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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" To view any individual as being independent of relationality is like viewing a point outside of a line, a line outside of a figure, a figure outside of a body. "

" Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral. "

" Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel. "

" 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. "

" The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter. "

" 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. "

" Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology. "

" 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. "

" Many of us, both Jews and Christians, want the public square to be pluralistic, which is neither partisan nor naked. "

" 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. "

" We Jews who willingly and happily confirm our covenantal status and its attendant rights and duties must take the question of mission seriously: either to accept it or reject it knowingly and with conviction. "

" The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance. "

" There is no question that Israelis - indeed, all concerned Jews - have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel. "

" The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms. "

" 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 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. "

" Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same. "

" Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now. "

" The slogan 'Never Again!' that emerged after the Holocaust implies that the Holocaust has a universal moral meaning, which, if properly learned, can provide at least a theoretical prophylactic against its repetition against anyone. "

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

" To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one's sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people. "

" 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. "

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

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