A Soulful Journey

What is an idol? Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol… Racial or religious bigotry must be recognized for what it is: blasphemy… To think of man in terms of white, black or yellow is more than an error. It is an eye disease, a cancer of the soul… God is every man’s pedigree. He is either the Father of all men or of no man. The image of God is either in every man or in no man… Equality as a religious commandment goes beyond the principle of equality before the law. Equality as a religious commandment means personal involvement, fellowship, mutual reverence and concern .   Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

  “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.” ― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

"If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals; read the New York Times, the news of the day....all the destructive and violent acts by young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society." -J oseph Campbell Better to know who you were created to be.

 "We have become a fire-engine religion...we only come in emergencies."   - Rabbi Lopian Come for the good times. It will make the bad times less painful and severe.

In the tart words of William Blake, the unrepentant critic of Newton and the Enlightenment, “He who sees the infinite in all things sees God.  He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.” We see what we are predisposed to see.

“Science can describe what has happened to a person; only religion can call it a tragedy.”  - Rabbi Harold Kushner We are an amalgam of tautological and creative thinking. The first is science’s call on our thinking while the other is concerned. Which motivates you with greater intensity?

"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein We need both our hearts and minds.

"All needs are one-sided. When hungry we are in need of food, yet food is not in need of being consumed. Things of beauty attract our minds; we feel the need of perceiving them, yet they are not in need of being perceived by us....Religion begins with the certainty that something is asked of us, that these are ends which are in need of us."   Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Rabbis were the most religious of men but had no word for religion.” – Israel Zangwill Why is that?  Perhaps because when you live it, there is no need to label it.

ITEM: “I was always an unbeliever, raised without religion….And I always tried to suppress nationalistic ardor…as something pernicious and unjust,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1926.  But when publication of his shocking views on human sexuality in the 1890’s led to his ostracism by Viennese society, Freud joined the Vienna lodge of B’nai Brith, the international Jewish fraternal order, to find people who would “receive me with friendliness.”   Despite his rejection of Jewish religious and ethnic particularism, he told the members in a speech written for the seventieth-birthday celebration of the lodge, “there remained enough other things to make the attraction of Judaism and Jews irresistible – many dark emotional forces, all the more potent for being so hard to grasp in word, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.” – Charles Silberman

"How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and to spill out his time as if it were scum!  How embarrassing for man to live in the shadow of greatness and to ignore it, to be a contemporary of God and not to sense it!  Religion is what man does with his ultimate embarrassment." -Abraham Joshua Heschel

"What young people need is not religious tranquilizers, religion as diversion, religious entertainment, but spiritual audacity.   It is wrong to reduce Hanukkah to latkes and dreidles.”   -Abraham Joshua Heschel

"I am not much of a Zionist-at least not in the way Einstein is,   even though I am one of the curators of the Hebrew University in Palestine. I recognized the great emotional force, though, of the Jewish center in the world and thought it would be a rallying point for Jewish ideals.   I was afraid for a while, though, that Zionism would become the occasion for a revival of the old religion, but I have been assured by people who have been there that all the Jews are you religious. Which is a good thing.” -Sigmund Freud, 1935

Once when in the eighteenth century the Vilna Gaon was teaching two pupils who were distracted, gazing at a bird soaring the sky.   He asked one of them, “What were you thinking as you watched the bird?” “I was thinking of the soul ascending to heaven,” he replied. The Vilna Gaon was not a fan of mysticism so he sent him away from the class. The Gaon then turned to the second boy and repeated his question.   The boy considered and answered, “If that bird dropped dead and fell between two fences who would own the body?” His teacher exclaimed, “God be praised!   Someone knows what religion is about!” -Lionel Blue The basis of religion is faith but its import is action.

One bright summer afternoon an artist was standing atop a rocky mountain cliff, painting the beautiful panorama.   He was deeply absorbed in his work.   With every stroke of the brush, he paused to regard his painting from various angles and smile to himself.   When he placed the last stroke on his masterpiece, the artists began stepping backwards in order to obtain a better view of the completed painting.   Little did he realize that each step was bringing him nearer to the edge of the cliff.   One more move would prove fatal and the artists would crash into the yawning abyss below.   His friend, standing nearby, noticed the danger.   Knowing that a warning would come to o late, he dashed over to the easel, seized a brush, and smeared the face of the painting.   The artists, furious at his friend’s behaviour, rushed toward his work and was thus saved from destruction. When the friend explained the precarious position from which he save him, th...

"This is a common device in all religious fanaticism [distorting religion for one's own purposes] when nobody is willing to listen, but everyone is willing to pronounce."   - Rabbi Lionel Blue One of the primary unspoken tenets of real faith - as opposed to our own invention - is the ability to hear disparate points of view without attacking the one who holds them.