David J. Wolpe > Quotes

“The only whole heart is a broken one because it lets the light in.”
― David Wolpe

“May your wonder always exceed your certainty.”
― David Wolpe

“God's greatest gift is to endow human beings with the capacity to perceive - and the create - holiness.”
― David Wolpe

“Honest people recognize the limitations of their own knowledge. God’s perfection does not extend to God’s creatures.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“INTUITING THE UNSEEN is a gift of perspective. Albert Einstein said there are two ways to see the world: as if everything is a miracle or as if nothing is a miracle. Living with an awareness of the miraculous re-enchants the world. From a flower to a star, it is easy to confuse knowing what a thing is made of with knowing what it is. Significance overspills the physical description; mastering botany is not the same as appreciating beauty. Acknowledging that overflow, what a flower means or what a human being is, not in chemical composition but in spiritual significance, is seeing everything as a miracle.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Without loss we cannot grow. But without faith, we can not bear to lose... By enduring, we make a statement that even the most poignant loss can be made meaningful. Refusing to succumb to despair is the greatest act of faith.”
― David J. Wolpe, Making Loss Matter

“I remembered the poem “Tourists” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; Amichai describes sitting with two baskets under a Roman arch in Jerusalem. A tour guide points out the arch to his group by noting it is just above the head of the man with shopping baskets. And the poet thinks that redemption would arrive if only the tour guide would say, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it is sufficient. Meister Eckhart”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.” (A. E. Housman)”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Political loyalties can die hard, and there were probably those who pined after Absalom and told their children stories of the greatness that briefly existed, in the manner of old communists saddened by the demise of the world in which they were young.”
― David Wolpe, David: The Divided Heart

“How much of our lives take place in the elusive spaces of this world—how much is conveyed, like the artistry of the master musician, in the silence between the notes?”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Browning, whose verse is famously obscure, was once approached by a woman who asked the meaning of a particular stanza. “Madame,” he answered, “when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now, only God knows.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“If we can love, if we can believe in the possibility of figuring out a place for ourselves in the world, we can endure losing home. For we will create a new one.

Each place we leave is a room in the house we build inside. The mortar is the belief that each home was necessary to make us who we are. We should not dread leaving or tremble at the unknown places where we have to go. We are wanderers all, children of the wilderness.”
― David J. Wolpe, Making Loss Matter

“All we know of Russell’s table is what we experience, and our experience differs from that of others and is dependent on where we are standing, what part we touch, how hard we touch it, and on and on. We are the blindfolded men around the elephant, each feeling but a small part of the whole. Some are arrogant enough to believe we can whip off the blindfold and see everything. But since the blindfold is the brain, it is not possible.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Prayer is not about the accuracy of the ritual, but about offering up one’s heart. It is not that God, or the world, needs one’s heart, but that we need to be able to offer… Prayer is the moment when we agree not to hide...

Sometimes I am surprised at what wells up inside me [when I pray]. I ask for things I did not know I wanted. I pray in words I am surprised are mine. I feel embarrassed, and then ask myself, before whom am I embarrassed? Myself? Surely not before God to whom I am saying nothing unknown.”
― David J. Wolpe, Making Loss Matter

“will sing of the Lord’s steadfast and eternal love/to all the generations my lips will declare your faithfulness. I declare, ‘Your enduring love is established forever’” (Ps. 90:2–3).”
― David Wolpe, David: The Divided Heart

“We are not physical creatures having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual creatures having a physical experience.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“it is a response to a reality beyond us. Far from being trapped in tribal illusions, we are liberated by transcendent truths.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“The greatest manifestation of God is not in the natural order--not in that display of power, artistry, and awe. For us, the greatest manifestation must be in the human heart, in the certainty, earned only after search and a sense of loss, that God comprehends, and feels with us.”
― David J. Wolpe, The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God

“As we are accustomed to acknowledging what we cannot see, the idea of God seems less strange. Nonphysical things are real; they are the stuff of life. Our lives pivot on real things that are non-material: ideas, emotions, imagination, memory, relationships, intuition, suffering, joy, and faith. To believe only in what you can see seems a peculiar form of blindness.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Sometimes it seems that a plan is a useful illusion until life figures out where you really should be headed.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Insisting to people that one would rule in their favor is, of course, the tactic of the demagogue; no one can know without hearing a suit what the result should be.”
― David Wolpe, David: The Divided Heart

“So long as I asked dismissive questions, faith seemed to me impossible. As life softened some edges and granted some wisdom, I began to ask out of genuine seeking, out of curiosity and not contempt. The very nature of a question opened my eyes to the possibility that what we cannot touch, what we cannot see, may indeed still be real.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“making sense of everything is not an obligation or even a possibility. So much of what goes on in the world, so much of what goes on even inside ourselves, is beyond our grasp. Acceptance of mystery is an act not of resignation but humility.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“David has won everything he coveted and lost everything he cared for. This snapshot of agony sums up for generations the price of power, the intersection of family and public life, the way in which we injure ourselves and are then staggered by the pain.”
― David Wolpe, David: The Divided Heart

“All life is limited, and limitation means loss. I have lost other lives I might have had. We all have.”
― David J. Wolpe, Making Loss Matter

“Increasingly, I learned that the great spirits of religious traditions do not solve all questions but live in the questions, and return to them again and again, not as a circle returns, but as an ascending spiral comes to the same place, each time at a higher level.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Teach your tongue to say ‘I don’t know.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters

“Shlomo Carlebach used to say, if he meets a student who says he is a Protestant, he knows he is a Protestant; if he meets a student who says he is a Catholic, he knows he is a Catholic. If he meets a student who says he is a human being, he knows he is a Jew.”
― David Wolpe, Pew's Jews: The Report That Shook the American Jewish Community: Responses in Haaretz to the Pew Survey of American Jewish Life

“I’VE OFTEN TOLD children the story of a man who stood before God, his heart breaking from the pain and injustice in the world. “Dear God,” he cried out, “Look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in Your world. Why don’t you send help?” God responded: “I did send help. I sent you.”
― David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters