Wolpe why be jewish

May 14, Marshaferz rated it it was ok. This simply didn't strike me. Nothing particularly interesting or resonant about it. Kevin Panameno rated it really liked it Oct 06, Candie Campbell rated it it was amazing Feb 09, Heidi Coretz rated it it was amazing Jul 01, Katie rated it really liked it Oct 27, Fabio Bernardis rated it liked it Jun 16, Cydnee rated it really liked it Sep 13, Bill rated it it was amazing Nov 20, Donna Kauffman rated it liked it Sep 24, Ben rated it liked it Dec 31, Sarah Aulike rated it it was amazing Mar 10, Mary Hofmann rated it really liked it Apr 22, Ellen rated it liked it Oct 03, Alex Cole rated it it was amazing Feb 13, Jen Trudell rated it really liked it May 28, Jenifer Nech rated it it was amazing Apr 05, Lydia Miller rated it it was amazing May 12, Matt Mast rated it it was amazing Apr 07, Wesley rated it really liked it Mar 08, Kathryn Armstrong rated it liked it Jul 15, Avi rated it it was amazing Feb 29, Where Heschel was a great Jewish theologian.

I really envy you. You must be so special. But the point is, Heschel had much greater ethical sensitivity and he took things that this other guy thought that no big deal as serious. It is a product of your actions, not your nature. You really can do repentance and you really can change who you are.

Rather it is a daily … At every moment, says Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher and legalist, at every moment someone should see themselves as perfectly balanced between good and evil. What you do now will tip that scale. As you were talking, I pulled up the Solzhenitsyn quote. The line separating good and evil passes not through states, not through classes, nor through political parties either, but right through every human heart.

Rabbi Wolpe: Yeah. Maimonides was born in Spain and he was born during the time of an Almohad persecution, of a Muslim persecution.

His family fled to Cairo. Whereby the way also Muslims were, but a much more tolerant Islam was ruling actually at a place called Fustat, which is a sort of suburb of Cairo. Maimonides grew up to be the greatest physician of his age. He treated the Sultan, but also the greatest legal authority in Jewish history, and the greatest philosopher in Jewish history.

He was a titanic figure in the middle ages and took from Arabic philosophy. He wrote, by the way, his philosophical works in Arabic because that was the language of philosophy in the middle ages. His great task as a philosopher was to try to reconcile Greek wisdom with Jewish philosophy. That was because Greek wisdom was the philosophical wisdom of the time, Aristotle, Plato, especially Aristotle. They could just open it up and find out what to do. His law code is extremely influential to this day, but of course, as happens over hundreds of years, people disagreed with this, took issue with that, other scholars argued with him.

David: When you were talking about Heschel earlier, were you talking about Heschel who wrote The Sabbath? Rabbi Wolpe: Heschel, he grew up in Eastern Europe. He left right before the Anschluss, right before the Nazis invaded Poland. He was saved sort of by the skin of his teeth by an invitation to come teach in America.

He had a mystical side. He wrote a beautiful short book, very short, you can read it in an hour, and I suggest that you do called The Sabbath. Where he said that Jews were always wandering. They did not build giant cathedrals. Instead, he said they had a cathedral in time. Because there is an essential deception, he said, to technology. Which is it collapses space, and therefore we think it collapses time.

Because I can see people on the other side of the world, I forget that I still have the same amount of time in my life. That wasting an hour is wasting an hour, whether I do it by watching people in Calcutta or by watching my cat play on the couch. But you can just be. Now having said that, like any masterpiece, I have not begun to do justice to the beauty of the sentences and the richness of the insights of the book. The way that by collapsing space, you also collapse time.

It certainly seems true. As we do, we feel like we have less time. I find one of the disorienting, but probably helpful features of the technology that we all share, is every now and then the iPhone will tell me how many hours I spent on it every day.

Rabbi Wolpe: It is not good. The other part of it is that the immediate, the urgent drives out the important. But he quotes some professor who went in front of his class.

He quotes a professor who goes in front of his class and he takes a glass and he puts three big rocks in the glass. But if you do the rocks first, you will always have time for the gravel and the water. I try to think, I will answer all the emails. I know I will. But if I answer all the emails, I will not go back and do the writing and the study. You got to do the big rocks knowing I promise you that you will have time to put in the gravel and the water.

It drives out the urgent and gives you … Or it drives out the important and it gives you the urgent. Even with reading, it gives you the new, the novel, the recent. Rabbi Wolpe: Whenever somebody says, you have to read this. It might be illuminating. Maybe in six months, maybe in a week, maybe in a day. We so saturate ourselves with ephemera that we have lost, to some extent, the ability to pay attention to things that really matter. One of the ways, by the way that I suggest you do this … By saying, I suggest you do this, is one of the ways I do it.

It may not work for you. I take walks early in the morning and I listen to books on tape. Guess what? I never got a text that said, you won a million dollars and the Nobel Prize if you react within three seconds.

Every text I ever got, it was okay that I answered it once I got back to the house. You just have to get in the habit of doing it.

Also, you have to educate the people around you. This is a new thing. I think a lot of religions do. It is temporality and the way that seasons take the day and they stretch daylight like an accordion during the summer and collapse it during the winter.

What we have in Judaism is a year. You spin around it. It restores the reality of different types of year. Rabbi Wolpe: You said earlier in the podcast that because you live in a city, you are disconnected sometimes from the transcendent.

Buildings are everywhere around us. I live in LA. The cycle of nature is also, we are protected from it. I mean, it still matters, it still exists obviously. Especially in places where there is a real cycle, not so much in LA. But we have done everything we can to create an artificial environment that detaches us.

There is something to that. We try not to experience the world because we want to be comfortable and safe. But there is a counter movement to that. People who go to things like Burning Man, they do that I think in part, because they want to feel the earth beneath your feet is an important spiritual undertaking.

That you need to find this beauty in something over and over again. Talk about that idea. Rabbi Wolpe: I said in one of my sermons, I quoted John Burroughs, who was a naturalist, who said, if you want to see something new, take the same walk you took yesterday.

Everything changes. You change, the world changes, and sometimes in very subtle ways. Wolpe and Complete Book Reviews. David J. In Jewish tradition, God created the world with words. In this luminous, often lyrical meditation, of value to Jews and Christians alike, Wolpe The Healer of Shattered Hearts , a rabbi in Los Angeles, explores language as a double-edged sword Wolpe, Author.

Rabbi Wolpe Making Loss Matter joins the throngs of authors responding to the new atheists with defenses of faith. Yet rather than tense up about atheism, its defenders and their dismissive attitudes about people of faith, Wolpe answers these Clearly-at times beautifully-written, Why Be Jewish? Wolpe encouraged students to ask questions, spending half of the hour-long discussion responding to their various queries.

Wolpe is a rabbi at Sinai Temple in nearby Westwood. You can find more information on Rabbi Wolpe and Sinai Temple online at sinaitemple. Follow Madeleine Carr on Twitter: madeleinecarr You must be logged in to post a comment.