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" Rather than forgive, we can wish ill; rather than hope for repentance, we can instead hope that our enemies experience the wrath of God. "

Meir Soloveichik

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" For both Protestants and Catholics, and whether or not absolute continence is demanded of the clergy, celibacy remains a blessed spiritual state. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Ours is decidedly not an age of Abrahams, Jacobs, or of youthful Elazars proud to be regarded as men of seventy. On the contrary, it is one in which the external signs of aging are avoided at all costs, youth is worshipped, and immortality is sought not in children but in Botox. "

Meir Soloveichik

" If R. Akiva was perhaps overly generous in judging his generation, it can perhaps be ascribed to the belief, based on his own experience, that everyone is capable of a dramatic life change. "

Meir Soloveichik

" We Americans unite faith and freedom in asserting that our liberties are your gift, God, not that of government. "

Meir Soloveichik

" God can desire to enter into a relationship with us; he can be drawn to some aspect of our identity. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Bride and groom are not just two contracting parties but two loving and beloved companions, joined in establishing a home that will be nothing less than a source of immortality. "

Meir Soloveichik

" The eternal link between Lincoln's life and Passover - the fact that Lincoln's death, marked in the Hebrew calendar, coincides with Passover every year - is certainly fitting, and perhaps even part of the providence that Lincoln began to see in his own life and the life of his nation. "

Meir Soloveichik

" I continue to dream of a day when my skullcap will not stick out so much. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Stanley Hauerwas is correct that Judaism insists on the bearing of children because it is essential to Jewish continuity. But to end the matter there is to miss an essential point: if we are to learn to love others, Judaism says, we must begin by loving those who are closest to us. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Not only were the Jewish people beloved, but God himself had taken pains to let them know it. Could there be any clearer sign that he continued to believe in their potential, even without the Temple, to achieve forgiveness and ultimately merit the Temple's rebuilding? "

Meir Soloveichik

" Jews seek to cleave to the will of God as set forth in the Bible and, particularly, the Pentateuch, with its rabbinic commentaries, the Mishnah and Talmud. "

Meir Soloveichik

" The giving of the Torah is a story of God seeking to provide humanity with the opportunity to make moral decisions. "

Meir Soloveichik

" A society that is all self-interest and no comradeship is not a society at all. But a society that is all comradeship and no self-interest is also not a society; it is a sect - or, on the largest scale, totalitarianism. "

Meir Soloveichik

Totalitarianism

" Over the course of history, many Jews have ultimately embraced Christianity - some forcibly, some in order to advance in non-Jewish society, some out of wholehearted belief. "

Meir Soloveichik

" By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth. By encouraging Jews to grow beards, it reminds them that they will not be young forever, that they must prepare the ground for those who come after, just as their fathers did for them. "

Meir Soloveichik

" To Catholic, Orthodox, and some Protestant Christians, communion involves partaking of the physical real presence of God in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. By contrast, the Torah draws the Jew into engagement with God's infinite mind. Torah learning is the definitive Jewish mode of communion with God. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Jews bear children not only because the carnal election of Abraham must continue. For Jews, raising children is essential to living a rounded ethical life. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Of all the rabbinic sages of antiquity, perhaps none was more influential or famous than Rabbi Akiva. "

Meir Soloveichik

" If God loves human beings and seeks to relate to them because he is drawn to something unique about them, then his love must be exclusive and cannot be universal. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Religions, by definition, disagree as to the truth - a reality that cannot be overcome by demanding that one or the other faith repudiate its claim to truth. "

Meir Soloveichik

" We know a great deal about the configuration of the menorah from the biblical book of Exodus. Beaten out of solid gold, the ancient candelabrum boasted six branches emerging from a seventh, its central shaft. The menorah was adorned with golden buttons, cups, and flowers. "

Meir Soloveichik

" There is, of course, only one chosen nation. But Abraham Lincoln would call America 'an almost chosen nation' because he believed that America had a providential role to play in history, inspired by the example of God's ancient covenant people. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Europe is no longer a Christian continent; few Europeans attend religious services on Sunday, and the European Union recently refused to refer to Europe's religious heritage in its fledgling constitution. "

Meir Soloveichik

" How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Traditional Judaism has always embraced the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the ultimate resurrection of the dead. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Religious relativism is not the answer to disagreement between faiths; yet relativism, and a blurring of religious distinctions, all too often result when two deeply believing faith communities engage each other in the public arena on theological issues. "

Meir Soloveichik

" The practice of shaving makes its first appearance in the Bible in connection with the story of Joseph, who as a young man was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, where he was subsequently imprisoned on false charges. "

Meir Soloveichik

" I am humbled and deeply honored to have been asked to serve the congregants of Shearith Israel, a congregation with an incomparable history, where some of America's most distinguished rabbis have pastored and preached. "

Meir Soloveichik

" If Christians see Mormonism as a dramatic deviation from a millennia-old, biblically-based faith, Jews see Christianity in the same light. "

Meir Soloveichik

" Jews focus on the Torah, the embodiment of God's will; Christians, on an embodied God. "

Meir Soloveichik