27 Quotes by Naomi Ragen

When a man and woman married, nothing they did together had any shame or immodesty. It was all in the name of God. There was fruitfulness and joy in it, and it followed the Creator’s own plan for continuing the human race.

So many hypocrites, people busy preaching acceptance and tolerance but hating and rejecting everyone who isn’t exactly like them.

The most terrible thing about terrorism, the thing that people fond of saying “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” didn’t get, was that even siding with the terrorists gave you no immunity. The terrorist never knew his victims, and didn’t give a damn. When you sided with them, you were taking sides against yourself.

Elizabeth feared that because of her looks, she was doomed to meet men with unreasonably high self-images and no depth, the kind that dogged movie actresses and models. Men who were superficial to begin with, and existentially boring in that which they sought, and thus ultimately unsatisfying and unworthy of respect of interest.

When there was nothing left to gain, nothing more to lose, when one was face-to-face with the moment of greatest despair, to speak to God in love and thanks, rather than to curse Him and one’s fate, was the ultimate choice of any human creature, and perhaps the ultimate expression of one’s humanity.

Like most Eastern Europeans, he was not amenable to the socialist ethic so many Israeli leftists still romanticized, despite the proven failure of Communism to solve any of the world’s problems and its unenviable success in inventing many new ones.

Of course, everyone had heard of the Ten Commandments, but these things, so much subtler, so embedded in the stuff of everyday human life and human interactions – this was the ultimate goal of all Jewish life: justice, kindness, charity, Holiness.

What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history – all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over – if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?

He who gives life, nourishes life. He listens, this I can tell you. Whatever happens, He’s listening. He doesn’t always answer right away. He doesn’t always say yes. But He’s listening. This much I promise you.