Shmuel Quotes

...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.

He looked down and did something quite out of character for him: he took hold of Shmuel's tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly. "You're my best friend, Shmuel," he said. "My best friend for life.

Bruno: Why do you wear pajamas all day? Shmuel: The soldiers. They took all our clothes away. Bruno: My dad's a soldier, but not the sort that takes people's clothes away.

You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend for life.

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let it go.

Can I ask you something? He added after a moment. 'yes,' said Shmuel. Bruno thought about it. He wanted to phrase the question just right. 'why are there so many people on that side of the fence?' He asked. 'And what are you all doing there?

If it wasn’t for the fact that Bruno was nowhere near as skinny as the boys on his side of the fence, and not quite so pale either, it would have been difficult to tell them apart. It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.

Almost everyone traverses their lifespan, from birth to death, with eyes closed. Even you and I, my dear Shmuel. With eyes closed. If we open our eyes for just a moment, a great and terrible cry will burst forth from us and we shall scream and never stop. And if we don’t cry out day and night, that’s a sign that our eyes are closed.

Answer me!'Shouted Lieutenant Kotler. 'Did you steal something from that fridge?' 'No, sir. He gave it to me,'said Shmuel, tears welling up in his eyes as he throw a sideways glance at Bruno. 'He's my friend,'he added.

There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.” Shmuel

Fences such as the one at the heart of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas still exist; it is unlikely that they will ever fully disappear. But whatever reaction you have to this story, I hope that the voices of Bruno and Shmuel will continue to resonate with you as they have with me. Their lost voices must continue to be heard; their untold stories must continue to be recounted. For they represent the ones who didn't live to tell their stories themselves.

Even after she disappeared, it did not settle at once, but continued to make waves and produced a trickling, rustling sound that Shmuel hoped would not die away too soon.

You're my best friend, Shmuel, ... My best friend for life. - The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

Anyone willing to change,” Shmuel said, “will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don’t understand it and loathe change.

It was almost (Shmuel thought) as if they were all exactly the same really.

Você é o meu melhor amigo, Shmuel. Meu melhor amigo para a vida toda.

E então o cômodo ficou escuro e de alguma maneira, apesar do caos que se seguiu, Bruno percebeu que ainda estava segurando a mão de Shmuel entre as suas e nada no mundo o teria convencido a soltá-la.

You wear the right outfit and you feel like the person you’re pretending to be, she always told me. I suppose that’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? Pretending to be a person from the other side of the fence.’ ‘A Jew, you mean,’ said Shmuel. ‘Yes,’ said Bruno,

Shmuel shrugged. “You know what bashert is?” “It’s like a soul mate.” “How very modern of you,” Shmuel teased. “Bashert literally means destiny.” “Isn’t that the same thing?” “Not exactly. Soul mate...it’s a movie concept. It’s the idea that you fall in love with someone, and off you go, living happily ever after. But in Judaism, that’s not the point of finding your bashert.” “So what is the point?” “Your other half exists to make you better. She exists to complete something you lack, and vice versa. You challenge each other, like chavruta, two blades which sharpen each other. But that’s different than love, Jacob. In some ways, it’s more powerful. Because only your bashert, your other half, can fill up what you lack...and help you fulfill your destiny.

Personally I do not believe in world reform. No. I do not believe in any kind of world reform. Not because I consider that the world is perfect as it is—certainly not, the world is crooked and grim and full of suffering—but whoever comes along to reform it soon sinks in rivers of blood. Now let’s drink a glass of tea and leave aside these obscenities you’ve brought me today. If only all religions and all revolutions vanished from the face of the earth someday, I tell you—all of them, without exception—there would be far fewer wars in the world. (p. 68) Only in one window a feeble light glowed, and he pictured a young rabbinical student sitting there reciting psalms. He said to him in his heart: You and I are both searching for something that has no fixed measure. And for that reason we will not find it even if we search till morning and the next night and every night to come until the day of our death, and maybe after that. (p. 184) “The eyes,” Gershom Wald said, “will never open. Almost everyone traverses their lifespan, from birth to death, with eyes closed. Even you and I, my dear Shmuel. With eyes closed. If we open our eyes for just a moment, a great and terrible cry will burst forth from us and we shall scream and never stop. And if we don’t cry out day and night, that’s a sign that our eyes are closed... ” (p. 192) Anyone willing to change,” Shmuel said, “will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don’t understand it and loathe change...” (p. 230)

Toate sentimentele mi se par inutile, făcînd ca lucrurile să se termine rău. Viața poate fi mult mai simplă dacă abolim emomțiile. Dar nu trebuie să te educ, Shmuel. Poate te mulțumești cu faptul că, în general, te tolerez într-o măsură mai mare sau mai mică, iar din cînd în cînd apar și momente ceva mai bune decît acesta.

If we are to romanticize any societal state, then let it be a peacefully functioning government, or better yet, a world matured beyond the need for government at all.

When all is said and done, it is perfectly alright to be afraid. It is human to fear death but childish not to face it—and quite often, dangerous.

I am not the lady’s husband. I do not have that honor and pleasure. Atalia is, in fact, my mistress.” He allowed a little time for Shmuel to wallow in his astonishment before deigning to explain: “I am not using the word in the vulgar sense, of course, but rather as in the famous saying of the first Queen Elizabeth of England: ‘I will have here but one mistress and no master.

You and I are both surely wrong about something we presently believe—more likely several somethings—and we have no idea how soon or how badly those errors will come to bear on our life and the lives of others.

Shmuel reached down and lifted the base of the fence, but it only lifted to a certain height and Bruno had no choice but to roll under it, getting his striped pajamas completely covered in mud as he did so. He laughed when he looked down at himself. He had never been so filthy in all his life and it felt wonderful. Shmuel smiled too and the two boys stood awkwardly together for a moment, unaccustomed to being on the same side of the fence.

with his legs apart, leaning on an old Czech rifle. He was smoking the dog end of a cigarette, and when he saw Shmuel and Atalia he spoke without removing it: “Closed. No entry.” “Why?” Atalia laughed. The soldier raised the cap slightly from one ear and replied: “Closed by order, lady. No entry.” “But we had no intention of going inside,” Atalia said, pulling Shmuel by the arm. Shmuel lingered and asked the soldier: “When does your watch finish?

Yakov,” said Shmuel, “He invented light. He created the world. He made us both. The true miracle is belief. I believe in Him. Job said, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ He said more but that’s enough.” “To win a lousy bet with the devil he killed off all the servants and innocent children of Job. For that alone I hate him, not to mention ten thousand pogroms. Ach, why do you make me talk fairy tales? Job is an invention and so is God.

You Who'd be Wise" from "Ben Mishle" written sometime between 1013 and 1050 C.E. You who'd be wise should inquire into the nature of justice and evil from your teachers, seekers like yourself, and the students who question your answer.

The mind comfortably closed to revisal, slight or sweeping, is the spoiled child of arrogance and the drunken father of chaos. It is a coward’s mind—scarcely even worth the name—whose inevitable blind spots, left unlit, turn all too quickly into Achilles’ heels for self and other alike.

We’ll meet at the same time tomorrow,’ said Shmuel. ‘Don’t be late this time,’ said Bruno, standing up and dusting himself down. ‘And don’t forget the striped pajamas.’ Both boys went home in high spirits that afternoon. Bruno imagined a great adventure ahead and finally an opportunity to see what was really on the other side of the fence before he went back to Berlin – not to mention getting in a little serious exploration as well – and Shmuel saw a chance to get someone to help him in the search for his papa. All in all, it seemed like a very sensible plan and a good way to say goodbye.

—Shmuel —dijo, corriendo hacia él y sentándose. Casi lloraba de alivio y de arrepentimiento.—Lo siento mucho,Shmuel. No sé porqué lo hice. Di que me perdonas. —No pasa nada.—dijo Shmuel, mirándolo. Tenía la cara cubierta de cardenales. Bruno se estremeció y por un momento olvidó sus disculpas. —¿Qué te ha pasado? —preguntó, pero no esperó a que Shmuel contestara.—¿Te has caído de la bicicleta? A mí me pasó una vez en Berlín, hace un par de años. Me caí porque iba demasiado rápido y estuve lleno de cardenales varias semanas. ¿Te duele? —Ya no lo noto —dijo Shmuel. —Debe de dolerte. —Ya no noto nada.

