The Thirteen Petalled Rose Quotes

“Torah and the world is thus the relation between idea and actualization, between vision and fulfillment. So that the intellectual study of Torah and the emotional involvement in its contents are a form of identification with the divine will, with what may be called God’s dream of the existence of the world and the existence of man.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“If anything is clear, it is that a rigid, unchanging way is wrong.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse on the Essence of Jewish Existence and Belief

“The concept of time in the Jewish way of thinking is not one of linear flow. Time is a process, in which past, present, and future are bound to each other, not only by cause and effect but also as a harmonization of two motions: progress forward and a countermotion backward, encircling and returning.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“The principal action of the soul, however, its paramount importance, lies not in its abstractness, its remoteness from the physical world, but precisely in the world of living creatures, in its contact with matter. Because within the extremely complex system of relations between the soul and the world of material substance as a whole – especially relations with its own body – the soul is able to reach far higher levels than it can in its abstract state of separate essence, in what is known as the paradisiacal state outside the body. The process of the soul’s connection with the body – called the “descent of the soul into matter” – is, from a certain perspective, the soul’s profound tragedy. But the soul undertakes this terrible risk as a part of the need to descend in order to make the desired ascent to hitherto unknown heights. It is a risk and a danger, because the soul’s connection with the body and its contact with the material world where it is the only factor that is free – unbounded by the determinism of physical law and able to choose and move freely – make it possible for the soul to fall and, in falling, to destroy the world. Indeed, Creation itself, and the creation of man, is precisely such a risk, a descent for the sake of ascension.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“The Talmud recounts that King David’s harp would play itself at midnight. And the Jerusalem Talmud comments that in the verse, “When the musician would play music, the hand of God would be upon him,” the word for “musician” should be read as “musical instrument” instead: the instrument would play by itself. Why do our sages insist on conflating musician and musical instrument? The answer is that when a person attains the perfect level of prayer, he himself is an instrument playing music spontaneously; he has become the instrument of song, of prophecy, of prayer. The melody is his, and his entire being is none other than an instrument expressing that prayer.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“Repentance does not bring a sense of serenity or of completion but stimulates a reaching out in further effort.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“A pragmatic examination of the way of life that results from obedience to the Torah shows that in the long run, besides offering considerable freedom in almost every area of endeavor, such obedience lends to every act the quality of ritual and makes it seem a direct link between man and his Maker.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“The more one becomes identified with the Torah, the more does its significance expand beyond particular circumstance.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“Chapter five Torah”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“The surrender of oneself on the Sabbath is not simply a matter of no activity but of opening oneself to the influence of the higher worlds and thereby receiving the strength for all the days of the week that follow.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“The movement of a man’s finger is as important or unimportant as the most terrible catastrophe, for as against the Infinite both are of the same dimension.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“Just as man’s true soul, his inapprehensible self, is never revealed to others but manifests itself through his mind, emotions, and body, so is the Self of God not revealed in His original essence except through the ten Sefirot.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“Thus, all the articulated visions of prophecy are nothing more than ways of representing an abstract, formless, spiritual reality in the vocabulary of human language; although, to be sure, there may also be a revelation of an angel in quite ordinary form, clothed in some familiar vessel and manifested as a “normal” phenomenon in nature.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose

“The physical world in which we live, the objectively observed universe around us, is only a part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence; they are of a different order from our known world.”
― Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose