Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I'm happy to be one - or proud to be one.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Orthodox Jews, or, as they are known in the Talmud, the Really Chosen Ones, are committed to the idea that the entire Torah was dictated by God verbatim to Moses at Mount Sinai. . . Other forms of Judaism dispute this claim, although it does explain certain passages in the first Torah, such as, I'm sorry, am I boring you? and What do you like better, Moses, Lord Almighty or Big Hoohah?
And yet when you take Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, whatever, their combined killings in the name of religion -- well, that would be zero.
The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.
[My mother] wanted to go as deep as possible into the world of religion. And that took her into Judaism.
Judaism is absolutely incompatible with the abandonment of the Torah.
Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.
It's not how much or how little you have that makes you great or small, but how much or how little you are with what you have.
I'm not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian - I'm just not interested in that argument.
Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.
What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I'm a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don't think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is
Indeed if we Christians so tell our story that Judaism is silenced, then we have not spoken rightly of Christ.
It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism.
Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters.
Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Judaism teaches everyone tolerance towards everyone.
The Jewish people have to get rid of their fears so they see the positive things and they need to dare to look at the world through their Judaism.
Judaism is important to me from a tribal point of view.