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There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Abraham Joshua Heschel
Age: 65 †
Born: 1907
Born: January 11
Died: 1972
Died: December 23
Judaic Scholar
Philosopher
Rabbi
University Teacher
Warszawa
Abraham Heschel
Sense
Supreme
Radiance
Without
Bear
Enables
Trying
Israel
Jungle
Despair
Holocaust
Bears
Agony
Answer
Rays
Jungles
Answers
Radical
Auschwitz
History
Commit
Blasphemy

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We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.
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Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
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Prayer begins where our power ends.
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Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
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There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
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The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
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In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.
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It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.
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The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
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God is either of no importance, or of supreme importance.
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The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.
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God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
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Every little deed counts.
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The essence of man is not what he is, but in what he is able to be.
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There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
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Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.
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The issue of prayer is not prayer the issue of prayer is God.
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Self-respect is the fruit of discipline the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
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To sing means to sense and to affirm that the spirit is real and that its glory is present.
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Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
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