The Orchard

Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Sicarii, Nazarenes – what did any of this have to do with him? From the little he had heard about them, he knew that he preferred the learned Pharisees who believed in the World to Come over the wealthy Sadducees who paid no mind to the simple folk, the aloof Essenes who frightened people with their prophesies of the

“I was asked to read the will. I was not asked to decipher the secrets of its author’s heart.”

The Nasi of the Sanhedrin must by nature incline toward the middle path – neither overly sensitive nor heartless, neither arrogant nor self-deprecating, neither despotic nor soft, neither frail nor wild. He must possess only two qualities in an extreme form – wisdom and appeal.

“We knew that Rabbi Akiva’s method of interpretation was making prophecy superfluous, which is why we called it midrash – inquiry. But we dared not take the next step and recognize what Rabbi Eliezer forced Rabbi Joshua to say openly today. Midrash frees us from God. We can interpret the Torah as we see fit. We don’t care what God meant to say. He

In our day, loyalty is not given to kin and to friends, as it is when things are right with the world, but rather to that elusive entity called “national unity.”

“The gentiles have already forgotten that there ever were Sadducees. They make no distinction between Sadducees and Pharisees. They don’t even know that Jesus was a Pharisee. All the Jews are to blame in their eyes.”

as sages are wont to do, each thinks differently, feels differently, and draws his own conclusions. After all, consensus is for the simple folk.

“Men cut up the world with sharp knives: ‘Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?’ We – the women – understand moderation and compromise.

The tradition of the past is the foundation: without a foundation, it is impossible to build new stories.”