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Book: This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism
Quotes of Book: This is My God: A Guidebook to
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  1. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and fearful. It would be just as silly to assert that disbelief in God is a crutch for the immoral and the ill-read.
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  2. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    Scholars call it {the Torah} the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were Hebrew scribes of the first centuries of the present era. They fixed the wording and spelling of the Bible; since then it has not changed. It has long been a matter of critical controversy as to just how accurate the Masoretes were; for one thing, did they have a true text from ancient sources, or did they invent and corrupt? Opinion has swayed back and forth on this point. The excitement over the Dead Sea Scrolls came in part from their substantial authentication of the Masoretic Isaiah.
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  3. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    Judaism takes the verse in Genesis, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' as part of its statutory law. Because it is the first law in the Torah it holds a special eminence.
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  4. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: 'Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.' This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of "Thou Shalt Nots" is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing.
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  5. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.
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  6. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    Al nations celebrate the day of their coming into being with a work stoppage and ceremonies. The Jews, who believe that God created the universe, celebrate its coming into being, and give thanks to its Maker, once a week.
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  7. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts.
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  8. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu--and a recognizable part--unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.
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  9. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.-"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.
    book-quotespirituality

  10. Herman Wouk _ This is My God: A Guidebook to

    The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.
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