilities—our genetic gifts—will dominate in the unfolding of our lives. If we lack a sufficiently stimulating environment, our cognitive gifts never have the chance to blossom.

Just about everything we choose to do can direct our cognition up or down. The effect may be negligible or significant, but it all adds up. The more challenging choices we make, and the longer we do them, the greater the benefit—usually by a considerable amount. It does not really matter whether we work primarily with people, things, or data. What matters is whether the work is challenging or routine. Schaie shows that we need to remain engaged. As is implied in his studies and demonstrated in others, a variety of stimulation matters a great deal to our brainpower.

GRATITUDE is intellectually compelling and it is a very good trait—so why are we so often ungrateful? There are two reasons for this. The first is that a person’s first impression is that everything comes by itself, and that it is all coming to him. The other reason is: when I receive good from someone and I recognize that good, I became indebted to him. —RABBI SHLOMO WOLBE (1914–2005)

Our cognitive skills are not fixed. At all ages the brain has the ability to respond to new information and new stimuli. Our intellectual abilities are a combination of our inherent genetic gifts and the lifelong consequences of all of the decisions we make that either positively or negatively contribute to our cognitive fitness.

The brain does not want the body to expend its resources unless we have a reasonable chance of success. Our physical strength is not accessible to us if the brain does not believe in the outcome, because the worst possible thing for humans to do is to expend all of our resources and fail. If we do not believe we can make it, we will not get the resources we need to make it. The moment we believe, the gates are opened, and a flood of energy is unleashed. Both hope and despair are self-fulfilling prophecies.

We are so used to thinking of our conscious selves as in charge that all the evidence documenting our lack of control—how much we depend on split-second perceptions and aesthetic judgments—is rather scary.

Shlomo Benartziego,

A living myth is not a lie; it is a story about the past or the future whose veracity cannot be established in a rational manner, yet that no one can imagine rejecting. It remains valid, in the eyes of believers, until heretics succeed in refuting it.

BDS is propaganda. It operates as such. Continuous repetition of simple messages is reinforced by threat of social alienation. It is surprising how well it propagates its message of diametrically opposite factors, the sources of good and the sources of evil.

In Israel, Shlomo Hillel called a press conference–broadcast by the BBC–to protest the executions. Hillel later reflected: ‘I doubt whether in all the two thousand five hundred years of Jewish history in Iraq, there had been anything to match the sheer malevolence of executing nineJews on the same day.’ Even the Egyptian Government condemned the hangings as ‘doing harm

I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.

As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair.

Shlomo’s offers of assistance, the tremendous energy of his communications, his enthusiasm, there lay the shadow of something else, more personal to him: his own need to stay connected to Bolechow, to his lost childhood and lost life.

protonational

Behavioral economists have shown the effectiveness of this technique in another important domain: saving for the future. In one of the most powerful demonstrations of this persuasion strategy, Nudge co-author Richard Thaler and his research colleague Shlomo Benartzi showed that they could drastically boost participation rates in 401( k) plans. Using what they called the “Save More Tomorrow” program, rather than asking workers to participate in the program immediately, they instead asked workers to commit to putting a portion of their future salary increases into the plan. Although this program was successful for many reasons, one central reason is that it effectively shifted workers’ thoughts about the program from the concrete terms associated with it (e.g., “I’ll have less money in my paycheck each month”) to more abstract terms about how it would help them achieve their broader values and goals (e.g., “I should do this because it’s important and the right thing to do for my family”).

But if it is crazy to turn down the 100 bets, the logic of Samuelson's argument is just reversed; you should not turn down one! Shlomo and I called this phenomenon "myopic loss aversion". The only way you can ever take 100 attractive bets is by first taking the first one, and it is only thinking about the bet in isolation that fools you into turning it down.

Mommsen did not think that the Judeans were necessarily the spiritual successors of the ancient Hebrews, and assumed that most of the Jews throughout the Roman Empire were not direct biological descendants of the inhabitants of Judea.37

people who suffered in their childhood and had to learn to get by on their own had more of a chance of adapting to life in camp and surviving than did people from privileged backgrounds.

Fortunes are made from scarcities, and the richest people are those who notice the scarcities first.