Harry: Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

....tradition gives the one thing many shapes.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

“Turning into a tradition, isn’t it?”
“Around here, anything that happens twice is a tradition.”

My feeling is that at our present stage of Judaism, knowledge and creation within the culture have come to replace ceremony, just as ceremony and prayer, in their time, came to replace the sacrifices.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Familiarity destroys reverence.

Blind conformity had taken the place of spiritual enthusiasm.

Tradition, — which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers, — tradition is responsible for all contrary averments.

Tradition is the crown of the tyrant.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.

We can no longer rely on tradition, on consensus, on cultural habit, on unanimity of belief to give us our values. These agreed-upon traditions are all gone. Of course, we never should have rested on traditionas its failures must have proven to everyone by now-it never was a firm foundation. It was destroyed too easily by truth, by honesty, by the facts, by science, by simple, pragmatic, historical failure.

We are all captive to our traditions and influenced by them more than we realize. And the effect of tradition and long practice is not always that some terrible error becomes entrenched; more often it is that our focus shifts away from our main task and agenda, which is disciple-making. We become so used to doing things one way (often for good reason at first) that important elements are neglected and forgotten, to our cost. We become imbalanced, and then wonder why we go in circles.