Top 43 Quotes About Rabbis
#1. In the Talmud (a record of discussions of Jewish law and ethics by ancient rabbis) it is said that charity is equal in importance to all the other commandments combined, and that Jews should give at least 10 percent of their income as tzedakah.
Peter Singer
#2. The rabbis paled. I'd managed to terrify holy men. Maybe I could beat up a nun for an encore.
Ilona Andrews
#3. The journey that 'In Praise of Slowness' has made since publication shows how far this message resonates. The book has been translated into more than 30 languages. It appears on reading lists from business schools to yoga retreats. Rabbis, priests and imams have quoted from it in their sermons.
Carl Honore
#4. Reformed rabbis are generally political in nature. It's almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way, to where it is just radicalized Islam is less about religion than it is about politics. When you look at the Reform Judaism, it is more about politics.
Glenn Beck
#5. If this interpretation of nashamah by the rabbis is right ... then it is naming that creates soul.
Anne Hamilton
#6. Nature is my temple; trees are my priests; birds, my rabbis; rains, my imams! Nature is my only true and eternal religion.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#7. Historically, the rabbis are split on the question of dreams. None of them denied their power.
Rodger Kamenetz
#8. We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family.
Mitt Romney
#9. I've spoken with friends who are rabbis and priests and we've agreed that most people have an emotional attachment to their faith, a desire to fulfill their spiritual longings, but they are not experts in understanding the history of their religion.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
#10. I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.
Steven Van Zandt
#11. Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
Cory Doctorow
#12. Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#13. I wonder if I have a problem. I definitely have a tendency to seek spiritual inspiration from super-rational thinkers rather than from rabbis and priests and theologians.
Daniel Klein
#14. My rabbis taught me that it was wrong to say God caused the Holocaust; that he simply, in 1938, turned His head. He looked away.
Shalom Auslander
#15. Priests, ministers and rabbis are asking where the children are going. Slowly but surely, they're seeing that people are hungry for something beyond the doctrine. It isn't that they don't want religious truth. But they want the mystical core, the heart of the religious truth.
Marianne Williamson
#16. It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.
Lionel Blue
#17. Everybody's talking about ministers, sinisters, banisters, and canisters, bishops, fishops, rabbis, and popeyes, bye-bye, bye-byes.
John Lennon
#18. As the Holy One of Israel, the foretold Messiah of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus was the exemplary Jew of all Jews, the Rabbi of all rabbis, the Lord of all lords, the King of all kings, and the Human Being of all human beings.
James Mikolajczyk
#19. According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein's monster, because the golem is neither alive nor dead. He is, rather, the ancestor of all robots.
Kage Baker
#20. The rabbis will find in me personally someone who cares about their future and welfare.
Ephraim Mirvis
#21. Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air you could get an education simply by breathing deeply. (p. 206)
Rebecca Goldstein
#22. Dear rabbis, I'm so sorry, I nuked your circle dude. Here is his head as a souvenir. Yeah, that would fly.
Ilona Andrews
#23. I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter. But I think it's very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. I meant no disrespect. It's just that I had always felt that rabbis, priests, pastors, any cleric, really, lived on a plane between mortal ground and heavenly sky. God up there. Us down here. Them in between.
Mitch Albom
#25. I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
Steven Weinberg
#26. It's not about terror or anything else, it's about politics, and so it becomes more about politics than it does about faith. Orthodox rabbis - that is about faith. There's not a single Orthodox rabbi on this list. This is all Reformed rabbis that were - that made this list.
Glenn Beck
#27. Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.
Thomas Szasz
#28. Did you know that Judaism is based on paradigm shifts, Henry? First came Abraham, then came Moses. Then came the prophets, then came the rabbis. Pretty amazing stuff. Each iteration, reaching for the godhead. What comes next, Henry? What comes next?
Michael Davidow
#29. Whatever the faults of the rabbis, consistency was not one of them.
Solomon Schechter
#30. Clergymen tend to be unreliable and pompous figures. Seldom Jewish rabbis, less often Catholic priests, but Protestant ministers tend to be ... not really very admirable. Not necessarily evil, but silly. And wrong, of course.
Charlton Heston
#31. Mainstream rabbis essentially closed the book on dreams by the sixth century, and Church fathers established that only certain saints have the discernment to determine which dreams are from God. The dream is exiled.
Rodger Kamenetz
#33. Rock music had become my religion. Radio my church. And these DJs my priests, rabbis and gurus.
Steven Van Zandt
#34. Human excellence, parted from God, is like a fable flower, which, according to Rabbis, Eve plucked when passing out of paradise
severed from its native root, it is only the touching memorial of a lost Eden; sad, while charming
beautiful, but dead.
Charles Villiers Stanford
#35. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, "Where there is no money, there is no learning." The rabbis explain that unless people's stomachs are full and satisfied, they cannot study, grow spiritually, and do good works.
H.W. Charles
#36. We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech.
Karen Armstrong
#37. I am humbled and deeply honored to have been asked to serve the congregants of Shearith Israel, a congregation with an incomparable history, where some of America's most distinguished rabbis have pastored and preached.
Meir Soloveichik
#38. The Orthodox believe in Jewish literacy, and most of the rest of us couldn't care less. Rabbis and other creatures have a monopoly on Judaism. This is a turnoff in a world that is increasingly secular and that has turned away from religion. Jews are simply turning away from Judaism.
Michael Steinhardt
#39. My brothers were rabbis. My grandfather was a rabbi.
Saul Leiter
#40. Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air - our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world and that everything should revolve round us.
Jackie Tabick
#41. Tom looked more and more like a rabbi. As is the way of men of character in provincial towns, he tended to become a collection of mannerisms, a caricature of himself.
Frank O'Connor
#42. The disinhibition caused by said brain damage, can also spur the infected individual to seek the pleasure of compulsive, casual sexual activity
Chuck Palahniuk
#43. You've been the rabbi here for thirty years and these guys who've never set foot here want to decide who should be rabbi or not. And to lead prayer in Hebrew for Jews who speak Arabic, they want you to write in French. So I say they're nuts.
Joann Sfar
