Reuven, I did not want my Daniel to become like my brother, may he rest in peace. Better I should have had no son at all than to have a brilliant son who had no soul. I looked at my Daniel when he was...
Rabbinic literature can be studied in two different ways, in two directions, one might say. It can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively - or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically...
Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.
It’s nice to be able to retire. Comforting. You think so? he said. Isn’t it? No, he said. Endings are never nice.
Is it better for man to live with uncertainty? Is the answer of Freud an answer? We should simply learn to accept our position as strange sick creatures? Is the answer of Nietzsche an answer? We shoul...
In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginat...
Devorah tended to fill empty spaces with books: end tables, the tops of dressers, the edges of desks, on occasion even a chair. She would arrange and rearrange the books with exacting care, lining up...
Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it. If
I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatica...
A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing, But the man who lves that span, he is something… A man must fill his life with meaning, m...
We will have many fights. But they will be for the sake of Torah.
We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it...
They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much.
She would sit with her eyes wide open, staring, as if a lever had been pulled inside her, sealing off her feelings. Her face sagged; the light went out of her eyes. I knew those moments: sudden retrea...
Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important thing that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them- ordinary things is a better expression....
Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or rebel against it.
It’s not a pretty world, Papa. I’ve noticed, my father said softly.
It's only a book. But what it means to write a book.
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, I read in the collection of letters written by Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, that one fine day you discover to your surprise...
It hurts a father to see a son this way. It makes no difference what age the son is; it hurts.