Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

All Quotes by author - David Novak

" A fully positive relationship between Christians and Jews is one that would elide all differences. "

" All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community's revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation. "

" All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication. "

" Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism. "

" A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists. "

" As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern with Jews and Judaism. "

" As a traditional Jew, I have benefited personally from the hospitality of Chabad Hasidim on many occasions, and I marvel at how many Jews Chabad has brought back to their primordial home. "

" A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt. "

" At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom. "

" Because Judaism and Christianity are both covenantal religions, the relationship of the individual Jew or Christian to God is always within covenanted community. "

" Christianity and Judaism are united above all in their common affirmation and implementation of the moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible, or 'Old Testament,' and the traditions of interpretation of that teaching. "

" Christians and Jews alike are the new exiles of the contemporary world, struggling with how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. "

" Cultural synthesis is how a compromise between various opinions is worked out. But truth does not change, and truth is not arrived at by some sort of compromise. "

" During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity. "

" Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair. "

" Even when God chose Israel, he did not create the people of Israel as he created its human members, as natural beings. Instead, God formed the people of Israel from individual human beings already living in the natural world, calling them into a new historical identity. "

" Every individual is a person necessarily imbedded in a range of multiple relations, and therefore, no one is really independent in anything but a relative sense; no one is truly autonomous. "

" For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights. "

" Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone. "

" God chose us to live both in body and in soul, but the body functions for the sake of the soul more than the soul functions for the body. "

" Historically, Jews only accept converts rather than actively seeking them. "

" If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic. "

" I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. "

" In a very real sense, Jews have to believe that Christians have missed the point about how to wait for the end, and Christians have to believe something quite similar about the Jews. "

" In deciding among theological views, one should be something of a consequentialist: the choice of one theological position over another should be, if not actually determined, at least heavily conditioned by the fact that it implies a better ethical outcome than the alternatives. "

" In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. "

" It has always been inevitable that, living as a small minority among a Christian majority, some Jews would convert to Christianity. "

" It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust. "

" It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level. "

" Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one's own volition. "

Check our other websites: