Friday the Rabbi Slept Late Quotes

“our prayers are rarely petitionary. We don’t so much ask for things that we don’t have as give thanks for what we have received.” “I don’t understand.” The rabbi smiled. “It’s something like this. You Christians say, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread.’ Our comparable prayer is, ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who bringest forth bread from the earth.’ That’s rather over-simplified, but in general our prayers tend to be prayers of thanksgiving for what has been given to us.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“Life after death means for us that part of our life that lives on in our children, in the influence that survives us after death, and the memories people have of us.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“Oh no, we stem from different traditions, all three of us. Monsignor O’Brien is a priest in the tradition of the priests of the Bible, the sons of Aaron. He has certain powers, magical powers, that he exercises in the celebration of the Mass, for example, where the bread and wine are magically changed to the body and blood of Christ. Dr. Skinner as a Protestant minister is in the tradition of the prophets. He has received a call to preach the word of God. I, a rabbi, am essentially a secular figure, having neither the mana of the priest nor the ‘call’ of the minister. If anything, I suppose we come closest to the judges of the Bible.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“Our people have only the one chance. Our good deeds must be done on this earth in this life. And since there is no one to share the burden with them or to intercede for them they must do it on their own.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“An applicant for a job who disagrees with his prospective employer is either a fool or he has convictions, and there was nothing to suggest to me that your husband was a fool.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“You Jews have no political sense whatsoever, and we Irish have a genius for it. When you argue or campaign for office, you fight on the issues. And when you lose, you console yourselves with the thought you fought on the issues and argued reasonably and logically. It must have been a Jew who said he’d rather be right than President. An Irishman knows better; he knows that you can do nothing unless you’re elected. So the first principle of politics is to get elected. And the second great principle is that a candidate is not elected because he’s the logical choice, but because of the way he has his hair cut, or the hat he wears, or his accent. That’s the way we pick even the President of the United States, and for that matter, that’s the way a man picks his wife. Now wherever you have a political situation, political principles apply. So don’t you worry as to why or how you were chosen. You just be happy that you were chosen.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“Our people have only the one chance. Our good deeds must be done on this earth in this life. And since there is no one to share the burden with them or to intercede”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“To most of us, it was merely a matter of form. We would have voted the contract right then and there.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“Without meaning to, you usually end up with a board made up of the richer members of the congregation.”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

“We Yankees don’t like anybody, including each other, but we tolerate everybody.” Even”
― Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late