Children who are neglected by their parents—despite their parents’ best intentions—grow up to feel insignificant, insecure, unloved and—more than anything else—angry. To make children feel important, loved and safe, parents should be physically and emotionally available to their children for a few hours every day, which he calls ‘quantity time.

Bruno had an urge to give Shmuel a hug, just to let him know how much he liked him and how much he’d enjoyed talking to him over the last year. Shmuel had an urge to give Bruno a hug too, just to thank him for all his many kindnesses, and his gifts of food, and the fact that he was going to help him find Papa. Neither of them did hug each other though, and instead they began the walk away from the fence and towards the camp, a walk that Shmuel had done almost every day for a year now, when he had escaped the eyes of the soldiers and managed to get to that one part of Out-With that didn’t seem to be guarded all the time, a place where he had been lucky enough to meet a friend like Bruno.

And I’m sorry we didn’t really get to play, but when you come to Berlin, that’s what we’ll do. And I’ll introduce you to … Oh, what were their names again?’ he asked himself, frustrated because they were supposed to be his three best friends for life but they had all vanished from his memory now. He couldn’t remember any of their names and he couldn’t picture any of their faces. ‘Actually,’ he said, looking down at Shmuel, ‘it doesn’t matter whether I do or don’t. They’re not my best friends any more anyway.’ He looked down and did something quite out of character for him: he took hold of Shmuel’s tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly. ‘You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend for life.

Bruno stared at him in surprise. ‘What did you say?’ he asked. ‘I said my birthday is April the fifteenth nineteen thirty-four.’ Bruno’s eyes opened wide and his mouth made the shape of an O. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ asked Shmuel. ‘No,’ said Bruno, shaking his head quickly. ‘I don’t mean I don’t believe you. I mean I’m surprised, that’s all. Because my birthday is April the fifteenth too. And I was born in nineteen thirty-four. We were born on the same day.’ Shmuel thought about this. ‘So you’re nine too,’ he said. ‘Yes. Isn’t that strange?’ ‘Very strange,’ said Shmuel. ‘Because there may be dozens of Shmuels on this side of the fence but I don’t think that I’ve ever met anyone with the same birthday as me before.’ ‘We’re like twins,’ said Bruno. ‘A little bit,’ agreed Shmuel.

Between his open calls for the illegal destruction of cherished cultural sites, the illegal plunder of foreign oil, the renewed embrace of largely illegal and murderously imprecise landmines, a gleeful and illegal program of torture 'even if it doesn’t work,' and yes, the illegal and deliberate slaughter of civilians, one could indeed be forgiven for confusing Trump’s peddled moral compass with that of the Taliban.

I could fill this entire book with Mr. Trump’s dirty laundry list of proven lies, but his most zealous disciples are sure to just cite one or another in fake defense, or else deny the very possibility that fact can be known from fantasy at all, or perhaps make both claims at once. For the Trumpist, there is no objective truth, or at least no real responsibility to it. There is only 'my opinion,' more or less fun, more or less useful.

Democracy without accountability is nothing but rule by the mob. As long as we claim the right to vote, we also assume responsibility for that vote; and if an opinion is good enough to share, then it is good enough to defend, to challenge, and (most importantly) to change if and when need be. Social taboos against discussing those most consequential of topics for fear of collateral feelings amount to nothing but a cowardly kind of nihilism best abandoned.

WE, THE SANE, HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT— That objective reality exists, That we all live at various overlapping points within it, and can map the whole more truthfully or less truthfully, That we are all surely wrong about something, That Life can be made better, and it can be made worse, That errors of belief blot our maps and hinder our hopes to navigate a better Life, and so we all ought to diligently discover and correct these errors, as best we can.

