James L. Kugel > Quotes

“This is the path of Torah: Bread and salt shall you eat, and drink water by measure; you shall sleep upon the ground, and live a life of privation, and in Torah shall be your work. And if you do thus, “You shall be happy, and it will be well with you” (Ps. 128:2)—Happy [refers to] this world, and well to the world to come. Greatest is the Torah, for it gives life to those who perform it[s commandments] in this world and in the world to come, as it is said, “It is a tree of life to those who hold on to it, and all who maintain it are blessed” [Prov. 3:18]. —m. Abot 6:4, 7 Once the wicked regime [Rome] decreed that Jews be forbidden to study the Torah. Pappus b. Judah subsequently found R. Aqiba nonetheless convening groups in public for the study of Torah. “Aqiba,” he said, “are you not afraid of the regime?” He said: “Let me answer you with a comparison: It is like a fox that was walking along the river-bank when he saw some fish moving in groups from place to place. He said to them: ‘What are you fleeing from?’ They said: ‘From the nets that the human beings cast over us.’ He said to them: ‘Wouldn’t you like to climb up onto the dry land so that you and I might live together as your ancestors and mine once did?’ They said: ‘Are you indeed the one who is alleged to be the cleverest of animals? You are not clever but foolish! For if there is danger in the place where we do live [that is, our natural environment], is it not all the more so in the place where we must die?’ So is it with us now: for we sit and study Torah, about which it is said, ‘For it is your life and your length of days’ (Deut. 30:20); were we to abandon it, we would be in far greater danger.” — b. Berakhot 61b”
― James L. Kugel, The Bible As It Was

“Amos describes transmitting God’s message as a kind of knee-jerk reaction: “If a lion roars, who isn’t afraid? And if God speaks, who doesn’t prophesy?” What could have been the lived reality behind such assertions?”
― James L. Kugel, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times

“Long, long ago, everyday life must have had a different quality, a different tone, from that of our lives today: it was ominous in a way that ours is not. At one point or another, it seems, anyone might encounter a stranger who, after a while, would turn out to be an angel/God/a god. I don’t believe, of course, that this was the everyday experience of ancient Israelites or ancient Greeks—I’m quite sure that most went through their lives without such encounters. But what these narratives are saying is that such things really can and do happen, indeed, they happened in the past to well-known people—and these very assertions must have sometimes made people think twice, not only about the unusual stranger they met at the market this morning, but about all of reality. The starkness was always just over there, concealing itself behind the drab colors of the everyday.”
― James L. Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief