Jews From Israel

"Do not say "When I have leisure, I will study", perhaps you will not have leisure."

"אם אין אני לי, מי לי? וכשאני לעצמי, מה אני? ואם לא עכשיו, אימתי?"

"A name made great is a name destroyed. He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it."

"Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and drawing them near to the Law."

"דעלך סני לחברך לא תעביד. זו היא כל התורה כולה, ואידך פירושה הוא: זיל גמור"

"Hillel stood in the gate of Jerusalem one day and saw the people on their way to work. "How much," he asked, "will you earn today?" One said: "A denarius"; the second: "Two denarii" "What will you do with the money?" he inquired. "We will provide for the necessities of life." Then he said to them: "Would you not rather come and make the Torah your possession, that you may possess both this world and the world to come?""

"when he died, they eulogized him (in the following manner): Alas pious one, alas humble one, student of Ezra"

"Architecture is not about building the impossible, which we can do if we have enough money and enough tools and enough computers, it is about building what is appropriate and about attaining beauty through such an approach. I describe this premise as "inherent buildability and I believe it is central to what I do."

"When I got my first commission after Habitat, for a few weeks I couldn't draw.""

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."

"To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East."

"Life, in that it is life, necessarily entails justice."

"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?'""

"studying the early civil rights movement in college, I'd been intrigued by the influence of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber on Dr. King's sermons and writings."

"Buber and Tillich each took similar paths toward their common destination of religious socialism. Both had been influenced early in their careers by the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche's rejection of bourgeois culture in his classic book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and were further influenced by Karl Marx's doctrine of human self-estrangement and objectification in capitalist society while rejecting his anti-religious bias. Moreover, Buber and Tillich, along with all religious socialists, rejected the Marxist “revolutionary dictatorship” of the proletariat. This would represent the extreme of heteronomy for Tillich and the political manifestation of the I-it relationship expressed by Buber that is based on human instrumentalism.… Tillich initially promoted an "idealistic anarchism" in the sense that he envisioned a theonomous culture arising from "communities themselves and their spiritual substance" instead of being promoted by the state. They would eventually part ways to some extent, with Buber continuing to promote a "federalistic communal socialism" yet not rejecting the political component of social life, while Tillich promoted the possibility of a central government that is not absolute in a theonomous society."

"Martin Buber, the famous Jewish philosopher who was inspired by a strong “religious anarchism”, defined Judaism as a synthesis of three basic concepts: the idea of unity, the idea of action and the idea of a future."

"(“How do you feel about America? There are some who claim it has become a land of greed.”) MA: It doesn't have to be. It has been rapidly turning into that. One sees what happened with the Indians first, and the black Americans second, and every other visible group. But I don't believe that's all there is, or else Paul and I would never live here. I can sell my books I can live like James Baldwin in the south of France, or in West Africa. But I believe there's something else. There is a spirit. And it's almost like Martin Buber, a good-evil conflict."

"Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man."

"So long as a man’s power, that is, his capacity to realize what he has in mind, is bound to the goal, to the work, to the calling, it is, considered in itself, neither good nor evil, it is only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, that is, thinks of power in itself, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil; it is power withdrawn from responsibility, power which betrays the spirit, power in itself."

"The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit."

"Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power."

"Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss."

"The realer religion is, so much the more it means its own overcoming. It wills to cease to be the special domain "Religion" and wills to become life. It is concerned in the end not with specific religious acts, but with redemption from all that is specific."

"To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin, this old man had perhaps first learned it thoroughly in old age."

"When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought."

"In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness."

"God ... demands everything, in order to give everything anew to him who loves Him, after that loving has truly given up all."

"It is the highest service to submit the evil impulse to God through the power of love."

"As the oil is in the olive, so is the teshuvah, repentance, hidden within sin."

"God ... desires His creature to be able to oppose Him. He has given that creature freedom. ... When man turns away from evil with that whole measure of power with which he is able to rebel against God, then he has truly turned to God."

"Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No And pressing forward honor reality.We cannot avoid Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully."

"Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair."

"When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse."

"The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: … the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth."

"Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man."

"In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself."

"An example may clarify more precisely the relation between the psychologist and the anthropologist. If both of them investigate, say, the phenomenon of anger, the psychologist will try to grasp what the angry man feels, what his motives and the impulses of his will are, but the anthropologist will also try to grasp what he is doing. In respect of this phenomenon self-observation, being by nature disposed to weaken the spontaneity and unruliness of anger, will be especially difficult for both of them. The psychologist will try to meet this difficulty by a specific division of consciousness, which enables him to remain outside with the observing part of his being and yet let his passion run its course as undisturbed as possible. Of course this passion can then not avoid becoming similar to that of the actor, that is, though it can still be heightened in comparison with an unobserved passion its course will be different: there will be a release which is willed and which takes the place of the elemental outbreak, there will be a vehemence which will be more emphasized, more deliberate, more dramatic. The anthropologist can have nothing to do with a division of consciousness, since he has to do with the unbroken wholeness of events, and especially with the unbroken natural connection between feelings and actions; and this connection is most powerfully influenced in self-observation, since the pure spontaneity of the action is bound to suffer essentially. It remains for the anthropologist only to resign any attempt to stay outside his observing self, and thus when he is overcome by anger not to disturb it in its course by becoming a spectator of it, but to let it rage to its conclusion without trying to gain a perspective. He will be able to register in the act of recollection what he felt and did then; for him memory takes the place of psychological self-experience. … In the moment of life he has nothing else in his mind but just to live what is to be lived, he is there with his whole being, undivided, and for that very reason there grows in his thought and recollection the knowledge of human wholeness."

"So long as you “have” yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things."

"You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight."

"The philosophical anthropologist … can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer."

"In philosophical anthropology, … where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature."

"Through the Thou a person becomes I."

"The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is divine meaning in the life of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and of me. Creation happens to us, burns itself into us, recasts us in burning — we tremble and are faint, we submit. We take part in creation, meet the Creator, reach out to Him, helpers and companions."

"Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless — when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God."

"Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others."

"All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him."

"Person erscheint, indem sie zu andern Personen in Beziehung tritt."

"Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos."

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."

"The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It."