COLLECTED & CONSIDERED
Collected & Considered
← Back to the library

The Jewish Experience

by Mark Wildes

Jewish Thought & MussarJewish Life & HistoryBiography & Memoir

Added to the collectionJanuary 30, 2026

Selected Passages

Selected passages

A theory is accepted not because it has been 100 percent proven, but because it best explains the cumulative data or phenomena. As Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman is often quoted: “It is scientific only to say what is more likely and less likely.” Therefore, our goal is not to demonstrate proof but probability"

the job of a good parent or teacher is not to mold, but to extract – to uncover the greatness that lies within each child. Extracting presupposes that one already possesses something uniquely spiritual.

Each of the three daily prayers focuses on a specific spiritual energy. The morning prayer empowers us to concentrate on renewal and innovation. In the afternoon, we carve out a few moments to find calm in the midst of our daily chaos. Finally, as evening arrives we find peace in the stillness of night ~ Reb Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin

We are worth what we are willing to share.

In the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik: “During the Yom Kippur services, our prayerful concerns are almost exclusively with our own people…. But this self-involvement is not hermetically exclusionary. The universal emphasis is prominent in all our prayers, in Scripture, the Talmud, and the Midrash; and when opportunities were benign and conditions propitious, we have contributed far more than our proportionate share to the welfare of humanity…. It is, therefore, characteristic of the universal embrace of our faith that as the shadows of dusk descend on Yom Kippur day, after almost twenty-four hours of prayer for Israel, the Jew is alerted through the book of Jonah, prior to the closing of the “heavenly gates” (Ne’ilah) that all humanity is God’s children. We need to restate the universal dimension of our faith.”