If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.
How can we expect to know everything about God?He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.I call that ambiguity, I said. Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the...
Asher, an animal cannot help what he does. A human being is able to control himself if he wills it.
...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.
… every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a universal without p...
Weeks of longing and solitude: twin muses of creation.
Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed, Lev. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go lo...
To the rabbis who taught in the Jewish parochial schools, baseball was an evil waste of time, a spawn of the potentially assimilationist English portion of the yeshiva day. But to the students of most...
There’s a rabbi in the Talmud who even says there’s no atonement for lashon hara.
There was an unearthly quality to the way he sang that melody that night - as if he were winging through unknown worlds in search of sources of strength beyond himself. His eyes were open, fixed, but...
The two extremes of secular life. Stoic acceptance and gay defiance in the face of—nothing; in the face of indifference, boiling violence, inexorable chaos; in the face of—the Other Side. Two hundred...
Take care of your father, he said. There aren't many people like him around anymore.
My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipul...
May the best of the past be the worst of the future. Keep everything always off balance. No boundaries. No repetition. The opposite of what the Rebbe wants. The Rebbe seeks fixed boundaries, perfect b...
Life connects us, Benjamin, not artifice.
It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned.
Is he aware of both—and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret m...
I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough t...
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary...
I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. 'The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line,...