Leo Rosten Quotes

Two shlemiels were drinking tea. In time, one looked up and announced portentously: “Life! What is it? Life — is like a fountain!” The other pondered for a few minutes, then asked, “Why?” The first thought and thought, then sighed. “So okay: life isn’t like a fountain.

An aveyre is the direct opposite of a mitzva, as we shall see. The words are often contrasted, as in the saying “One mitzva leads to another; an aveyre leads to an aveyre.

FOLK SAYING: “The luck of an am horets is this: He doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

No one is sure how and when the Star of David first came into use as a symbol of Jewry. The first Zionist Congress adopted it in 1897.

To be sure, the cheder curriculum was narrowly limited, the pedagogical methods primitive: drill, repetition, and cracks across the knuckles with a pointer or ruler. But at a time when the overwhelming majority of humanity was illiterate, there was hardly a Jewish male over the age of five who could not read and write. The cultural impact and importance of this are for historians, sociologists, and educators to appraise.

In the Jewish communities of Europe, learned but poor Jews were much, much more highly respected than rich but unlearned ones. Am horets meant “uneducated” or “uncultured” (just as “villain,” in English, originally designated a serf, and “boor,” a peasant);

The Torah, like other ancient law codes, assigns the death penalty to many proscribed behaviors besides murder — including adultery, rape of a betrothed woman, giving insult or injury to one’s parents, witchcraft, male homosexuality, and public profanation of the Sabbath. By the second century C.E., however, the Talmudic rabbis, whose debates and rulings constitute the main body of Halakha, had virtually nullified the death penalty. The Mishnah (the codification of law that forms the core text of the Talmud) states, “A Sanhedrin [governing council] that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death” (Makkot 7A). Even in murder cases, the Torah’s requirement of two eyewitnesses for a sentence of death was interpreted by the Talmudic rabbis to make capital punishment highly unlikely: the murderer’s own confession could not be accepted as evidence, and the two eyewitnesses were required also to have warned the criminal beforehand that he would be executed! Justice tempered by mercy thus became the Jewish ideal.

It has been said that the basic principle of Jewish ethics lies in the idea of mandatory mitzvas. Said Eleazar ben Simeon: “The world is judged by the majority of its people [and] an individual by the majority of his deeds. Happy is he who performs a good deed: that may tip the scale for him and the world [italics mine].” Israel Zangwill called the mitzvas the Jews’ “sacred sociology.

PROVERB: “A wise man, looking for a bride, should take an ignoramus along to advise him.

FOLK SAYING: “A man’s worst enemies can’t wish on him what he can think up himself.

The shadkhn was impressing the young woman with the boundless virtues of a female and ended: “And to look at, she’s a regular picture!” The young man could not wait for his blind date. But when he accosted the shadkhn the next day, his voice was frosty: “Her eyes are crossed, her nose is crooked, and when she smiles one side of her mouth goes down — ” “Just a minute,” interrupted the shadkhn. “Is it my fault you don’t like Picasso?

What a farshtinkener business!” has the edge on “What a stinking business” in my opinion, because the sh is more eloquent than the s in the communication of obloquious nuances. It is also more chic to enlist a foreign word when driven to coarse utterance.

In the Jewish communities of Europe, learned but poor Jews were much, much more highly respected than rich but unlearned ones.

There is no truth in the observation that after Robert Briscoe, a Jew, was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, the Irish began to see leprecohens.

Sholem Aleichem defined a shadkhn as “a dealer in livestock.