Here’s an imaginary twin pair that would be God’s gift to behavior geneticists—identical twin boys separated at birth. One, Shmuel, is raised as an Orthodox Jew in the Amazon; the other, Wolfie, is raised as a Nazi in the Sahara. Reunite them as adults and see if they do similar quirky things like, say, flushing the toilet before using it. Flabbergastingly, one twin pair came close to that. They were born in 1933 in Trinidad to a German Catholic mother and a Jewish father; when the boys were six months of age, the parents separated; the mother returned to Germany with one son, and the other remained in Trinidad with the father. The latter was raised there and in Israel as Jack Yufe, an observant Jew whose first language was Yiddish. The other, Oskar Stohr, was raised in Germany as a Hitler Youth zealot. Reunited and studied by Bouchard, they warily got to know each other, discovering numerous shared behavioral and personality traits including . . . flushing the toilet before use.

Insofar as his patterns of speech reflect his predominant patterns of thought, Mr. Trump knows no second best, second worst, or second thought, no caveat or concession. His is a worldview painted in blackest black and whitest white, at whose center he and he alone rightly reigns. He grades nary a person, platform, or policy as anything other than the absolute best or worst of all time, which is to say he dips hardly a toe into the gray area that makes up the bulk of our reality—after all, the world is made of more than capstones.

This is the very basis of inspiration and friendship, both of which are, in essence, spiritual connections. No two people are exactly the same, though they may share fragments of each other’s personality. Some may feel so uncannily connected as to be kindred spirits, watching the world through different eyes but hearts aligned, the canvas of consciousness cast in common colors, struggling to express the same thoughts and gleefully snapping their fingers when the other puts it just right, finishing each other’s sentences on page, screen, or scroll—across the decades, centuries, millennia. Great men and women influence “a number of people,” even after they die. People will take up their mantle and continue the endless work of human progress. By giving new voice to the echoes fading in time, we elevate both ourselves and the person from whom we draw inspiration. Our souls interpenetrate through the broken chains of eternity, and through us, they live once again.

The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.

Ideas should be freely and dispassionately considered on their own merits, since after all, one generation’s heretic is another generation’s hero. Mystics like the Ramchal disagreed with rationalists like the Rambam on what exactly is the highest mode of being. The Rambam believed that the ultimate existence is purely spiritual, in Olam HaBah, while the Ramchal believed it to be corporeal resurrection in this world.1 In his time, the Ramchal was labeled a heretic and had his works burned by fellow Jews, but nevertheless lives on today as one of the most respected Jewish philosophers in history. The Rambam before him suffered the same fate, not just for his views on the afterlife, in which corporeal resurrection only played a minor role, but also for his “radical” belief that God does not have a body. It seems possible that his debate may find a sister in modern times: I would not be surprised if future generations view the figurative nature of Olam HaBah with the same certainty as modern Jews now view the Rambam’s “heresy” about the nature of God. Because frankly, these Talmudic passages make no sense unless viewed as metaphor, and the Rambam provides a kind of Rabbinic precedent to do so. It is precisely the same dialectic: as our scientific view of reality expands and sharpens, our religious teachings must evolve and conform. If the evidence confirms a literal reading, then so be it. If it refutes it, then so be it. Truth is truth, and we must cherish our integrity just as we cherish as our faith.

Even when she was a girl, the kitchen was a source of pride and power. A separate vestibule off the main room, it cocooned her in glorious aromas. She had proven herself a skillful and painstaking chef, famous in the family for yaprach that tickled the tongue with notes of tomato, lemon and dried sumac. Shmuel and her half brothers teased that Miryam's date-sized yaprach were tiny, like her. Miryam didn't mind the ribbing; she rolled grape leaves at half their usual size precisely so that her family would recognize them as hers, rather than her stepmother's or her aunts'.

on iz February 1948 a British patrol disarmed a Haganah roadblock and arrested its members on Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi Street. The four men were later "released" unarmed into the hands of an Arab mob, which lynched them and mutilated their bodies.'9 A similar incident occurred a fortnight later, on 28 February, when British troops disarmed Haganah men at a position in the Hayotzek Factory near Holon. Eight men were "butchered.""' (The next day, LHI terrorists blew up a British troop train near Rehovot, killing twenty-eight British troops and wounding dozens more.)

While researching and writing this book, I realized that not only had I lost count of the various scandals and portents from the past five years; I’d actually forgotten many of them. That, perhaps more than anything else, motivated and disturbed me—the sheer dizzying scope of the threat. Strange how one can miss the storm for its countless passing clouds, or else forget older clouds in the thick of the storm. But if anything of value is to stand in its wake, we must keep our eyes and memories wide and clear, and hold to our lines in the sand, even if the storm has washed that sand to mud.

Though triage currently commands my critical focus rightward, many on the left prove hardly any less careless in their policy and epistemology. Whatever moral high ground they may now hold rises largely out of sheer luck and lack of Faustian opportunity. Given the right devil and deal, Trump’s photonegative could all too easily arise from a rival wing.

Even at the most cynical of levels, the last thing a sane conservative might do to advance this or that less-than-popular policy would be to tie it to a figure as utterly hated and morally compromised as Mr. Trump. The man often seems to function like a Bizarro Midas, lending little more than sabotage to what could otherwise constitute a civil and sincere conservative movement… Every political action tends to yield an equal and opposition reaction, and for any conscientious conservative who hopes to steer the ship of government toward such respectable policies as, say, a balanced federal budget, a secure (if not necessarily sealed) border, a lean state hedged to its sharpest shape by constant audits and edits, etc. etc., Trump presents a veritable iceberg ready to sink those dreams into oblivion. And I say this as someone who had expected to vote Republican until the eleventh hour of 2016.

Given the rising tide of blue millennials and twilight of redder Boomers, our shifting Overton window will, in all likelihood, soon box out the fringe of the right and usher in the fringe of the left. Thus in the long term, I am in fact more worried about the American left than the American right.

The color of your neighbor’s first passport tells you effectively nothing of concern about the content of their character.

To doubly, triply, repeatedly gorge on those media with which we already agree is nothing but an absurd exercise in futility and cowardice, as conceited as Narcissus and pointless as Sisyphus. As long as we hope and expect others to open their hearts and truly hear out the other side in its best light, we are obliged to follow suit—no matter how certain we may presently feel, or how surely and laughably false the point may seem at first blush. Every truth seems the height of absurdity to someone; and sooner or later, we are all that someone.

If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, then a fallacy for a fallacy makes the whole world stupid.

While legend says that Washington felled his father’s cherry tree then nobly confessed, Trump would more likely set fire to the entire orchard then blame his father to his face.

Any response not calibrated to reality simply cannot engage reality in any reliable way.

Those who wage war with objective reality with always lose in the end, and likely take a good deal of the rest of us down with them.

It is difficult to convey the sheer deluded depravity of such 'alternative facts.' Though an imperfect analogy, imagine that President Bush, sarcastically or not, had taken up the bullhorn on September 14, 2001, and told the first responders at the pile of Ground Zero to 'slow down' their search for survivors, because the more they searched, the higher the body count rose, and 'in many ways, it makes us look bad.' (I call this analogy imperfect, since more than 230,000 Americans have now been killed by SARS-CoV-2 under Trump’s watch, nearly eighty times those murdered on September 11, so Trump’s self-serving denial would in fact be quantifiably worse.) […] Perhaps not every drop of this fresh American blood can be placed on his hands. But much of it surely could, if only his hands weren’t planted squarely over his eyes.

Our sacred freedom of speech is in fact worthless when divorced from its twin value of sincere attention, for while dialogue is priceless, monologue is pointless. Once we hallow a shared liberty to speak, we necessarily assume a shared duty to listen, and listen honestly, for an unwelcome truth, freely spoken unto deaf ears, is as good as silenced.

It all starts with the lie, the erosion of hard standards that he might fail to meet. Right, in every sense of the word, begins to die when we prize pride over the truth. This was true long before Trump and will remain true long after he is gone: once principle surrenders to mere personality, all hell follows.

Like a bug drawn to light, Trump’s trust and respect tend toward those who praise him as the sun and moon. A fellow Republican questions his policy? They are a sad, crazy loser with a low IQ who can’t help but cry on their knees before his majesty. A foreign dictator wishes him a happy birthday and slurs an American rival? Best of brotherly love sent across the sea.

Past a certain threshold, it is not enough to merely repudiate the Dear Leader’s onanistic propaganda; one should remember to laugh at it as well.

Mr. Trump is not quite the enfant terrible that his fans imagine, as much as he is just an unruly child, plain and simple.

What drives every new nail into liberty’s coffin? Fear: of chaos and disaster, both real and imagined. Freedom is untamed possibility, and only the brave can make a home on its weathered, fruited terrain. The coward prefers the pathetic security of a dark and breathless bunker, safe from death as well as life. Authoritarians thrive on this cowardice.

Mr. Trump and his underlings have already dabbled in this Reichstag tactic… Though in a deeper sense, there is no need; Trump’s Reichstag went up in flames nearly two decades ago, on a sunny Tuesday morning in downtown Manhattan.

Presumably, in a fascinating feat of doublethink, Trump is at once claiming that the election will be rigged, and claiming that it will not be, should he win. Because, again, there is no such thing as objective truth in his dark wonderland of a world. There is only pride, power, and the noises made to accrue them. Notably, this desperate plea to pause our cycle of free elections came just two days after the president complained to a sick and dying American people that pandemic task force leader Anthony Fauci has 'got this high approval rating' while 'nobody likes me.' Thus the pathetic gives way to the autocratic.

The high time to resist comes not after tyranny strikes, but the moment it coils.

Even the most doctrinaire libertarian could argue that, although taxation may amount to a kind of theft, some such theft would in fact be proper if and only if it went to guarantee the survival of citizens: through a public healthcare option, a negative income tax or basic income, and of course a solid national defense—no more, no less. To further aim the guns of government where none are needed is trigger-happy and thuggish.

We cannot always know where the line exactly falls between justified and unjustified uses of state force. But both in crafting laws and enforcing them: when in doubt, err toward liberty. Better that the government let some offenses go unmanaged than seek to totally manage them all and, in so doing, intrude too far, upon the innocent. If for no other reason: it is far easier to right a crooked life than a crooked law. The former is free to change as soon as error is brought to light, while the latter—to borrow a metaphor from President Obama—constitutes a veritable aircraft carrier slow to steer back on course. We carve our opinions into the stone of the state at our peril, for human error is inevitable, and these are hard opinions to retract.

The libertarian stands in relation to government as the skeptic stands in relation to belief. Neither of the former constitutes a total rejection of the respective latter, only a bone-deep recognition that humans have a horrid track record of confident error, and that therefore we ought to tread lightly, shed certainty, and make our inevitable errors as easy to freely correct as we can. By no means is this the only function of liberty, but it is among its most vital.

The problem, of course, with any such fundamentalist faith in 'my country, right or wrong,' is that every country is 'my country' to someone or another.

Flags don’t bleed.

While the nationalist preaches literal and unfounded supremacy, the patriot nurses and shares a humble affection for his or her home, much more like the bond between friend or spouse than god and zealot.

The nationalist’s surplus of symbols obsessively flaunted only betrays a short supply of actual substance for which they desperately overcompensate.

Beneath a common banner of classically liberal ideals, countless tastes and traditions may mingle and mutate into ever new and exciting flavors. Thus would be born a homeland where the Sufi dances with the Breslover round the neon jungle of Times Square, where the Baptist of Alabama nods along to the merry melodies of Klezmer, where the secular humanist combs the Christian gospels and poems of Rumi for their many pearls of wisdom, where the Guatemalan college student learns to read Marx and Luxemburg in their original German, where the Russian refugee freely markets her own art painted in the style of Van Gogh and Monet, where the Italian chef tosses up a Lambi stew for his Haitian wife’s birthday while the operas of Verdi and Puccini play on his radio, where two brothers in exile share the wine of the Galilee and Golan while listening to the oud music of Nablus and Nazareth, where the Buddhist and the stoner hike through redwood trails and swap thoughts of life and death beneath a star-spangled sky. In this America, only the polyglot sets the lingua franca, the bully pulpit yields to the poets café, decent discourse finds favor over any cocksure shouting match, no library is so uniform as to betray to a tee its owner’s beliefs, no citizen is so selfish as to live for only themself nor so weak of will as to live only for others, and such a land—as yet a dream deferred, but still a dream we may seize—such a land would truly be worthy of you and me.

Possibly the most glaring blindspot in current leftist discourse is its apathy for—or worse yet, outright opposition to—the Second Amendment. Ironically this trend seems to have evolved out of the lie long lobbied by the NRA that posits a zero-sum contest between proven gun control measures (e.g. waiting periods, safe storage, universal background checks for mental and criminal records, etc.) and a citizen’s right and duty to bear arms in defense of self and others. Like many such partisan dichotomies, this is utterly false. What left-leaning gun skeptics must recognize […] is that the final political veto always rests with the armed, for better or for worse; and that while might of course does not make right, right just as surely requires might if it’s to endure worth a damn. Only the nihilist can, of right accord, embrace a life of weakness, whereby the meek in effect surrender the earth to the highest bid of brute force.

We ought to fight to prevent a war just as fervently as we’d fight to win one.

The irony is that if and when revolution ever does become imperative, those reckless souls who crave it are seldom those who should wage it, and those wary of it are the careful skeptics most needed in it.

Since it is always easier to destroy what is bad than to create what is good, antipathy often proves far easier to foster than any affection.

Radical reform and even revolution are indeed justified in some cases; and in such cases, those who wage them with reluctant yet steady hearts are heroes of the highest rank. But any self-styled social justice warrior who has never even smelled gunpowder in their life should think long and hard before impetuously calling for an armed revolt, in a lazy leapfrog over those more measured modes of reform that prudence first demands. Press them to define exactly what they mean by such revolt, how they imagine they might pull it off, why they think it is the best of bad routes to take, and which positive program they hope to implement the day after rebel bugles sound their last taps. A mind built with integrity, brick for brick, will survive all such degrees of scrutiny; a scattered brain drunk on conflict will not.

We cannot wait for 'someone else' to step up. 'Someone else' will never show. You are someone else’s someone else. We all are. Act accordingly.

When cynics abound, the sincere grow guts.

Even if one’s motives are in fact less than sterling, no matter. As long as, at the end of the day, one does the right thing, they can sort out petty problems of intent later on. Only the most monstrous victim of hubris would, for example, not buy food for a homeless person simply because some onlookers might assume they did so out of ego, or even because they can’t be sure themself. To hell with your navel-gazing. Your neighbor is hungry.

If the union breaks apart, game over. No fine disputes of policy or progress matter after that. Act accordingly. Measure every act and word by how far, or how close, it brings us to that apocalypse.

If each of us could help change just one mind, our own included, then the world itself would change in turn.

With every new thing we learn, we lose an excuse.

How easy and righteous and delicious it feels to slam the gavel and declare our efforts done, our patience out, and our neighbors a long lost cause; but how hopeless and helpless the implication. We must face each other, tolerate each other, speak to each other, listen to each other, and, one free step at a time, change each other—or most assuredly we will ruin each other.

Do not miss the forest fire for a few dampened twigs.

Even if the United States led the frontline of progress on every political and social front—which we certainly do not—it would be a strange citizen indeed who’d then rebuff any and all efforts to correct our finer flaws by reference to said stature. While a sober sense of priority is surely vital to reflection and reform, it is ultimately an amoral red-herring to ask the activist, 'But can you name a place that is better?' for this carries with it the absurd implication that the frontmost line of progress ought to necessarily and indefinitely halt.

Jacob,” Shmuel interrupted him. “Lie to yourself all you want. But do me a favor, okay? As your friend and business partner of over a decade who’s risked everything with you on this Matzah Ball...don’t lie to me.

Tous tremblent devant cette pichenette sur le nez, s'effraient bien plus à son idée qu'à celle d'être mis au monde sur la Terre. Cet ange alcoolique a rendu malheureux plus d'un enfant avec sa pichenette sur le nez… Si vous voyez sur la Terre un enfant au nez épaté, vous devez savoir que l'ange Simon Bär y a été trop fort avec sa pichenette sur le nez. [Vor diesem Nasenstüber zittern alle, sie haben vor ihm einen weit grösseren Schrecken als vor dem Geborenwerden auf der Erde. Mehr als ein Kind hat dieser trunksüchtige Engel mit seinem Nasenstüber unglücklich gemacht… Wenn ihr auf Erden ein Kind mit einer Stubsnase seht, dann sollt ihr wissen, dass ihm Simon Bär, der Engel, einen zu starken Nasenstüber versetzt hat.]

