Torah Study Quotes

One is also obligated to divide one's [learning] time into three: a third for learning the Written Torah, a third for learning the Oral Torah and a third in which to understand and comprehend what one learnt into the first two thirds by deriving facts from other facts

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

I've studied Kabbalah, as you know, for many years, so there are a lot of things I do that one would associate with practising Judaism. I hear the Torah every Saturday. I observe Shabbat. I say certain prayers. My son was bar mitzvahed. So this appears like I'm Jewish, but these rituals are connected to what I describe as the Tree of Life consciousness and have more to do with the idea of being an Israelite, not Jewish.

There is the illusion of the world and the reality of the Torah.

And you can't make a mistake when you are reading the Torah, so you have men standing around who will correct you if you are reading it incorrectly.

Being Orthodox Jewish is kind of like being raised on like network sitcoms.

In Jewish tradition the Talmud is said to have been given on Sinai.

I started out in the Chabad movement, and I started pretty closed up, with the idea of there being that 'this is it.' I bought into that fully. I really explored in depth the Chabad ideology.

Yeshivas barely teach any Bible, only Talmud.

There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, all of this because of too little Torah study.

I attended five different Jewish day schools as a teenager. I mean, I was trained as a hazan!

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study.

In Judaism, there are 613 biblical commandments, and the Talmud says that the chief commandment of all is study.

The whole upbringing was interesting because we grew up Orthodox Jews all the way until we were teenagers.

I went to an Orthodox Jewish children's home that became an orphanage.

I was raised Jewish and bar mitzvahed.

I assume as a child Jesus had to learn how to do carpentry, learn Torah, learn all the things a human child had to learn. If He was human in all ways except that He did not sin, this must have been the case.

I think part of being Jewish is that innate desire to question things. Rabbis sit around all day and question the Torah. Giving yourself the room to question things, in a religion, just breeds thinking.

I have a broad but not an expert or scholarly background in the Jewish tradition. I've tried to learn what I can from childhood, but I am not an expert on Jewish teachings.

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

I fought tooth and nail: I didn't want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn't want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.

Make the study of the Torah your chief occupation; speak little, but accomplish much.

If you study the Talmud you please God even more than you do by praying or fasting.

In my little town, Sighet, which is in Romania, Hungary-Romania, but a real shtetl, a little [Jewish] village - and we began with the Chumash [Pentateuch], probably at age four.

One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.