Jewish With Feeling Quotes

“We make God the steward of morality and build up expectations, expectations that sooner or later are bound to be shattered. If instead we strive to accept all sides of the equation, if we could get into a Möbius strip mentality in which both sides of the page, good and evil, are one and the same, then we start to get a real sense of that famous phrase from Adon Olam: “Ve-hu echad ve-ein sheini,” God is one, there is no other.”
― Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“Indeed, religions might be seen as elaborate, multilayered metaphors, with layers upon layers of submetaphors, constructions that point beyond themselves toward the primary experience of ultimate reality but do not capture it.”
― Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“Pay attention to what gives you the greatest mileage. If you’re an intellectual person”
― Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“We’re not talking merely about dragging our focus back to the present moment, but about repeating an action until we can transcend “technique” and rise to a higher level. If you have ever devoted yourself to learning a musical instrument, or a craft like calligraphy or pottery, or a sport or martial art, you will get the sense here. The perfect golf or tennis swing comes only after a thousand swings; the perfect yoga pose after a thousand poses; the perfect earthenware pot after a thousand pots. We practice again and again until we are entrained, until the action wears a smooth and nearly effortless groove upon our bodies and hearts and minds. Only then can our controlling faculties relax and we can perform the action in harmony with the universe. So with mitzvot do we strive to act mindfully and in harmony each time. Of course we fall short of our aspirations, as we do in any practice we take up seriously. But without the striving we’d never make it at all.”
― Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“this may really be the purpose of the universe—that we ourselves are God growing Godself, and that the task of every person and faith community is to collaborate in that process.”
― Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“There is something about being alive that says to us, “I want.” No matter what we give it, it isn’t satisfied, because that “I want” wants nothing less than infinity: it wants it all.”
― Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“No one who hasn’t taken a vigil for the night and had it out with God can get to the place where their love and faith become real. We”
― Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“Theodicy, the philosophers call it: the problem of God’s justice. The”
― Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice

“Anyone who has had a truly “spiritual” moment, a moment of breaking through our day-to-day reality and touching the divine, knows how difficult it is to communicate that experience to others—or even to recapture it later for ourselves. The”
― Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish with Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice