The Jew in the Lotus

Rabbi Greenberg explained that we lost 30 percent of the Jewish people during the war, but more than 80 percent of the scholars, mystics, and teachers who could pass on ancient traditions.

For Jews, the journey to paradise is a journey of interpretation.

“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.”

A Jew who has another Jew to argue with can feel at home anywhere, even the Punjab.

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

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

Marc, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, was the first person to ever describe himself to me as a JUBU—a Jewish Buddhist. I’ve since learned that he is one among many, in a long line that goes back at least one hundred years.

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

“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.”