How can we draw nearer to HaShem’s throne without a living parietal lobe to navigate space? How can we see his glorious light without the rods and cones that color our visual cortex? How can we learn and appreciate Torah with sages past without an all-too-human neocortex to effect higher thinking and comprehend language? How can we even register any reward at all without the dopamine receptors spiraling across our nervous system?8 We can’t, and we should not disrespect these serious teachings by taking them to mean something so scientifically backwards and absurd. Dare I say, we don’t have the time. As the Rambam implied and Rabbi Sacks stated, 'If a Biblical narrative is incompatible with established scientific fact, it is not to be read literally.

In a last-ditch effort, some readers may pathetically attack the scientific method, claiming that all subjective perspective is flawed and cannot be trusted, no matter the empirical evidence or broad consensus. By this tremendously stupid standard, none of the thousands of Jews who witnessed the events of Matan Torah at Har Sinai could, in good conscience, accept their subjective experience as fact. Kal vachomer, no Jew living today should at all trust the game of broken telephone that has carried the mesorah of this experience. Take this to its logical result, and any consistent thinker will soon end up with a mind totally emptied of all axioms and convictions. Then again, not all thinkers are consistent, and too many seem oddly comfortable with such cognitive dissonance, no matter how glaring. This worldview gives rise to severe chilulei HaShem, and anyone brazen enough to offer this doublethink as legitimate belief should be ashamed of themselves. Refusal to follow the evidence is an insult to the God who put it there.

While in yeshiva, I was once asked by a friend and frequent debater, do I believe in a soul. I answered that I believe a human being is more than the sum of his or her parts—in much the same way it would be wrong to say that Shakespeare’s poetry is mere ink on paper. Reality does not equal cold reductionism. So in answer, no, I do not think that we have a literal spark burning within the inion of our squama occipitalis. Then again, I do not think that you, dear reader, truly think this either.

It is no coincidence that the two primary terms for heaven and hell in Judaism are “Gan Eden” and “Gehinnom.” Gan Eden, as explained above, refers to the four-leveled realm of the intellect, in all its depth and beauty. Gehinnom, on the other hand, takes its name from an infamous valley just outside Jerusalem, a portmanteau of Gei Ben-Hinnom (literally “Valley of the Son of Hinnom”). In this valley, King Ahaz would burn incense to idols, practice witchcraft, and sacrifice his children in fire (II Divrei HaYamim 28:3, 33:6). Putting aside the hokey connotations with which we have saddled these two terms, neither Gan Eden nor Gehinnom bear any connection to the supernatural. On the contrary, they pertain exclusively to this world. Gan Eden—or rather Pardes—is the highest high to which the human intellect may soar, while Gehinnom is the lowest low to which we may fall. But both exist in this world. Elisha ben-Abuya even uses these terms in this very sugya when teaching his disciple Rabbi Meir, “HaShem created righteous, and he created wicked; he created the Gan Eden, and he created Gehinnom” (15a).

Seemingly unethical verses must be interpreted so as to be read ethically.

Value nuance and skepticism over any blind dogma. Pierce through the cacophony of human error and listen for the still, small voice of God. After all, this is all we humans can hope to do.

Putting a slight twist on Pascal’s famous wager, what do we have to lose? Are we afraid to meet God having dreamed as if we’d live forever but lived as if we’d die tomorrow?2 having seen every corner of his beautiful world and savored every moment of this fleeting life? having smelled every rose and let our heart beat to the finest music? having built relationships and legacies with the conviction only the dying can muster, with the selflessness only mortal man can feel?

Putting a slight twist on Pascal’s famous wager, what do we have to lose? Are we afraid to meet God having dreamed as if we’d live forever but lived as if we’d die tomorrow? having seen every corner of his beautiful world and savored every moment of this fleeting life? having smelled every rose and let our heart beat to the finest music? having built relationships and legacies with the conviction only the dying can muster, with the selflessness only mortal man can feel?