The Jew in the Lotus

He explained that the basic Buddhist concept of shunyata, or emptiness, which derives from Indian philosophy, was carried by a Jewish scholar into the Arabic world where it became the mathematical zero.

There is a beautiful Hasidic teaching, that before every human being comes a retinue of angels, announcing, “Make way for an image of the Holy One, Blessed be He.” How rarely do we listen for those angels when we encounter another human being. How rarely do we see in another human being’s eyes an image of everything we hold most dear.

“The Orthodox Jewish community is third world in theology and philosophy. Having a political state of Israel now, I’m convinced the great religious challenge is going to be the pluralist issue. Each culture can no longer present itself as self-evident.”

Modern science and Buddhism cannot contradict, because Buddhism is based on reality.

“There isn’t a serious Jew today, whatever denomination or affiliation, who is not still somehow traumatized that a third of our people were destroyed so viciously and in such a short period of time. It’s like the amputee who still feels the phantom pain. The leg isn’t there, but the pain is always there.”

The “demand for spirituality today” is “at the deepest level subjective, it’s in the nominative, not in the accusative, the dative, the genitive. In shul, I’m there because it’s genitive: my poppa belonged to the shul, I’m of it. I’m an accusative Jew because a goy calls me that way. Because I’ve been circumcised and I have this history, my dative

Ever since the Holocaust we are all like priests who have become contaminated by death.

I decided that the most important baggage Jews carry is an absolute conviction of our significance because we are Jews, because we have survived.

Jews have achieved because they consider secular achievement a religious excellence.