Everyday Holiness Quotes

“The central statement of faith in Judaism is the Sh’ma, which reads: “Hear Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One.” Only in silence is it possible to hear.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Who is rich?” asks Ben Zoma,17 and he answers, “One who is content with his lot.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Compassion is the feeling of empathy which the pain of one being of itself awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned are they to re-echo the note of suffering which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“In Pirkei Avot4 we learn that “the world stands on three things: on the Torah, on the service of God, and upon acts of loving-kindness.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to accomplish and to mend!”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“As the Sages state: ‘The desire for honor removes a man from the world.’ However, the reverse is true concerning others, as the Sages said: ‘Who is honored? He who honors others.’”7 Do not seek honor for yourself, but go out of your way to honor others.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“When you live with other people and you are content to make a mess in shared spaces, you dishonor the people you live with.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Rabbi Elyakim Krumbein puts it, “To fulfill the Torah means to grow as a person, and to grow truly as a person is tantamount to the fulfillment of Torah.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“When asked how he had had such an impact as a great sage and leader in the twentieth-century Jewish world, the Chafetz Chaim answered, “I set out to try to change the world, but I failed. So I decided to scale back my efforts and only try to influence the Jewish community of Poland, but I failed there, too. So I targeted the community in my hometown of Radin, but achieved no greater success. Then I gave all my effort to changing my own family, and failed at that as well. Finally, I decided to change myself, and that’s how I had such an impact on the Jewish world.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Giving thanks can become a flow that waters the fields of life.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“The tradition is so insistent that we be living vessels of compassion that the Talmud asserts that “anyone who is not compassionate with people is certainly not a descendant of our forefather Abraham.”2”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Occupy a rightful space, neither too much nor too little. Focus neither on your own virtues nor the faults of others. Generally, man finds his delight in examining his own virtues, in discovering even the smallest of his positive attributes and the most minute faults of his friends, for he can then find reason to be proud even when in the company of great ones whose little fingers are thicker than his loins.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Equanimity is a quality of being centered in yourself, though at the same time being exquisitely sensitive to the forces that are at work all around, or else you will be vulnerable to being tossed around by the sorts of unexpected waves that crash in on every life.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“The second stage in Mussar practice involves restraint. Our new awareness calls out for active steps to change the circumstances of our lives. Once we realize how rarely the moments of real silence occur in our days, we can restrain the input and the output of noise that swirls around us. We do have a choice.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“The pursuit of comforts and pleasure depletes spiritual energy simply because we have only so much energy in our lives. We waste precious energy by running after the shiny apple, and then we have nothing left for higher pursuits.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Contrast Moses, eved HaShem par excellence, who is described in the Shabbat Amidah prayers as “Moses will be happy with the gift of his portion because a faithful servant You have called him.”10 Happy. A servant.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Being a servant of God means striving to align my will to that of the Master. I desire to unify my will with God’s will within my own life and to delight in that unification. Rabbi Gamliel used to say: “Do His will as if it were your will that He may do your will as if it were His will.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Take time, be exact, unclutter the mind. —Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter of Kelm”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Who is rich?” and then answers, “He who rejoices in his own lot.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“It is not enough to feel reverence; one must act reverently.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness

“Occupy a rightful space, neither too much nor too little. Focus neither on your own virtues nor the faults of others.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Awaken to the good and give thanks.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“I have even heard holiness defined as the absence of self-interest.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“An Image of Disorder Consider the consequences of disorder, and you will be strengthened in choosing order in your life. The Torah gives us a direct teaching in this regard in the famous story of the Tower of Babel.16 The Hebrew word for sin, averah—like its English counterpart transgression—means “straying across a boundary.” The tower builders’ efforts to reach out to touch heaven were sinful because they transgressed the limits and constraints that are laid into the deep structure of the universe. Stretching for heaven, they failed to honor the distinction between the human and the divine. Since they flaunted order, their punishment was to suffer disorder, as represented by their inability to communicate with one another. Failure to honor the need for order brings on chaos. This cautionary tale applies to our lives, too. How much time, energy, emotion, and life is diverted into the channels that spring from disorder? Where are the Haggadot for the Seder? Where is my tallis? Who forgot to set the clock? Why didn’t you take the soup out of the freezer? Why would I buy milk if it wasn’t on the list? It’s in here somewhere. I almost got there. How many relationships are challenged or even destroyed by lack of attention to order? Without order, you are bound to be wasting something—whether time, resources, things themselves that get lost, relationships, and so on. Not wasting is a Jewish ethical principle.17 Any management consultant will tell you that you have to get organized if you want to be effective, but our concern goes far beyond that. Our concern is how living in chaos throws up impediments to being attentive to the divine will. And isn’t a life at the other end of the spectrum, which would be obsessively rigid, every bit as much an obstacle to spiritual living? Picture chaos, with stuff flying and piles of junk and cluttered thinking and a clanging ruckus: who could possibly hear the fragile voice of truth whispering in the midst of the tornado? And in contrast, but equally disabling, where order has been taken to the point of extreme inflexibility, even if you heard the divine will, would there be anything you could do to meld your own personal will to the will of God, so unbending would your ways have become?”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“A day should not pass without acts of loving-kindness, either with one’s body, money, or soul.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

“Gossip is passing on to a person the negative things someone else had said.”
― Alan Morinis, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar