Of choice

“All is foreseen yet freedom of choice is given” - Pirkei Avot 3:15

“We have to believe in free will: we have no choice.” - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"We and God are co-authors of the human story. Without our efforts we can achieve nothing." - R. J. Sacks

A sad truth

Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive. - David ben Gurion

Thank God for Maimonides

“Thank God for Maimonides! The refuge of the Orthodox Jewish rebel. – Chaim Potack, “In the Beginning”

Meet the Austins

"'What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, the life of any living creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to post this question? I answer: the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures to be meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.'" - Albert Einstein, "Meet the Austins", Madeline L'Engle

The Morning Star

The very first day, she had dragged him off to the Wailing Wall so she could insert between the stones a letter to God that she had carefully written. Wishes and messages reached Him in all languages, and, before that multitude, he thought about the apocalyptic atmosphere that had reigned in the days leading up to the Six-Day War. Haim had gone to Israel at the time, and in the face of all the real threats of annihilation, he had thought that it may well spell the end of the Jewish people. But, for two thousand years, hadn’t each generation also thought that it was the end? The world would certainly do without Jews, but it could do even better without mankind.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the crowd. “They’re alive…they’re alive. They’re not ghosts.”

They had come from all continents, witnesses from all the races and traditions, Jews of the East and of the West, white Jews, black Jews, yellow, red, right down to those mysterious Jews from Cochin China, whose eyes seemed to gaze upon a different sky; right down to those beings who seemed to step straight out of legend, Falashas from Ethiopia, who still remembered the Queen of Sheba; right down to the Jews of Harlem, who carried the two heaviest legacies in human history on their shoulders. She said that this country of Israel was first the act by means of which all these scattered people asserted their common identity. But it was also the singular history of each and every one of them, it was the past that they’d torn themselves away from and that lived on in them. It was Cairo, Baghdad and Teheran. It was the mellahs of the Maghreb and all the memories of Arab civilization. It was the shtetls of Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, and all the vestiges of Eastern Europe. It was also Paris, Berlin, New York, and it was Palestine itself, where the Jews had never stopped being, in spite of everything, while the Romans and Byzantines, the Arabs, Egyptians, Mamelukes, Turks and English had run the country. It was a planetary tribe: you’d have said that the totality of humanity’s past had poured into this place and so it thereby reflected, by the sheer nature of things, the whole set of contradictions of the modern world.

Page: 170-171, ‘The Morning Star’, Andre Schwartz-Bart

From the heart, to the heart

If you see your fellow Jew traveling down a self-destructive path, and you seek to set him straight but fail, the fault is yours. The reasoning behind this conclusion is both profound and simple. Our sages have declared that "words that come from the heart enter the heart." So if your words did not enter his heart, this can only mean that they were not spoken in complete sincerity. Had you been truly sincere--had you spoken with no objective in mind other than his good--your words would have entered his heart and would have had their desired effect.

Broken and whole

Only the human heart can be broken and whole at once. - Rabbi M. M. Schneerson