Quotes about Divine

The Sabbath is the most precious present mankind has received from the treasure house of God. All week we think: The spirit is too far away, and we succumb to spiritual absenteeism, or at best we pray: Send us a little of Thy spirit. On the Sabbath the spirit stands and pleads: Accept all excellence from me.

Replete is the world with a spiritual radiance, replete with sublime and marvelous secrets. But a small hand held against the eye hides it all," said the Baal Shem.

Happy is he who is aware of the mysteries of his Lord.

For Sinai consisted of both a divine proclamation and a human perception. It was a moment in which God was not alone.

Judaism is God's quest for man.

Thus Judaism is based upon a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation, upon the will of God and upon the understanding of Israel.

God's goodness is not a cosmic force but a specific act of compassion. We do not know it as it is but as it happens. To mention an example, "Rabbi Meir said: When a human being suffers what does the Shechinah say? My head is too heavy for Me; My arm is too heavy for Me. And if God is so grieved over the blood of the wicked that is shed, how much more so over the blood of the righteous.

The Sabbath, thus, is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below and what is above. All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God. This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.

Just as man is not alone in what he is, he is not alone in what he does. A mitsvah is an act which God and man have in common.

The Torah is primarily divine ways rather than divine laws.

He is in need of the work of man for the fulfillment of His ends in the world.

To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.