Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)

various people can and do have multiple and widely varying conceptions of a person, all the more should that be true of God, who presumably is open to interaction with everyone.”

Rather than acting on every urge and indulging every appetite, we refuse to be at the mercy of our most base instincts, and we take the needs of others into account.

“the four Rs”: “Recognition of having done wrong. Regret. Resolution not to repeat. Restraining oneself in the face of the same temptation or opportunity that previously led to wrongdoing.”

“Study is greater, as study leads to action.”

While I admire the unselfconscious way some people of faith speak about God, their certitude about what they’re saying makes me nervous, and I appreciate the skepticism with which many Jews approach the Divine.

“Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so.”

the Rabbis actually regarded someone who committed a sin and then did teshuvah to be in a better position than one who never committed that sin in the first place.

God is not a being, but rather the process of being. Connecting with this kind of God is less about addressing an entity and more about simply being present with what is. As Rabbi Alexander Schindler described it, “The closer I feel to life at each lived moment, the closer I feel to God.”

What was unusual about the Torah was its concern not just for vulnerable Israelites, but for vulnerable non-Israelites as well. They too, the Torah insists, are in God’s image.