9 Quotes by Judith Shulevitz

The psychoanalytic session, like the Sabbath, takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time--the timeless time of the unconscious, with its yawning infantile unboundedness, its shattered sequentiality. It may not be pleasant, it may not be convenient, you may not want to go, but you do. On time. And the fixed time limits also keep you from losing yourself in that disorienting , disorganizing flux.

Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval

The religious Jew is to study Torah for the sake of studying Torah. Torah lishmah. The ingenuity of the edict, I realized was that it relieved you of the obligation to be qualified. You studied because you had to study, and those who taught had to take you as a student.

the day is all about getting connected.

Heschel calls the Sabbath a cathedral in time.

The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people. You can’t just extract lessons from it.

There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.

The psychoanalytic session, like the Sabbath, takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time – the timeless time of the unconscious, with its yawning infantile unboundedness, its shattered sequentiality. It may not be pleasant, it may not be convenient, you may not want to go, but you do. On time. And the fixed time limits also keep you from losing yourself in that disorienting, disorganizing flux.

Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval.