Judith Shulevitz > Quotes

“The psychoanalytic session, like the Sabbath, takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time--the timeless time of the unconscious, with its yawning infantile unboundedness, its shattered sequentiality. It may not be pleasant, it may not be convenient, you may not want to go, but you do. On time. And the fixed time limits also keep you from losing yourself in that disorienting , disorganizing flux.”
― Judith Shulevitz

“Heschel calls the Sabbath a cathedral in time.”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“The religious Jew is to study Torah for the sake of studying Torah. Torah lishmah. The ingenuity of the edict, I realized was that it relieved you of the obligation to be qualified. You studied because you had to study, and those who taught had to take you as a student.”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval”
― Judith Shulevitz

“There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“the day is all about getting connected.”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people. You can’t just extract lessons from it.”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“One minute is not exactly like every other minute, because time changes as it flows. Time is qualitative as well as quantitative. The when of time—its after what or before what or at the same time as what—matters as much as, if not more than, its how much. It makes a big difference whether you do something now or wait till later. We”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“According to one estimate, one-third of all the books sold in Germany between 1518 and 1525 were written by Luther.”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

“To become religious is to brave a leap into the absurd. Kierkegaard”
― Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time