The Jew in the Lotus

Jews have achieved because they consider secular achievement a religious excellence.

The glory of Judaism is that there is no single voice. There’s no pope setting the key. So it’s a vast musical library.

Ever since the Holocaust we are all like priests who have become contaminated by death.

“The Orthodox Jewish community is third world in theology and philosophy. Having a political state of Israel now, I’m convinced the great religious challenge is going to be the pluralist issue. Each culture can no longer present itself as self-evident.”

He explained that the basic Buddhist concept of shunyata, or emptiness, which derives from Indian philosophy, was carried by a Jewish scholar into the Arabic world where it became the mathematical zero.

The “demand for spirituality today” is “at the deepest level subjective, it’s in the nominative, not in the accusative, the dative, the genitive. In shul, I’m there because it’s genitive: my poppa belonged to the shul, I’m of it. I’m an accusative Jew because a goy calls me that way. Because I’ve been circumcised and I have this history, my dative

For Jews, the journey to paradise is a journey of interpretation.

There is a beautiful Hasidic teaching, that before every human being comes a retinue of angels, announcing, “Make way for an image of the Holy One, Blessed be He.” How rarely do we listen for those angels when we encounter another human being. How rarely do we see in another human being’s eyes an image of everything we hold most dear.

Rabbi Greenberg explained that we lost 30 percent of the Jewish people during the war, but more than 80 percent of the scholars, mystics, and teachers who could pass on ancient traditions.