Synagogue Quotes

We believe that every child has a right to learn without fear, that every parent has a right to hug their beautiful little babies when they come home from school, and that all of us, we have a right to dance at a concert, laugh at the theater, pray at a synagogue, at a church, and at a mosque.

I’m twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don’t understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.

When “I” and “You” are absent, I’ve no idea if this is a mosque, synagogue, church or temple

I grew up attending a Conservative day school, Solomon Schechter, until I was about 14, and going to a Reconstructionist synagogue.

The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.

I’m now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion.

I had always known that I was Jewish – we celebrated the holidays, we went to a synagogue – but I had never known that I was supposed to feel ashamed about it.

My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I’m from Canada. I left there at 16.

Before I became an orphan of the Holocaust my early family life was stable. I grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt, and I was in a household with two loving parents and an adoring grandmother who spoiled me. My mother helped my father in their wholesale business and they went to synagogue every Friday.

The first album, for better or for worse, was done over from the ages of 17-22, with a couple of different producers. Some of it was recorded in an old swimming pool, some of it was recorded in a synagogue – it kind of was all over the place.

Throughout its history, the members of Shearith Israel have observed Thanksgiving by reciting in synagogue the same psalms of praise and gratitude sung by Jews all over the world on festive days like Hanukkah.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

I know crowds of people who go to church and the synagogue who aren’t religious.

I now attend non-orthodox synagogues, and study little during the secular week.

I think people often come to the synagogue, mosque, the church looking for God, and what we give them is religion.

If you look around, you can find a face of God in each thing, because He is not hidden in a church, in a mosque, or a synagogue, but everywhere. As there is no one who lives after seeing him, there is also no one dying after seeing him. Who finds Him, stays forever with him.

Satan is inconsistent. He persuades a man not to go to a synagogue on a cold morning; yet when the man does go, he follows him into it.

I didn’t go to church, I didn’t go to synagogue; I went to temple, Hindu temple, where I prayed to my Hindu gods – whether or not I believe in it is another story.

Today, as it was 2,000 years ago, the Kingdom of God is within each of us. It is not within a church, a temple, a mosque or synagogue.

I believe in Christianity, Judaism and Islamism, but I stay away from churches, synagogues and mosques.

If it respected religion, Israel would have transferred these synagogues back to its territory.

It is very difficult to be a non-religious Jew outside Israel. The synagogue keeps Jews together in the Diaspora. In Israel, you are a Jew from morning to night. We don’t even have to think about it, just as a Dutch citizen doesn’t spend his whole day thinking about the fact that he is a Dutch citizen. It’s a given.

Before I was elected to Congress, I had the honor of serving as the president of the Congregation Ner Tamid in Henderson, the largest Reform Synagogue in Southern Nevada. During my tenure, I witnessed firsthand the beauty in our country’s religious diversity and how community engagement strengthens America.

Once the world sees this Synagogue of Satan as it really is and knows the players, they fear what will happen to them. The world will turn against them and that is happening now as we speak.

To go to the synagogue with one’s father on the Passover eve – is there in the world a greater pleasure than that? What is it worth to be dressed in new clothes from head to foot, and to show off before one’s friends? Then the prayers themselves – the first Festival evening prayer and blessing.

It’s quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he’s neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one’s glimpsed the divine, one’s left these man-made distinctions behind.

Everyone, whether he is self-denying or self-indulgent, is seeking after the Beloved. Every place may be the shrine of love, whether it be mosque or synagogue.

The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make – not just on your wedding day, but over and over again – and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband or wife.

We joined a Conservative synagogue. I began learning through engagement, rote and reading. Suddenly, I belonged… well, to the extent that a novelist can ever feel she is part of a group; we may be part of a minyan, but we’re not fully merged into the community.

And some needs and hurts are so deep they will only respond to a mentor’s touch or a pastor’s prayer. Church and charity, synagogue and mosque, lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and laws.

Ask me, it’s a sin to pervert faith with religion. Despite every church, mosque, & synagogue in it, this is not the world any God worth his salt would have created.

I remember my father, who was ‘somebody’ in the synagogue, bringing home with him one of the poor men who waited outside to be chosen to share the Passover meal. These patriarchal manners I remember well, although there was about them an air of bourgeois benevolence which was somewhat comic.

The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and… become a living language

You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.

Of course, being the synagogue president, for me it was a great blessing.

I love going to synagogue on Friday night and being swept in the melodies. Everyone seems more friendly and unburdened by the week and ready to be taken elsewhere.

If you call [the synagogue] a brothel, a den of vice, the devil’s refuge, Satan’s fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever else you will, you are still saying less than it deserves.

Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host who excommunicated them.

What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? … I will give my faithful advice: First, that one should set fire to their synagogues. . . . Then that one should also break down and destroy their houses. . . . That one should drive them out the country.

A survey carried out across the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity.

I am excited to run in the community where my wife and I work, where my daughters graduated and my son attends high school, where my family goes to synagogue, and where I have spent so much time working for and with the people of South Florida.

I’ll keep it short and sweet. Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks, you don’t want to be driving to a maternity hospital or sitting in some phony-baloney church. Or synagogue.

The majority of Jews are secular… the Nazis never checked if anyone was going to the synagogue or eating kosher.

Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

Babies aren’t born knowing differences in color, gender, religions. They’re taught those things. They’re taught them at home. They’re taught in the schools. They’re taught in the churches. They’re taught in the mosques, in the synagogues.

I was always the weirdo who wanted to have an egalitarian service in synagogue and felt I was always going against the grain.

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers – the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue – bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.

If we are not able to bring the churches, the synagogues, [and] the mosques around to the animal rights view, we will never make large-scale progress for animal rights in the United States.

I was a very religious child – I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good – I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.

When I am at home, I never go near the synagogue unless, say, there is a bar or bat mitzvah involving the children of friends. But when I am traveling, in a country where Jewish life is scarce or endangered, I often make a visit to the shul.

I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.

In monasteries, seminaries, retreats and synagogues, they fear hell and seek paradise. Those who know the mysteries of God never let that seed be planted in their souls.

I’m in this effort to unify my life and to live day to day in a disciplined way, to be real at all times, not just in front of people, or not just in a synagogue.

Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.

If you are wealthy enough, use part or all of your Social Security proceeds to invest in a favorite cause or two. Invest 10 percent or 100 percent of your monthly Social Security check in your favorite charity, foundation, think tank, church or synagogue, or other good cause.

Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and there, I don’t care.

My grandfather was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived in Northern Ireland and apparently when he sang in the synagogue he made everyone cry.

The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.

I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I’m not observant, and I don’t belong to a synagogue. I don’t go to temple on high holy days, but I’m proud to be Jewish.

The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make on your wedding day, and over and over again and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband.

One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.

I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish – the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn’t go to synagogue. I’m frightened of synagogue to this day.

in the synagogue of my heart… I myself jail and the jailed, I go wounded, bite-marked

The Internet, Facebook, synagogue pamphlets, and the plethora of TV channels and cellular networks in our lives increasingly blur the boundary between the public and private sphere.

Now, Jews integrate but they don’t destroy their institutions. They don’t close the synagogue. They don’t stop having special Jewish graveyards. They don’t stop having special Jewish holidays. Why can’t we understand that we can have things special to us and still comingle and integrate with others.

I did go to cheder and was a bar mitzvah. We were members of an Orthodox synagogue, although we were not religious. My grandfather was Polish. He came to Ireland in the ’30s.

In the past, children learned their values at home, reinforced by organizations such as the Boy Scouts and, of course, their church or synagogue, but in all too many families that is no longer the case.

I have not given it [synagogue] up. Christianity is the completion of the synagogue, for the synagogue was a promise, and Christianity is the fulfillment of that promise.

My mother was very agnostic. She would never set foot in the synagogue, she couldn’t be doing with it.

I follow no doctrine. I don’t belong to a church or a temple or a synagogue or an ashram.

Less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaida attacks were continuing: the firebombing of a synagogue in Tunisia in April, a bomb outside the U.S. Consulate in Karachi in June.

In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn’t go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi’s sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.

I am not a Jew in the synagogue and a feminist in the world. I am a Jewish feminist and a feminist Jew in every moment of my life.

I have a wonderful synagogue, fantastic rabbi and cantor and membership, and they just enrich my life every day, and I learned so much from helping to grow our synagogue, grow our membership, and meet the needs of such a diverse population.

I grew up in Synagogue in the boys’ choir. We didn’t listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

I’m Reconstructionist; I don’t serve the Sabbath, but I go to synagogue.

I knew I had a remarkable voice, but I was embarrassed because it was so high. But when I sang at my bar mitzvah, the rabbi was in tears. He said to my parents, ‘He must become a cantor in the synagogue,’ but my mother said, ‘No, he’s going to be a concert pianist.’