To try to distill the Bible, which is bursting with life, drama, and tension, to a series of principles would be like trying to reduce a living person to a diagram.
A world without time would be a world without God, a world existing in and by itself, without renewal, without a Creator.
God does not reveal Himself; he only reveals His way. Judaism does not speak of God’s self-revelation, but of the revelation of His teaching for man. The Bible reflects God’s revelation of His relation to history, rather than of a revelation of His very Self. Even His will or His wisdom is not completely expressed through the prophets. Prophecy is superior to human wisdom, and God’s love is superior to prophecy. This spiritual hierarchy is explicitly stated by the Rabbis.
As long as man sees religion as a source of satisfaction for his own needs, it is not God whom he serves but his own self.
The most incomprehensible fact is that we comprehend at all.
Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things.
There is no reverence for God without reverence for man. Love of man is the way to the love of God.
We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.
Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted, regarding events as a natural course of things.
Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organized in order to be mastered.
A moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time.
For the pious person, destiny means not simply to accomplish, but to contribute.
Words create worlds.
Theology starts with dogmas, philosophy begins with problems. Philosophy sees the problem first, theology has the answer in advance.
Creative thinking is not stimulated by vicarious issues but by personal problems.
This was a religious problem, my father felt; people can want to be deceived. Do not deceive, the Kotzker rebbe insisted, and that also means do not deceive oneself by being gullible.
The words of the Bible are sources of spirit. They carry fire to the soul and evoke our lost dignity out of our hidden origins. Illumined, we suddenly remember, we suddenly recover the strength of endless longing to sense eternity in time.
Within our awe we only know that all we own we owe.
The Bible is the perpetual motion of the spirit, an ocean of meaning, its waves beating against man’s abrupt and steep shortcomings, its echo reaching into the blind alleys of his wrestling with despair.
There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.