Sara

“The traits we revile in others are often the ones that remind us most of our worst selves. And we react most strongly to the faults and flaws we see in others that we are most ashamed of in ourselves.”
― Rana Awdish, In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope

“This image, this series of fasts, tells our bodies and our souls the story of the encroachment of emptiness: the story of impermanence. There was a Great Temple, a great nation with its capital in Jerusalem, but even such seemingly unshakable institutions as these simply slipped away into the mists of history. Yet even while it stood, the Great Temple was a structure that was centered around emptiness. The Holy of Holies, the Sacred Center upon which all the elaborate structural elegance of the Temple served to focus, was primarily a vacated space. It was defined that way in the Torah. The Holy of Holies was the space no one could enter except the high priest, and even he could only enter for a few moments on Yom Kippur. If anyone else entered this place, or if the high priest entered on any other day, the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center, the powerful nothingness there, would break out on him and overwhelm him, and he would die. So Yom Kippur is, among other things, the day we enter the vacated space, even if only by proxy, the day we experience the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center.”
― Alan Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“...he walked into the WinCo, a brightly lit
twenty-four-hour warehouse supermarket that looked like the bastard child of a one-night stand between a horny Costco and a drunken 99 Cents Only Store.”
― Lee Goldberg, Malibu Burning

“After one begins to study, and the more one learns, the world does not become simpler and smoother. On the contrary, in a certain sense it becomes more and more complicated, more and more complex. What this means is that study entails a kind of traumatic process, a process of breaking things apart.”
― Adin Steinsaltz, Talks on the Parasha