In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel.
Interpretation
Faith involves grappling with doubts and challenges, similar to how Jacob struggled with the divine.
This quote suggests that faith in Judaism is not a passive acceptance of belief but an active engagement that includes questioning and wrestling with one's beliefs, much like Jacob's literal struggle with the angel. It indicates that true faith can involve conflict, doubt, and a journey towards deeper understanding and connection with God.
In practice
During a sermon, the pastor discussed the importance of questioning one's faith, reminding the congregation of Jacob's fight with the angel.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
I think I should understand that better, if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.
Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.
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