Avi Eisenman

“Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.”1 The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.”
― David Brooks, How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Many of us constantly use work or technology to “leave our place”—to escape the moment in which we currently find ourselves so that we can avoid the uncomfortable feelings that are arising. Bored? Hop on Twitter! Lonely? Start texting people! Anxious? Unwind with some TV! Doubting your purpose in life? Dive into those work emails! But on Shabbat, many of the strategies we use to run away from ourselves are prohibited. We can’t escape to the office or into a screen. We can’t curate our life for others’ consumption on social media, focusing on how our life looks, rather than how it feels. Instead, for twenty-five hours, we actually have to live it.”
― Sarah Hurwitz, Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism