Top 75 Quotes About The Torah
#1. The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now.
David Novak
#2. I don't do Jewish stuff because I don't want people to be left out. If I mention the Torah in Alabama, it's not going to go down that well. I used to do some Jewish jokes because when I started, I used to play lots of Jewish country clubs.
Rita Rudner
#4. To be Christian means to find the decisive revelation of God in Jesus. To be Muslim means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Koran. To be Jewish means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Torah, and so forth.
Marcus Borg
#5. Muhammad's example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran. Certainly,
Reza Aslan
#6. Judaism is absolutely incompatible with the abandonment of the Torah.
Solomon Schechter
#7. Jews focus on the Torah, the embodiment of God's will; Christians, on an embodied God.
Meir Soloveichik
#8. Was raised on the Torah, my wife on the Qu'Ran, my eldest son is an Atheist, my youngest is a scientologist, my daughter is studying Hinduism, I imagine there is room there for a holy war in my living room, but we practice live and let live.
Jerome Bixby
#9. My heart can be pasture for deer and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and a Kaaba for the pilgrims. It is both the tables of the Torah and the Koran. It professes the religion of Love wherever its caravans are heading. Love is my law. Love is my faith.
Ibn Arabi
#10. My heart has become capable of every form: It is a pasture for gazelles And a monastery for Christian monks, And the pilgrim's Ka'ba, And the tablets of the Torah, And the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: Whatever way love's camel takes, That is my religion, my faith.
Ibn Arabi
#11. It's no coincidence that the word 'holiday' suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
Pico Iyer
#12. There are thousands of codes in the Torah which are decoded by the Talmud.
H.W. Charles
#13. I wouldn't even dare read the Torah, let alone attempt a witty observation on the Torah.
Charles Grodin
#14. There is the illusion of the world and the reality of the Torah.
Meir Kahane
#15. One compelling alternative to land theology is the recognition that Judaism consists most elementally in interpretation of and obedience to the Torah in its requirements of justice and holiness.
Walter Brueggemann
#16. A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invented when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera ...
Roman Vishniac
#17. Throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran.
Reza Aslan
#18. When the great theologian and philosopher Rabbi Hillel was challenged to explain the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot, he replied, Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. All else is commentary.
Edward O. Wilson
#20. I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
#21. Though my father was poor and had nothing, the Torah, the poetry of prophets, was his daily bread.
Anzia Yezierska
#22. In the Einstein way, I can't believe in a universe that doesn't have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation.
Simon Schama
#23. Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority.
Greg Mortenson
#24. My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#25. I don't remember any snow in all of the Torah. The Lord probably doesn't even go to places where it snows.
Christopher Moore
#26. The giving of the Torah is a story of God seeking to provide humanity with the opportunity to make moral decisions.
Meir Soloveichik
#27. The Jewish tradition presents itself as the greatest revelation of God's truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves 'the chosen people.' It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah.
David Novak
#28. The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute; if you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth.
Conor Oberst
#29. In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.
Jeanette Winterson
#32. If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.
David Novak
#33. You've read the Torah, right? So you know the Torah defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.
Josh Mandel
#34. It specifically says in the Torah that you can eat shrimp and bacon in a Chinese restaurant.
Jason Alexander
#35. Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-Tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won't break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon.
Christopher Moore
#36. I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity
Harold Bloom
#37. I'll quote from Ecclesiastes to the Catholics, from the Koran to the Muslims, from the Torah to the Jews, from Aristotle to the atheists.
Paulo Coelho
#38. The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#39. 111God has purchased the persons and possessions of the believers in return for the Garden - they fight in God's way: they kill and are killed - this is a true promise given by Him in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur'an. Who
Anonymous
#40. Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.
Shalom Auslander
#41. And you can't make a mistake when you are reading the Torah, so you have men standing around who will correct you if you are reading it incorrectly.
Jami Gertz
#42. The Bible is not religion, nor are the Vedas. The Torah is not religion, nor is the Quran, or any other scripture on earth.
Abhijit Naskar
#43. The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power.
Simon Schama
#44. I don't think you could pull one Bob Marley song that didn't have quotes from the Torah or the Old Testament.
Matisyahu
#45. If He (God) is invisible, how does He know what He looks like?'
"The Torah tells us He has made man in His own image, after His likeness, and therefore He does but glance at you, my son, and sees Himself.
Noah Gordon
#46. We humans are the culmination of God's efforts. The Torah is man centered under God centered. It's like TWIN pillars, TWIN centers. It's NOT JUST God centered.
Dennis Prager
#47. I shall teach you the best way to say Torah. You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, YOU must stop.
Martin Buber
#48. Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God. Beloved are Israel, for they were called children of God. Beloved are Israel, for unto them was given the desirable Torah
Rabbi Akiva
#49. People expect someone with the name 'Israel Horovitz' to be a little old man with sideburns carrying a Torah.
Israel Horovitz
#50. The religious Jew is to study Torah for the sake of studying Torah. Torah lishmah. The ingenuity of the edict, I realized was that it relieved you of the obligation to be qualified. You studied because you had to study, and those who taught had to take you as a student.
Judith Shulevitz
#51. Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.
N. T. Wright
#52. I assume as a child Jesus had to learn how to do carpentry, learn Torah, learn all the things a human child had to learn. If He was human in all ways except that He did not sin, this must have been the case.
Anne Rice
#54. Where there is Torah it sustains the world.
Ovadia Yosef
#55. Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering.
Chaim Potok
#56. Judaism is my life. Everything I do is through the lens of Torah.
Matisyahu
#57. The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own ...
Robert M. Price
#58. In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
David Novak
#61. Golden Rule": "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.
Hillel The Elder
#62. As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise," or Rabbi Hillel's statement, "What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.
Paul Bloom
#63. To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar,
motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document.
Neal Stephenson
#64. We will have many fights. But they will be for the sake of Torah.
Chaim Potok
#66. Nowhere in the Bible, Koran, or Torah does it say, "If you curse, then you're going to hell." But everywhere it says that if you kill, you're going to wherever they send you, depending on the religion.
Russell Simmons
#67. Torah is not merely a collection of prohibitions, rigid strictures and boring observances. Rather, it is a narrative of the blessings and promises of God initially offered to one person and family, but through which the whole world will ultimately be blessed.
Walter C. Kaiser Jr.
#68. Both of my parents would say they were atheists, so where I inherited my connection to God I don't know. But it's natural. No Bible, no Torah, just the love religion.
Lisa Bonet
#69. By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.
Karen Armstrong
#70. The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.
Wendy Mogel
#71. The ruach blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but cannot tell from where it comes or where it goes. God is He, He is Ruach (Spirit) and Ruach is speaking to our ruach (spirit) revealing great mysteries, knowledge, wisdom, understanding and joy.
Sipporah Joseph
#72. How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.
Meir Soloveichik
#73. The easiest way for Americans to make sense of Chinese history is to compare everything to Jewish history. There's an analogue for everything. Torah: Analects. Curly sideburns: long ponytails. Mantou: bagels.
Eddie Huang
#74. One cannot accept Christ and still be part of the normative Jewish community; one cannot live by Torah and still be part of the Church.
David Novak
#75. The observant Jew has his own sense of values. Torah Judaism is his blueprint for this life, his target for existence.
Meir Kahane
