David Wolf, DPM

“So I resolve to cancel my trip, and for a moment, I feel relieved. Then depression sinks in, and everything seems flat and colorless.” Zalman gave a rueful smile. “You’ve decided to go back to the gray land rather than the one that’s Technicolor, where everything feels significant.” That reminded me of Joseph Campbell’s words about refusing the call. If the hero doesn’t heed the call to action, he wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the “flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones.”
― Sara Davidson, The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery

“It is written, ‘This world is like a vestibule before the world-to-come; prepare thyself in the vestibule, that thou mayest enter into the hall.’ The meaning is clear: The vestibule is this world, and the hall is the world-to-come. Listen. In gematriya, the words ‘this world’ come out one hundred sixty-three, and the words ‘the world-to-come’ come out one hundred fifty-four. The difference between ‘this world’ and ‘the world-to-come’ comes out to nine. Nine is half of eighteen. Eighteen is chai, life. In this world there is only half of chai. We are only half alive in this world! Only half alive!”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“a whisperer of Yiddish—the lingua franca spoken by Jewish immigrants when they didn’t want their American children to understand what they were saying”
― Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy

“passage on the spiritual journey, we can get encouragement from others, but in the end, the yes has to come forth from our own selves, body and soul. Making a commitment to life can’t happen until we have taken a good, sober look at what we are signing up for, having surveyed some of the delectable as well as the disheartening aspects of living in this world and realizing that life is an unpredictable journey composed of both aspects.”
― Tirzah Firestone, With Roots in Heaven: One Woman's Passionate Journey into the Heart of Her Faith