Top 100 Rabbi Quotes
#1. ("Tell me," a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. "Do you think God cares?")
Joan Didion
#2. The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.
Benjamin Cohen
#3. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize
Arthur Hertzberg
#4. 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
#5. Whether a man favors crepes and classical or cornbread and country, the complexities of life are all the same.
-The Rabbi-
J. Frank Dunkin
#6. She is not for you. She is a wild one
wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.
Bernard Malamud
#7. I refuse to stand up in front of a rabbi and my friends and the woman I love - who I will tell you I can love with all my heart - and promise she will be the only one I will ever have until the day I die. That's a lie.
Gene Simmons
#8. If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman
Martin Buber
#9. God is my best friend. I talk to God every day. And no one can tell me how to talk to God - not no imam, not no priest, not no rabbi, no pastor.
Eve
#10. One rabbi compared wise men studying the law to children tossing a ball to one another: a first sage said the meaning was this, another said the meaning was that, one gave his opinion, another begged to differ.
Israel Shenker
#11. Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it
Gerald Priestland
#12. If the plural of "octopus" is "octopi" then why isn't the plural of "rabbit" "rabbi"? Is it just because "octopuses" is too much fun to say? *
Jenny Lawson
#13. Life is a very narrow bridge between two eternities. Be not afraid.
Rabbi Nachman of Braslav
Nachman Cohen
#14. Too often we attempt to teach people to swim in a classroom. If you have ever taken swimming lessons, you immediately get the importance of getting in the water and practicing under the watchful eye of a swimming rabbi. Jesus invited the original twelve to go swimming with Him.
Ed Stetzer
#15. So know this, little one. Whether you are the Messiah, or you become a rabbi, or even if you are nothing more than a farmer, here is the sum of all I can teach you, and all that I know: treat others as you would like to be treated. Can you remember that?
Christopher Moore
#16. Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq.
Fran Lebowitz
#17. 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
#18. Every time I go into a new venture, I find a "rabbi" who has the business acumen to help me understand the mechanics of that industry, the costs involved in developing a product, and what you need to do in order to make a profit.
Russell Simmons
#19. Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" Rabbi Stern
Athol Dickson
#20. Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?
Martin Buber
#21. The twelfth-century poet Abraham ibn Ezra, whom you encountered in high school as Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra (may his tribe increase), limpidly described the shlimazl's lot when he wrote: If I sold lamps, The sun, In spite, Would shine at night.
Leo Rosten
#22. By the way, Reb, about the singing. What gives? Walt Whitman sang the body electric. Billie Holiday sang the blues. You sang ... everything. You could sing the phone book. I would call and say how are you feeling, and you'd answer, The old gray rabbi, ain't what he used to be ...
Mitch Albom
#23. Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.
Walter Kaufmann
#24. I'm twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.
Woody Allen
#25. How can a rabbi not live with doubt? The Bible itself is a book of doubt.
Arthur Hertzberg
#26. It's easy to feel like the bunny rabbi frozen in terror. And it's easy to feel like one of the fire balloons, at the whim of the wind, either rising up out of sight or burning down. Blow one direction or another.
Ava Dellaira
#27. Just for the record, I personally do agree with some of the sentiments of Rabbi Meir Kahane. I think he was right about certain things, wrong about other things, but I have absolutely nothing, no association whatsoever with Kahane Chai leaders.
Aaron Klein
#28. Given the circumstances, I think the rabbi did a very good job. What did you think?"
"It's my policy not to review funerals.
A.M. Homes
#29. Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
Jane Yolen
#30. The blue-eyed rabbi in our village at Samotschin used to talk to me as though I were a grown person, even when I was just a boy. We must believe in God, he told me, because if we don't we will have to believe in man, and then we will only be disappointed.
Anna Funder
#31. This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.
A. J. Jacobs
#32. I would like now to shed light in your heart on the truth of things, for it was not my will, but that of the Father and my Rabbi, which was done that faithful night.
