The Source

by James A. Michener

a Jewish girl who has seen so much terror that there’s only one thing in the world she wants to be. A Jewish girl.”

“when three stars can be seen in the heavens at one glance” Shabbat ends

“What do you own? Really?” Reich countered. “Your education. Your force of character. Your family. Do you really own the other things? Or do they own you?”

The businessman in Chicago who objects to his wife’s expenditures on jewelry should visit a prehistoric cave, he thought. There he’d find that his wife is in the grand tradition.

And the anguish that Ur knew that night—the mystery of death, the triumph of evil, the terrible loneliness of being alone, the discovery that self of itself is insufficient—is the anxiety that torments the world to this day.

She was reluctant to think that the moral structure of a town could determine the kind of people who lived therein, but that appeared to be the case.

but also because he knew that if his god had intended his Hebrews to use bronze he would have put it in the world for them and not have asked them to mix metals, which was a suspicious occupation and an evidence of human arrogance.

there was an ancient truth that had been proved by long years of usage and there was innovation which might lead men into unknown regions, and he was determined to keep his people secure in the old ways.

“A man who had known God, who had created a nation, who had laid down the law that all of us still follow. And when he dies you say of him, ‘He could still function in bed.’ Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”

Zadok lived personally within the bosom of El-Shaddai and could visualize no existence outside that all-encompassing deity.

The complaisant town of Makor with its amiable gods could never have produced Yahweh; that transformation required the captivity in Egypt, the conflict with the Pharaohs, the exodus, the years of hunger and thirst in the desert, the longing for a settled home and the spiritual yearning for a known god … these were the things required for the forging of Yahweh.

a man who had run away from everything but the pursuing power of Yahweh.

“A man is never old if he can still be moved emotionally by a woman of his own age.”

If we know what He wants, we will know what we want.”

“When you once describe a venture as a holy war you surrender all capacity to judge honest alternatives.”

Judaism can be understood, it seems to me, only if it is seen as a fundamental philosophy directed to the greatest of all problems: how can men live together in an organized society?”

Two Jews get together, they build three synagogues. ‘You go to yours, I’ll go to mine, and we’ll both boycott that son of a bitch on the hill.’

“And the Talmudic rabbis who worked here at Tiberias were the worst of the lot, codifying into ugly little categories all things that God intended to be free.”

“Then we shall begin the real battle,” the rebbe said. “For the soul of Israel.”

“Religions are always in trouble,” Tabari said. “In adversity they grow honest. It’s good for them.”

‘If you need money, shame has not yet been invented.’

They had survived persecution, as the Vodzher Rebbe knew, only because their stern rabbis had kept them faithful to the law, and if now this law raised certain difficulties, that was nothing new; it had always done so.

for if His law was exacting it was also ennobling.

Life isn’t meant to be easy, it’s meant to be life. And no religion defended so tenaciously the ordinary dignity of living. Judaism stressed neither an after-life, an after-punishment, nor heaven; what was worthy and good was here, on this day, in Zefat. We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.