Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)

And while Judaism offers plenty to engage children, much of its deepest, most transformative wisdom is really only accessible to adults.

If anything, when it comes to God, Judaism embraces complexity—almost to a fault. While there are few things Jews agree on, there seems to be consensus that we cannot fully understand or adequately describe God.

the terror our ancestors must have felt at being so vulnerable to circumstances beyond their control.

g’neivat da’at,

That is the paradox at the heart of this book: To create the kind of Judaism that is worth choosing, we need to start by choosing Judaism.

the Rabbis actually regarded someone who committed a sin and then did teshuvah to be in a better position than one who never committed that sin in the first place.

as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, while the Torah dictates 613 commandments for the Israelites to follow, biblical Hebrew doesn’t have a word for “obey.” Rather, the Torah uses the word “shema,” which means “to listen, to hear, to understand, to internalize, and to respond.”

Rabbi Donniel Hartman refers to this core Jewish ethic of self-transcendence as the “ethic of non-indifference,” which he defines as the obligation “to see the needs of others and to implicate oneself as part of the solution.”

Judaism includes a variety of tools and techniques for engagement with the Divine—from unscripted personal prayer, to meditation, to study (yes, study is considered a spiritual practice in Judaism).