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 pra… - Shulamith Hareven

We know more about a foreign politician or entertainer than we do about the man across the road.

This writer said in October 1967, in an article in Ha'aretz, that if we hold on to the territories, the first consequence will be that we will start lying to ourselves. That is exactly what happened, very rapidly, and that is what is happening today, when a weak population, deprived of citizenship and rights, lacking arms and the means to defend itself, is claiming its rights-a claim that is consonant with the Israeli social interest itself-but is reflected in our warped mirror as actually threatening the existence of the state. Not only an outsider will have trouble understanding this; so will the historian of the future. The worst of it is that these tribal mythologies leave us with no alternative, no scale of possibilities, no prospect of culture, no choice of identity-except to be either murderers, the murdered, or both. As though Israel had no other identity. As though, in the biggest lie of all, this were Judaism. ("Israel: The First Forty Years")

you could always tell a man's calling by his dress.