Telushkin - Jewish Wisdom

Between People: How to Be a Good Person in a Complicated World

Does Judaism Have an Essence?

When to Give, What to Give, How to Give: Why Tzedaka Is Not Charity

Helping the Helpless: What Are Our Obligations to Societys Most Vulnerable Members?

MenschNine Challenges a Good Person Must Meet

Honesty, Dishonesty, and the Gray Areas in Between

You Must Pay Him His Wages on the Same Day: Between Employers and Employees

Truth, Lies, and Permissible Lies

Sticks and Stones and Words: The Ethics of Speech

Arguing Ethically

The Obligation to Criticize, How to Do So, and When to Remain Silent

When Life Is at Stake

It Is As If He Saved the Entire World: The Infinite Value of Each Human Life

All Jews Are Responsible One for Another: Communal Responsibilities

Models of Leadership

Listen to Her Voice: Conflicting Biblical and Talmudic Views of the Character of Women

It Is Not Good for Man to Be Alone: Jewish Perspectives on Marriage

For Love Is As Strong as Death: Romantic Love

Sex: The Commanded, the Permitted, the Forbidden

Be Fruitful and Multiply: The Duty to Have Children

Between Parents and Children

If the Fetus Is Not a Life, What Is It?: Judaism and Abortion

Even the Altar Sheds Tears: Divorce

Love Your Neighbor

Either Friends or Death: Friendship

When I Was Young, I Admired Clever People. Now That I Am Old: Kindness and Compassion

What Does a Good Guest Say?: Good Manners

If You See Your Enemys Donkey: A Jewish Alternative to Jesus Command: Love Your Enemies

The Terrible Toll of Hatred

Good Advice on Fifteen Subjects

Personal Issues: Judaism and the Quest for Meaning

Human NatureA Somber Look

The Human Condition: Four Parables and a Bushel of Quotes

On Suffering

One Does More, and One Does Less: Humility

Did You See My Alps?: Against Asceticism

What Have I in Common with Jews?: Alienation

A Person Is Always Liable for His Actions: Free Will and Human Responsibility

Old Age: Anguish and Opportunities

The Anniversary of a Death, That a Jew Remembers: Death and Mourning

A Sentinel Who Has Deserted His Post: Suicide

The Afterlife

Who Is Rich?

Between People and God: What God Wants from Us

God

Is God Necessary for Morality?

Idolatry and Its Attractions

Chosen People: A Beautiful, but Often Misunderstood, Concept

Jews and God After the Holocaust

How Does One Sanctify Gods Name? How Does One Desecrate It?

Martyrs: Those Who Died al Kiddush ha-Shem (to Sanctify Gods Name)

Mitzvah (Commandment) and Some of the Distinguishing Characteristics of Judaism

Studying Torah

How Can We Tell When a Sin We Have Committed Has Been Pardoned?: On Repentance and Sin

Prayer

Rabbis

Your People Shall Be My People: Converts

You Shall Rejoice in Your Festival: A Few Scattered Thoughts on Jewish Holidays

Between People and the World: Jewish Values Confront Modern Values

People Would Swallow Each Other Alive: Against Anarchy

Let the Law Cut Through the Mountain: Jewish Principles of Justice

Murder and the Death Penalty: The Conflicting Views of the Bible and Talmud

Must the Sword Devour Forever?: Jewish Reflections on War

Against Utopianism

Poverty Would Outweigh Them All: The Curse of Poverty

A Physician Who Heals for Nothing Is Worth Nothing: Medicine and Doctors

For There Will Be No One to Repair It After You: Toward a Jewish Ecology

His Mercy Is upon All His Works: Jewish Ethics Toward Animals

Modern Jewish Experience: Major Themes

Antisemitism

Antisemitism and the American-Jewish Experience

Philosemitism

Assimilation and Intermarriage

A Miscellany: On Sports, Jewish Denominations, and Communism

The Holocaust

The Holocaust: A Prologue

What the Nazis Said

The Experience of the Final Solution: Six Stories out of Six Million

Before and During the Holocaust: Reactions in the West

Like Lambs to the Slaughter: Why Did More Jews Not Fight Back?

Then They Came for Me, and There Was No One Left: Heroic Words and Tragic Quotes

Let Them Go to Hell: Jewish Rage at the Nazis

Let Not the Murderers of Our Nation Also Be Its Heirs: The Debate over German Reparations

As Your Sword Has Made Women Childless: The Eichmann Trial

That Place Is Not Your Place: Ronald Reagan and the Bitburg Controversy

On Holocaust Deniers

The Holocaust and Its Meaning for Christians

One, Plus One, Plus One: Six Final Quotes on the Holocaust

Zionism and Israel

The Land of Israel in the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish Law

Theodor Herzl: Zionisms Founder

Chaim Weizmann and the Balfour Declaration

Vladimir Jabotinsky

David Ben-Gurion

Golda Meir

Menachem Begin

It Is Good to Die for Our Country: Other Zionist Leaders and Other Quotes About Israel

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

On Being a Jew: Modern Reflections

Since my teenage years, I have generally marked up the books I have read, putting large checks or other signs around passages that moved or infuriated me, or taught me something new, or just caused me to consider a perspective to which I had previously been oblivious. For many years, I also have written at the front of a book the page number of passages that I wish to recall, along with a very brief summary of their contents. These marked passages, drawn from some thirty-five hundred Jewish books in my home library, constitute a large percentage of the texts cited in Jewish Wisdom .

For me, the writing of Jewish Wisdom has been a singularly satisfying event. I have always been drawn to books of quotations (over the years Ive assembled more than two hundred), and long have dreamed of putting together a compilation of Judaisms most insightful and inspiring statements. What attracts me to a good quotation is its ability to cut to the core of the most complicated issue and present one with a fresh and essential truth.

Two thousand years ago, when a non-Jew asked Hillel, the leading rabbi of his age, to define Judaisms essence, the sage could have responded with a long oration on Jewish thought and law, and an insistence that it would be blasphemous to reduce so profound a system to a brief essence. Indeed, his contemporary, Shammai, furiously drove away the questioner with a builders rod. Hillel, how ever, responded to the mans challenge: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: this is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary; now go and studya model statement that has defined Judaisms essence ever since.

As Hillel knew, the right words at the right time can inspire people for generations. Theodor Herzl, the nineteenth-century founder of Zionism, declared at the end of his novel Altneuland , But if you will it, it is no fantasy. With those words, he fashioned a goad that helped move Jewish life in radically new ways for generations. As I explain later, Herzls words in Hebrew, Im tirzu, ein zoh aggadah , quickly became a slogan that galvanized early Zionist pioneers to settle previously uncultivated swampland, and to persevere in turning it into fertile fields. They also motivated Zionist activists to work for Hebrews reestablishment as a modern, spoken language (although no other dead language ever had been resurrected), and inspired Jewish activists to lobby non-Jewish leaders to recognize their right to reestablish a homeland, and then a state, in Palestine. Five simple Hebrew words! Yet Herzls insistence that people can transform a fantasy into reality itself shaped reality.