Godstruck

I felt jolted when I first heard the lesson of na'aseh v'nishma: to hear that my emotions were actually not terribly relevant was a big relief, even though I recognize that it's deeply antithetical to the zeitgeist (perhaps that accounts for some of my attraction)

Ultimately I understood that faith requires a kind of letting go, a willingness to treat scripture as both factually true and symbolically true (for many believers, anyway), and that submitting to incomprehensibility in an era besotted with certainty is part of the intellectual and emotional challenge of belief.

Rather than go to church to commune with a God whose existence they take for granted, then, Luhrmann says that people attend services to actively create the sense of God's presence. "Of course, one might say, they believe, and so they build cathedrals," she writes. "I am asking what we might learn if we shift our focus: if rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship."

Does it really matter if I'm wrong? It does not, for the ramifications of the seeking alone ripple throughout my life in ways that both ground me to the earth and expand me to the above. Whichever narrative I choose would be just that--a choice, made in the absence of any meaningful data proving or disproving some transcendent force--so I might as well pick the open one, the hopeful one, the magical one

Our secular contemporary culture-which largely venerates the ability to have one's desires met, rather than the ability to overcome said desires has given people almost no framework for understanding sacrifice

It bothered me that in the face of something Jewish that didn't jive with modern sensibilities, many liberal leaders seemed to always and automatically cast the Jewish stuff aside in favor of modernity, in a way that struck me as lacking in reflection and kowtowing to presentism

I believe that humans need newness, and they need to feel that they are discovering things for themselves, even things they've been bequeathed