R. Eleazar fell ill and R. Johanan went to visit him. R. Johanan noticed that R. Eleazar was weeping, and he said to him, “Why do you weep? Is it because you did not study enough Torah? Is it perhaps lack of sustenance? Is it because of lack of children?” R. Eleazar replied, “I am weeping on account of this beauty that is going to rot in the ( Read more... )

“The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for oneself, to make one’s own decisions, to say to oneself this is black or is white, to decide for ( Read more... )

But in both psychoanalysis and hermeneutics, the aim of the task is not merely to explain what is being read, but also to prompt action. Psychoanalysis tells the patient how to act upon the truth of the revealed hidden meaning of the unconscious; hermeneutics finds in the hidden intentions of its texts instructions on how to behave in the world, ( Read more... )

It was like holding Proteus, he thought at one point, as though she was liquid moving through his grasping fingers, as though she was waves of the sea rising all round him. How many, many men have had that thought, he told himself, in how many, many places, how many climates, how many rooms and cabins and caves, all supposing themselves swimmers in ( Read more... )

He watched her. He noted that she assumed no manners that might be thought wifely. She handed him nothing. She did not lean forward intimately, she did not defer. She watched him with her sharp look when she thought herself unobserved, but not with solicitude, nor yet with affection, nor yet with the greedy curiosity he could not suppress in ( Read more... )

In the end--at least in the end of late antiquity--rabbinic Judaism refused the option of becoming a religion, another species of the kind that Christianity offered ... Judaism is not and has not been, since early in the Christian era a "religion" in the sense of an orthodoxy whereby heterodox views, even very strange opinions,* would make one an ( Read more... )

First of all, I will insist that the borders between Christianity and Judaism are as constructed and imposed, as artificial and political as any of the borders of the earth ... Rather than a natural-sounding "parting of the ways," such as we usually hear about with respect to these two "religions," I will suggest an imposed partitioning of what was ( Read more... )

A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air.

-- from Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

Rain bathed my cheeks and collar-bone as I waited for the bus and read ( Read more... )

I know that many people are, or call themselves "atheists" simply because they are repelled and offended by statements about God made in imaginary and metaphorical terms which they are not able to interpret and comprehend. They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of Him more perfect ( Read more... )