Rabbi Quotes

I refuse to stand up in front of a rabbi and my friends and the woman I love - who I will tell you I can love with all my heart - and promise she will be the only one I will ever have until the day I die. That`s a lie.

He never ran from personal pain, but he rushed to help you with yours, ... He was rabbi, priest, chaplain and mullah when he was not morale officer-in-chief.

(on his hometown of Hibbing, MN) The town didn`t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. They put him upstairs above the café, which was the local hangout. It was a rock and roll café where I used to hang out, too. I use to go up there every day to learn the stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour or so, I`d come down and boogie.

First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.

Before the US (2006) mid-term elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flak. The congregation is exclusive-liberal, yet he is a self-described independent (read "conservative") and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first; that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon one to hear the other fellow out. `So I, like many of the liberal congregation, began - teeth grinding - to attempt to do so. And in doing so I recognised that I held two views of America. `One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other (the world in which I actually functioned day to day) was made up of people who were in the main reasonably trying to maximise their comfort by getting along with one another (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, even the school meeting). `And I realised that the time had come for me to avow my participation in the country in which I chose to live - and that this country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

She was what a rabbi ought to be -- a great teacher. She enriched the lives of everyone around her.

My wife and I are affiliated with a temple here in Los Angeles. We feel very close to the congregation and to the rabbi, who happens to be my wife`s cousin and who I admire greatly. I talk to him regularly but I consider myself more spiritual than religious.

How can a rabbi not live with doubt? The Bible itself is a book of doubt.

The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.

A rabbi should not despair if people do not do as much as they should. Every parent has that with children. God is merciful.