My collection of Quotes

I've come to the conclusion that the main purpose of writing or doing most things is to give others pleasure. So if I've given you some pleasure I have been rewarded for my efforts, which I confess are quite strenuous.

I don't think that wise sayings are meant to be practised, they're only indications of a person's opinions and guidelines to thoughts. They aren't dogmatic beliefs and a person can change his opinions about life and daily events. 

Some sayings appear to be wise, others are plainly nonsense, but these are things I have thought about or that I've heard tourists say while guiding tourists around the places which are holy for them.​

The Bible

Many peoples will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. Isaiah 2:3

Pirke Avot (Jewish Book of Ethics)quotes

Everything is in the hands of God, excepting the fear of God. 

My friend's quotes Interpretation: (By my friend Sid Gordon) 

God doesn't make decisions for man (like being righteous or wicked) every person makes his or her own decisions in life. God allows this because He does not force anyone to be righteous and holy or to be wicked. Man is responsible for these decisions.

Sid Gordon Fri 13th Nov 09

"I didn't know that calvary and the tomb of Jesus were so close to each other" 

Tourist Bob Thur 3rd Dec 09 

Never give up on the internet. Keep at it untill you get it right.

Candy 

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Always be willing to let go of the life you had planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for you.

My Quotes:

Be patient with people, everybody, especially those close to you. People need time to come round to think about what they have said or done. 

People will criticise themselves much more fiercly and effectively than you can ever do, but you need patience untill they think about the things they've done or said. 

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Social order is maintained by the spread of myths which Plato calls "Noble LIes and maimonides calls "necessary and useful beliefs." 

Sun 15th Nov 09 

What is the light at the end of the dark path of Jewish HIstory which illuminates every step we take? it is the light of Torah. 

It's important to enjoy something beautiful each day. 

Tues 1st Dec 09

looking back at the light and shade of Jewish history we’re hopeful that whatever tragedies the future may bring, joyous events will follow.

Western (Wailing) Wall quotes 

Tues 17th Nov 09 

Jews pray at the wall for God not to destroy the world 

The wall is the closest we can come to the place where holiness used to come down to earth without standing on the place itself. 

Temple sacrifice quotes 

God used to send holiness down to earth when the priests used to sacrifice at the temple, now we aren't worthy to recieve the holiness because we're not holy, because we have defiled ourselves with war and blood and in any case there aren't anymore priests. 

Because of this we live in darkness and just as people sleep in the darkness and dream so the temple has become a dream

Leon's War quotes 

We’ll win the war when we stop fighting. 

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"you move to violence by blaming someone for nonsense. You move people to peace by not blaming anyone." 

Leon's interpretation quotes

Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut is the tragedy of a woman who takes love from one man and money from another. 

Leon's quotes about Jesus 

Sat 14th Nov 09 

Jesus was not the saviour of the Jews neither was he their king or god.

Leon's Calvary Quotes

Calvary and the tomb of Jesus weren't close to each other. The closeness was artificially contrived by Constantine to facilitate pilgrimage . 

Winston Churchill 

Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is."

Ed Morrissey

"Mass murderer in Norway gets 99.5 days in prison per victim" 

"scary but it would help if other nations make sure that this guy stays in Norway and never enters another country." 

beena sarwar 

If clerics can hold forth from pulpits, move crowds to be violent in religion's name, they should also be able to move crowds to be peaceful.

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More of My Quotes:

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worries take up too much thinking space in my brain and I am very worried about its capacity. 

Jews mourn at the Wailing because the destruction of the temple signified the imminent destruction of the world. 

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You don’t have to hate someone just because you disagree with him.

the Jews are the guardians of the temple and God will give them back that task. 

Moslems will agree to Jewish sovereignty of the Holy Land if they become Moslem.

Gambling is stealing honestly from people prepared to pay for the chance to steal honestly. 

God wants to destroy the world but desists because of devout Christians, Jews and Moslems.

Offering animal sacrifices Jews thought they were saving the world from destruction which God was preparing to carry out after Adam's sin.

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Israelis have lost patience with the Arabs and aren’t interested in fighting extended wars. Leon Gork

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Jewish idealism established the State of Israel to reach for the top of an ideal society

Hanlie Gordon

advice for folding bike enthusiasts CAREFULL THAT THE THING DONT FOLD UP WHILE YOU ARE TRAVELING! MOOI BLY.

Rabbi of Kotzk

horses follow the middle of the path humans always walk along the edge.