Judas Iscariot
#33. It is easy for a rabbi to establish prohibitions, but a rabbi's real strength is to teach Torah and rule on lawwith an emphasis on what is permitted.
Ovadia Yosef
#34. A rabbi should not despair if people do not do as much as they should. Every parent has that with children. God is merciful.
Louis Finkelstein
#35. Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#36. A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt.
David Novak
#37. I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
Lionel Blue
#38. If I see any politician or a priest or an imam or a rabbi in the Paradise, I will give up believing in God!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#39. I know I would have learned a huge amount had I read the Bible with my rabbi. But I also would have missed a huge amount, and I would have been guided down the narrow paths where the rabbi led me, not the paths that I chose for myself.
David Plotz
#40. You can't appreciate a great day unless you've experienced bad ones. - Rabbi Glassman
Simone Elkeles
#41. The one thing needed is the decision to live so continually in Jesus' presence as to be always covered with the dust of the rabbi. Martha got
John Ortberg Jr.
#42. 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
#43. Thank you, Carol Lynn Pearson, for reminding us that the task of any religion is to teach us whom we're required to love, not whom we're entitled to hate. - Rabbi Harold Kushner
Carol Lynn Pearson
#44. 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
#45. I see the role of a rabbi or a pastor in general sort of like the role of a quarterback who throws the ball a little bit ahead of the receiver - that is you want to make people run just a bit to catch up to the message that you offer.
David Wolpe
#46. Passivity breeds anxiety. To be healthy, a person needs to be having an impact on his surroundings, uplifting those about him and bringing in more light
- Rabbi M.M. Schneerson
Rabbi M.M. Schneerson
#47. An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!
Lionel Blue
#48. The dangers is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says "I have the ultimate truth." Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts. In fact, you are the only one who is responsible.
Paulo Coelho
#49. And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.
Jorge Luis Borges
#50. 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
#51. I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.
George Steiner
#52. One should find wholeness in marriage, Gabriel, but it should not be a prison for either party, said Rabbi Loew.
Deborah Harkness
#53. If you spent your life trying to be LIKE EVERYBODY, you will only succeed at BECOMING A NOBODY. (Rabbi Celso Cukierkorn Bestselling Author and Speaker)
Celso Cukierkorn
#54. Not that the study is not important. A Jewish rabbi I once studies with would often say, 'For us Jews studying the bible is more important than obeying it because if you don't understand it rightly you will obey it wrongly and your obedience will be disobedience.
This is also true.
Eugene H. Peterson
#55. Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: "Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#56. In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.
Alan Dershowitz
#57. My brothers were rabbis. My grandfather was a rabbi.
Saul Leiter
#58. In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. "I believe in Spinoza's God," he answered, "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
Jim Holt
#59. Still, I'd like to know how you came up with that line of reasoning." "You can thank a rabbi," Javna said. "And a hot dog.
John Scalzi
#60. Rabbi Heshel said: "A man should be like a vessel that willingly receives what its owner pours into it, whether it be wine or vinegar.
Martin Buber
#61. I am not a priest, I am not an imam, I am not a rabbi and I am implementing the French laws on every French citizen.
Jacques Myard
#62. There comes a time in every rabbi's life when he thinks he's Moses.
Silvia Tennenbaum
#63. Rabbi Marx pointed out to me that there is a verse in Isaiah that says, "You are my witness. I am the Lord,
Thomas L. Friedman
#64. and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?' The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important
Diane Ackerman
#65. A second-century rabbi said that if 999 angels gave a bad account of a man and one angel reported favorably, God would hear the one angel; even if 999 parts of that one angel's report were unfavorable, God would hearken to the favorable part.
Israel Shenker
#66. The gentle Rabbi reminds us that few things really matter and only one thing is necessary ... Martha found it in the gentle reminder to slow down, let go, and be careful of challenging another woman's choices, for you never know when she may be sitting at the feet of God.
Rachel Held Evans
#67. In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, "God is so great, he does not even need to exist."
Victor Frederick Weisskopf
#68. In the future, the Holy One, Blessed be He, will bring about great disasters in the countries of the world to sweeten the judgments of the Land of Israel.1 - Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, 2005
Carl Gallups
#69. God answers every prayer, Rabbi Schumann once told him, years ago. Mostly His answer is 'no'.
Paul Russell
#70. Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.
Diane Ackerman
#71. First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.
Barbara Walters
#72. I got a imam, I got a rabbi, I got a priest, I got a reverend - I got 'em all. But I don't want to be holier-than-thou. I want to help everybody and still get some (sex).
Mike Tyson
#73. I would become a priest or a rabbi or a monk or whatever the hell was necessary to perform miracles such as taking money from someone else's pocket and putting it into mine, still remaining within the confines of the law.
Lenny Bruce
#74. Like the rabbi with the red circle, she should have said "no" to everything. She should have become a raven. She didn't understand that every word the judge said was a trap, in that every word she said could easily be a stone used to shut her into that trap.
Alice Hoffman
#75. A rabbi told me that when you have two problems - one near, one not so near - concentrate on the immediate one.
Ariel Sharon
#76. You're at a Jewish wedding. How can you tell if it's Orthodox, Reform, or Liberal? A: In an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant. In a Reform wedding, the bride is pregnant. In a Liberal wedding the rabbi is pregnant.
David Minkoff
#77. telling the jokes - was the setups. Why were that priest, that rabbi, and that minister walking down that street? Where were they headed? How had they happened to come together? What odd chance had put ex-presidents Bush, Clinton, and Carter on that same plane?
Donald E. Westlake
#78. Of all the rabbinic sages of antiquity, perhaps none was more influential or famous than Rabbi Akiva.
Meir Soloveichik
#79. The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
David Novak
#80. The great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use" ('God in Search of Man' p34)
Paul F Herring
#81. I knew there was only one place to go. I sank down into the center of my soul, grew still, and listened to the Rabbi's heartbeat.
Brennan Manning
#83. As the former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks has expressed it: "If the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, the Rebbe wished to search out every Jew in love.
Joseph Telushkin
#84. In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution.
Kage Baker
#85. The rabbi glanced over glumly from behind the jail bars. 'My faith in God is fine,' he said. 'It's people I'm not so sure about.
Richard Fliegel
#86. When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn't any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.
Richard P. Feynman
#87. In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager)
Yehuda Amichai
#88. With two children of my own, I know what it means to balance the demands of family and career - and let's not even talk about finding a date for myself. Rabbi Shmuley keeps telling me he'll find me the perfect woman. My response is, 'As long as she's not a journalist'.
Michael Jackson
#89. My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.
David Steinberg
#90. The beth din is the court of the chief rabbi. I see myself taking an active role within the beth din.
Ephraim Mirvis
#91. The Rabbi thought he saw an expression of perplexity in the golem's eyes. It seemed to the Rabbi that his eyes were asking, 'Who am I? Why am I here? What is the secret of my being? Rabbi Leib often saw the same bewilderment in the eyes of newborn children and even in the eyes of animals.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#92. 'Rabbi' means 'teacher,' and I see the role of chief rabbi as chief teacher.
Ephraim Mirvis
#93. To me designing has never been a job or profession. It's a way of life, like a priest or rabbi.
Ed Benguiat
#94. In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the "Kingdom of Ishmael" to conquer Palestine.
Karen Armstrong
#95. I'm not a practicing kabbalist. I'm not a spiritual master. I'm not a rabbi. I don't - but it's part of who I am.
John Zorn
#96. Jesus must have been married to have been called a rabbi.
Darrel Ray
#97. I want a priest, a rabbi and a Protestant minister. I want to hedge my bets.
Wilson Mizner
#98. I wanted to be a soccer player. And then I wanted to be a rabbi.
Jake Epstein
#99. Perhaps we would do well to listen to the likes of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed.
Tony Campolo
#100. 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
