Quotes about Israel

Following the lead of Moses, Israel seizes upon this revelation as the clue to its future. Israel celebrates that Yahweh is this peculiar God of covenantal relatedness, even as Israel insists that Yahweh must be the God who is self-announced in this way. Israel "prays back" to Yahweh in an imperative, Yahweh's own words of self-announcement.

Restitution costs: "He shall restore it in full, and shall add a fifth to it." Restitution costs twenty percent according to Leviticus. Guilt requires not simply equity and an even balance, but gift beyond affront. It requires surplus compensation. Such a rule is both economically shrewd and psychologically sound. Israel is required to move beyond grudging restoration, until it is "pressed down and running over.

Yahweh is not unfettered but is constrained by a hard, relentless commitment made to Israel. The very character of Yahweh, as Yahweh has articulated that identity, gives Moses and Israel a toehold against God and a space from which to speak imperatives that Yahweh must heed.

The creedal disclosure of Exod. 34:6-7 and the initial "pray-back" of Moses in Numbers 14 form a tap root for Israel's recurring prayer to this You who does wonders of costly solidarity.

God has defied the purity laws! In doing so the God of the trance has violated Israel's definition of chosenness. All of the old certitudes about chosenness are coming unglued. There is no distinction between pure and impure, clean and unclean. So is there no distinction any longer between chosen and unchosen?

Respect for everyone he met. The preference of service over power. The rejection of violence. Israel—its Law and worship—as the primal source of meaning.

Indeed, by the time of the Temple destruction, which set in motion the separation of "the Jews" from "Christians," Paul was dead. That is why it is absurd to imagine that he himself caused the separation. Any imagined echo in his multifaceted writing of a distinction between "the Church" and "the Synagogue" resounds anachronistically from a future that did not yet exist—a fully ruptured Israel of which Paul knew nothing.

We have to protect and do our utmost to fortify the walls of Judaism in the land of Israel through legislation that will guard the unique Jewish character of the state of Israel.

[The United States and Israel] share many common objectives ... chief of which is the building of a better world in which every nation can develop its resources and develop them in freedom and peace.

The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts.

Don't touch the ark of God! It is the God of Israel who is wounding people with regards to their sin. Do NOT comfort the soul that God is breaking.

God's covenant with the church and Israel is unbreakable.