More of my very own quotes:

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why is it important to know that there is a god? won't i be just as happy not knowing that he exists as knowing?

levels of society are joined to each other, like mountain climbers struggling to reach the peak. Leon Gork

the Garden of Eden is the world we leave behind after we die, our lives are a once in a lifetime opportunity to make it more perfect Leon Gork

The Death of Sigmund Freud Mark Edmundson P.232

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to renounce the visible in the interest of the unseen is an enormously difficult task.” 

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for all to go well, he needed to have a close friend to confide in and a spirited enemy to oppose.

My Quote:

why is it important to know that there is a god? won't i be just as happy not knowing that he exists as knowing? 

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The animal is capable of achieving pure joy because it can't think. I am capable of achieving it because I can think.

My tours in Jerusalem and Israel are the closest one can come in Israel to the situation in Hyde Park, where everyone can speak his mind freely.

Introducing Disobedience Gen 2:16:17 Morality is the important thing in life

Introducing Disobedience.

“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16–17).

You don't get morality by eating fruit, neither do you get it by acquiring knowledge. You get it by being obedient to God's laws.

The message of Torah is "Study Torah" that's where you can find God's laws, which you need to know so that you can be obedient to them. 

The Torah, however could not be given to mankind untill mankind had learned that a morally evil act causes death as surely as poison.

The only way to teach mankind this lesson was to give him a law and punish him by death if he broke it. So God gave Adam and Eve the law not to eat from the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. But since Adam and Eve disobeyed this law the inclination to disobedience became part of human nature and it’s become impossible to be perfectly obedient. This created the need for morality and the way how to become moral.

God wants Adam and Eve to acquire knowledge. That is why He created a tree of knowledge and a tree of life and planted them in the Garden of Eden. It's a clear sign that He wants Adam and Eve to have life and to have knowledge of Good and Evil; knowledge is a moral good which can lead to life, which is also a moral good.

The two things, life and knowledge go together as is made clear from this verse, hereunder and many others like it in the Torah.

“Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD.” (Lev 18:5)

Adam and Eve and all mankind learn that the essence of knowledge is to know that moral evil is punishable by death.

Obviously disobedience did not exist until Adam and Eve disobeyed the commandment of God not to eat from the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. The snake succeeded in tempting Eve to be disobedient because he told her she wouldn’t die from eating the fruit, and he was correct in that, namely she wouldn't die from any physical, tangible poison in the fruit, and she knew that, as well as he did. She obviously knew which fruit was poisonous and which not and clearly the fruit she saw was not poisonous, as the verse says: “and she saw that it was good to eat” Gen 3:6.

She didn’t have to be disobedient to learn that eating poisonous fruit could kill her. She knew that already. But she obviously didn’t know that there was another kind of poison, namely the unseen poison of carrying out a morally evil act.

When God told Adam “for on the day you eat of it you shall surely die” he didn’t mean that he would die from poison in the fruit and Adam, like Eve was confused. He didn't understand that God was referring to a morally bad act, the act of disobedience to God. He thought it referred to the fruit being bad, meaning poisonous, and he could plainly see that the fruit was not poisonous. But God meant that if he ate from the fruit he would be disobeying God’s commandment, which is a morally evil act and that warrants the punishment of death just as surely as physical poison that one can see.

I doubt if we could accuse the snake of a crime, because he also couldn't have known about moral crimes that could cause death.

The sin of Adam and Eve is disobedience. They brought disobedience into the world. 
Now, once the evil of commiting a moral crime had been established it became necessary to make laws regarding the various punishments for various crimes, hence the creation of Torah, the book in which God tells us what we may and what we may not do and the various punishments for disobeying His word.

The words “for on the day you eat of it you shall surely die” aren’t a threat, they are information, the statement of a fact, namely moral evils cause death as surely as physical poison causes death by being punishable by death. Disobedience to the word of God is a morally evil action, punishable by death. Adam and Eve are no longer immortal and mankind, their offspring are mortal. Now everybody lives under the shadow of the sword of death.Death is certain and there's no escape from it since Adam and Eve's disobedience. 

It’s not the fruit which carries the death penalty. The snake isn’t lying when he says that Eve won’t die from eating the fruit. He and Adam and Eve all possess knowledge that the fruit wasn’t poisonous. It’s disobedience to the word of God which is liable to be punished by death.

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is necessary because that is the place for absollute obedience to God, the placeof perfection, where perfectly obedient people have access to the tree of life.