Quotes about Connection

Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

God does not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.

Wasn't forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it. Life would be intolerable, wouldn't it? Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiva.

It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction.

You walk out in the evening with a woman, you tell her that she is beautiful and you love her, and twenty centuries hear what you are saying.

One must not rely on the dead," he said. "One must rely on the living—and on God who gives life to the living.

The lack of hate between executioner and victim, perhaps this is God.

I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that's all I think we can do and we should do.

My father, an enlightened spirit, believed in man. My grandfather, a fervent Hasid, believed in God. The one taught me to speak, the other to sing. Both loved stories. And when I tell mine, I hear their voices. Whispering from beyond the silenced storm, they are what links the survivor to their memory.

For memory is a blessing: it creates bonds rather than destroys them.

Cold prayers, like cold suitors, are seldom effective in their aims.