A [Jewish] woman could not divorce her husband, but she could petition for divorce, and the religious courts could force him to grant the divorce on ….

At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the popu….

God's greatest blessing is children. The only problem is that you have to support them. It's a problem, not a disadvantage..

A second-century rabbi said that if 999 angels gave a bad account of a man and one angel reported favorably, God would hear the one angel; even if 99….

Jews are a singular confusion — difficult to define, awkward to describe, impossible to understand. All the virtues, all the vices, every pleasure, e….

America has a way of inventing tradition each morning and erasing the past by nightfall, and thehold of ancient custom is endangered by a thousand ci….

The suggestion that Jews were selected from among all nations of the earth to be God's chosen people suggested a kind of group arrogance, especially ….

In Jewish tradition, death-defying devotion to scholarship was the stuff of saintliness..

At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next lingered for a moment, then….

Theology emerged not as a course of knowledge but as a feast of homily and imagination and exaggeration in which every man could find his image and h….

Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning va….

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored..

Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identif….

Embracing and rejecting tradition, bound and liberated by faith, torn between obscurantism and reason, self-assured and self-critical, they were a ka….

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes..

It was God who dictated what man should believe and do, leaving man the freedom to accept or scoff, to obey or disregard..

In the Bible, fate was often presented as the handmaiden of morality: sin was succeeded by misfortune, righteousness by prosperity, with reward and p….

One rabbi compared wise men studying the law to children tossing a ball to one another: a first sage said the meaning was this, another said the mean….

The [Jewish] Sabbath was not intended to be simply a desert of prohibitions, but rather an oasis for moral restoration and seemly pleasure-one was to….

Fundamentalists are less concerned to be systematic and rational than to be humble and faithful, accepting God's commandments because they come from ….