We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.
When a mentally retarded child is born, the religious question we often ask is, “Why does God let this happen?” The better question to pose is to ask, “What kind of community should we be so that mental retardation isn’t a barrier to the enjoyment of one’s full humanity?”
Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for.
There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.
That is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.
History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win.
The God I believe in is not so fragile that you hurt Him by being angry at him, or so petty that He will hold it against you for being upset with Him.
I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God’s creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind.
When I talk to people who feel this emptiness and lack of fulfillment, I recommend they find a source of balance in their lives. I suggest they find a way to “give back” to the world in order to feel a sense of completeness...
I wish i spent more time at the office.
Seek something outside your nine-to-five job as an additional source of fulfillment and as a way to feel the joy of helping others.
Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them.
It explains why people come home from work or school and immediately switch on the television. They are not interested in the program much of the time, they do not even know what is on. But they are desperate for the sound of another human voice in their lives.
Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells – our hair, our fingernails – can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?
Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone.
If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life’s crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder.
God’s role is not to make our lives easier, to make the hard things go away, or to do them for us. God’s role is to give us the vision to know what we need to do, to bless us with the qualities of soul that we will need in order to do them ourselves, no matter how hard they may be, and to accompany us on that journey.
I am not sure prayer puts us in touch with God the way many people think it does – that we approach God as a supplicant, a beggar asking for favors, or as a customer presenting Him with a shopping list and asking what it will cost. Prayer is not primarily a matter of asking God to change things. If we come to understand what prayer can and should be, and rid ourselves of some unrealistic expectations, we will be better able to call on prayer, and on God, when we need them most.
As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, ‘Light enters at the place of the wound.
We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.