Elie Wiesel Quotes

Judaism is in a sense a Rabbinic, Talmudic religion, rather than a Biblical religion.

Jews seek to cleave to the will of God as set forth in the Bible and, particularly, the Pentateuch, with its rabbinic commentaries, the Mishnah and Talmud.

Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study …. Judaism, there are 613 biblical commandments, and the Talmud says that the chief commandment of all is study.

So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.

Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study.

Whatever it is Christ said doesn't get a fair shake. There's not much written, it was done 150 years later, and it was used to create an empire. So can we get rid of all that and just see what the guy said?

I argue that the Talmud is about the constant struggle to understand.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.

We don't see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it. And because we don't care for some of them, we think we shouldn't care for it.

Yes, I think that when the Bible refers to a horse or a horseman, that's exactly what it means.

It is only in the case of the Priestly Code that opinions differ widely; for it tries hard to imitate the costume of the Mosaic period, and, with whatever success, to disguise its own.

The Priestly Code preponderates over the rest of the legislation in force, as well as in bulk; in all matters of primary importance it is the normal and final authority.

One is also obligated to divide one's [learning] time into three: a third for learning the Written Torah, a third for learning the Oral Torah and a third in which to understand and comprehend what one learnt into the first two thirds by deriving facts from other facts

The habit of regarding the Bible as historically accurate dates only to the Protestant Reformation: That outlook has since passed to the Muslim world.

Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything.

As I've taught our congregation, within the Christian faith the question of homosexuality is not a question of biblical authority, but biblical interpretation.

In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It's time we did the same for homophobia.

Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.

Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated

What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not the Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. Are, not were.

The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.

To me, these biblical stories are just so many fish stories, and I'm not specifically referring to Jonah and the whale. I need indisputable proof of anything I'm asked to believe.