This is My God Quotes

“Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life

“The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu--and a recognizable part--unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“A language has genius. Some works translate well, others are untranslatable. Molière is effective only in French. Without knowing Arabic nobody has ever understood the Koran. Pushkin remains a possession of the Russian people, though the world has acquired Tolstoy. In general, the higher the charge of peculiarly national identity and emotion, the less translatable a work is.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and fearful. It would be just as silly to assert that disbelief in God is a crutch for the immoral and the ill-read.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Tocqueville long ago marked as the great weakness of a democracy in his unforgettable phrase, “the tyranny of the majority.” The pressure to emulate neighbors, the urge to conform to popular views and manners, the deep fear of being different”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.

The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“What did they care if the rabbis who found them with the books of haskala, of enlightenment, called them epicureans, atheists, breakers of the wall? These old epithets they began to take as names of honor. Out of their ranks came the minds and spirits that created modern Zionism. The fact that Zionism was cradled against the separatist learning of the old yeshivas colors the state of Israel to this hour.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: 'Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.' This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of "Thou Shalt Nots" is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“A Talmud saying implies that in Messianic times the sacrifices will not be resumed in the restored Temple, except for the thank offerings.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Parlor talk seems to me on much more promising ground worrying over conformity than gnawing the bones of Freud.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“This particular argument was pleasanter than most, because the person setting me straight was a pretty seventeen-year-old girl, a college sophomore, and it was no strain to smile at her with good humor as she went about her work.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“I offer the book, relying on the maxim of Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of the Fathers: The work is not yours to finish; but neither are you free to take no part in it.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Scholars call it [the Torah] the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were Hebrew scribes of the first centuries of the present era. They fixed the wording and spelling of the Bible; since then it has not changed. It has long been a matter of critical controversy as to just how accurate the Masoretes were; for one thing, did they have a true text from ancient sources, or did they invent and corrupt? Opinion has swayed back and forth on this point. The excitement over the Dead Sea Scrolls came in part from their substantial authentication of the Masoretic Isaiah.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“In our own tradition, and on the basis of the words of Hebrew Scripture, there is not the faintest doubt that Moses is not only the source of Judaism under God, but its high reach as well.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear, in the way that best honors one's intelligence and one's birth. Part 2 THE FAITH”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“The Talmud is not only an encyclopedia of law but a work of folk art, a hymn to the Lord rising out of many generations of men who spent their lives in the quest for him. This quest for God, the confident search for the holy in every busy detail of life, is its grand single theme. The Talmud recaptures a long golden age of intelligence and insight, and it is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Judaism takes the verse in Genesis, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' as part of its statutory law. Because it is the first law in the Torah it holds a special eminence.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“In Judaism praying for benefits is a very small part of the liturgy. Most of it is commitment of one's fortunes to God, and meditation on sacred writings which put in clear words the few great points of our religion. Its daily aim is a renewal of religious energy through an act which declares one's Jewish identity and one's hope in the Lord.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“To sum up, then, we are Israelites, descended from the small nation which came out of the Sinai desert into Canaan three thousand years ago, with a tradition of liberation from Egypt, under a lawgiver and deliverer named Moses. We are called Jews, and our heritage Judaism, because in the political decline and fall of our nation the tribe which held out longest and became the surviving remnant in exile predicted by the Torah was named Judah. Almost all living Jews stem, at a remove of no more than four or five generations at the most, from observant Jews. Historically, Israelites who have discontinued the practice of the law of Moses have faded into the environment and lost their identity within a century or two. The attrition over the centuries has of course been enormous. The Jews who are left are mainly the sons and grandsons of those who have kept the faith, preserving the chain unbroken through time, from the twentieth century back to the sunrise of the human intelligence. Before examining this faith, we can surely acknowledge two things: first, that as a feat of gallantry of the spirit of man, the preservation of Judaism ranks high; second, that if ancient lineage be a source of legitimate pride, the Jews have a right to be a proud people.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“The reason for the prosperity of the wicked, and also for the troubles of the good, is not in our hands.” Then”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“tradition of liberation from Egypt, under a lawgiver and deliverer named Moses. We are called Jews, and our heritage Judaism, because in the political decline and fall of our nation the tribe which held out longest and became the surviving remnant in exile predicted by the Torah was named Judah.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“Get two non-Jews confiding in each other, after cautiously finding that they have enough common ground not to mistake each other for the kind of mental defective called an anti-Semite, and they are likely to agree that notwithstanding all this liberal talk Jews tend to be brash, pushing, sharp in business, vulgar in manners, loud in public, and so clannish that they band in a knot against the Christian world. They will also agree that they know Jews who are different, and that they number such Jews among their valued friends. There are, of course, many Christians who will take no part in such an exchange. But the reader will recognize the commonplaces.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“Our tradition has it that Job, the supreme figure of the man of faith in agony, was of the righteous of the world, and not a Jew.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“The two festivals have one real point of contact. Had Antiochus succeeded in obliterating Jewry a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, there would have been no Christmas. The feast of the Nativity rests on the victory of Hanuka. Chapter 8 The Prayers, the Synagogue, and the Worshippers GOD cannot be much of an Almighty, it has”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God

“She had been reading sociology and was full of terms like anomy, other-directedness, acculturation, and similar jawbreakers, which she got off with athletic ease.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Al nations celebrate the day of their coming into being with a work stoppage and ceremonies. The Jews, who believe that God created the universe, celebrate its coming into being, and give thanks to its Maker, once a week.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism