“The great question of why God permits evil is usually treated in Judaism less as a “why” question than as a “what” question: Given the evil in the world, what do we do about it?

We can wonder about God’s role, but it is ultimately inscrutable. We cannot know. Imagine how little a two-year-old understands an adult. He cannot even understand what he does not know. The Jewish tradition conceives of the gap between humans and God as far greater than that between an adult and an infant. So how, ultimately, can we understand?

What we can do, is act. Faced with evil, we can choose goodness. In a weary world, mitzvot enable us to begin closing the breach between what is and what should be. Even in the most difficult circumstance, we can choose. As the great Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.’”

-Rabbi David Wolpe - From a past edition of his weekly Off the Pulpit.

"Since the 1960's, the Messianic Jewish Movement has talked about revival - an act of G-d - while too often we have instead seen revivalism - more of an act. A movement calling itself the Messianic Jewish Movement has increasingly become the Messianic Jewish-style Movement, with a decreasing Jewish demographic presence. But what is most telling is that what we are seeing in the Messianic Jewish Movement bears little if any resemblance to what the Bible would lead us to expect: a movement of observant Jews at the heart of the Jewish community, empowered by the Spirit, demonstrating the authority of the risen Messiah - as a sign, demonstration, and a catalyst of G-d's consummating purposes for Israel, the nations, and the entire creation."

"The ‘Gen-Y’ers wish to live lives that matter. They are hungry for community and where they do not find ones that welcome them, they will create their own. They do not wish to escape, but to engage; they do not want to judge or to be judged, but to join. They do not desire indictment, they seek inspiration. They are also not willing to accept the community silos of the past but are interested in models that perform. They are not interested in being silent partners in an organizational bureaucracy but want to matter and will accept process only if it leads to purpose. They are looking to change the spelling of their gaming console, the Wii from two i’s to an “e.’’

If we create portals of entry, share with them our story undiluted or whitewashed, and find the courage to let them make it their own they will do something that we can’t: guarantee our future."

-Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, from a recent Sh'ma article: GenXers and Boomers: Humility and Tzimtzum

"Welcome to a generation where rabbis have been defanged and declawed. The days of the rabbi as a weighty moral conscience are behind us now. The rabbi as irritant has been replaced with rabbi as ego-massager … The rabbi is there for ceremony. We train him for five years to announce page numbers in synagogue and present your daughter with a leather-bound Bible for her bat mitzvah … Through our desire not to offend we rabbis have reduced ourselves to a caricature, the full vitality of our souls sandwiched into the extremely narrow bandwidth accorded to us by a community that calls on us primarily for lifecycle events.

I constantly hear myself being described as "controversial," as if that's an insult to a rabbi. Yes, I am a rabbi who is loved and hated. A preparedness to be unpopular is what I have learned from Judaism, not to mention the world's most influential figures … The most influential rabbis in the world today are those like Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who aren't afraid to take verbal jackhammers to anti-Semites, notwithstanding the discomfort it breeds among some less-vocal Jews … Rabbis must begin broadening their roles away from the ceremonial and toward the provocative. You're given a pulpit. Use it."

-Rabbi Shmuley Boteach from his recent article "The End of the Rabbi as Mr. Nice Guy."

"In the past, Jews were forced to be Jews or to break away completely. Nowadays, every Jew is a Jew by choice. All of us have autonomy as to how we want to be Jews. Since being a Jew means being part of an organic being, there have to be all kinds of Jews: We need the religious, who are the backbone, and the atheists, who keep us from having faith in foolish things, and the whole spectrum in between. What do we bring into the world? Davening. The word davening comes from the Latin word divinum: to do the divine thing. Some people daven by praying, others by feeding homeless people and in these different ways, we become the instruments of God. God told Abraham, “Those people who will bless you, I will bless.” The planet is underblessed today, and our task as Jews is to keep blessing things."

-Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (from a recent article in Moment Magazine)

"Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev asks why Hanukkah is considered the holiday of miracles, rather than Passover, when the military victory of the Maccabees and even the miracle of the lights in no way compare to the grandeur of the parting of the Red Sea. Why? Because the miracle of Hanukkah is that we don't wait for God to make miracles happen for us, we take responsibility and act to make manifest our dreams now. In that sense, the real miracle of Hanukkah is human beings becoming agents of the Divine in the world. Hanukkah is about knowing that things can be better and then fighting to turn our dreams into reality.

Rava says that the fourth question we are asked to determine if our lives were lived fully and meaningfully is tzipita l'yishua - did you expect redemption? In other words, did you live mired in reality, or did you believe in the possibility of something better? Did you respond to life with despair or hope? The Jewish consciousness is built on the foundation that each of us is obligated to respond to life's inadequacies with hope - with the knowledge that everything can be different than it is. Tonight, as we light, let's affirm the central element of our humanness -- the ability to dream and the hutzpah to expect that our dreams will, eventually, become real."

-Rabbi Sharon Brous

"Rabbi Hugo Gryn was a child in Auschwitz when his father melted the precious margarine ration to light a Hanukkah candle. Hugo protested. His father said, 'My child, we know you can live three days without water. You can live three weeks without food. But you cannot live for three minutes without hope.' Live in hope."

-Rabbi David Wolpe

"Messianic Judaism has never had the luxury of being able to sit back and affirm what has always been at the expense of what could (and we believe, will) be: the recognition of Yeshua as Messiah by all Israel. Yet, just as the pioneers of Messianic Judaism had the boldness to reclaim kippot and tallitot, to disavow the label “Christian” to the extent it meant “member of a sociohistorical entity opposed to Judaism / the Jewish people”, to rename Jesus, and to assert their right to create a distinctly Jewish expression of faith in Messiah, we must have the boldness to fix their mistakes, to go where their acquired Christian theologies would not let them, to de-tangle our ultimate goal from the particular cultural forms of early Messianic Judaism and (more broadly) American evangelical Christianity as they become obsolete or counter-productive, and to follow Yeshua not only as Jewish people but as practitioners of an informed and faithful Judaism. Stagnant Messianic Judaism should be a contradiction in terms (Emphasis mine)."

-Ovadia from the blog, Just Jewish

"At the very outset I make my honest and public confession, the result of earnest thought and inward struggle, that it is my steadfast, unalterable conviction ... Yes, as a Rabbi grown grey in office, as an old Jew faithful to the Law, I confess candidly, Jesus is the predicted Messiah of Israel ... for whom we long, and for whose Advent our people have ever expected. He is come! This is now my shout of rejoicing, which my lips and pen, and, if G-d wills, my prolonged life shall serve to make known."

"Everything that is born, dies. We acknowledge our mortality, but should we give it much thought? The Spanish philosopher de Unamuno wrote that the syllogism that used to be taught in logic classes — Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal — sounds very different when rendered: I am a man; all men are mortal; therefore I will die.

Spinoza wrote that a wise man thinks of nothing less than death. Very different is the advice of Freud, "we recall the old proverb, if you want to preserve peace, arm for war. Well, if you want to endure life, prepare for death."

Judaism demands attention to this world, yet keeps us aware of our eventual fate. We are continually reminded that we are fleeting, that our lives are like the wind that blows, like the flower that fades. On Yom Kippur we dressed in white, reminiscent of the shrouds in which we will be buried. Judaism asks us to grasp both ends: we know we will die, and therefore should treasure life. Our time is given vividness and urgency by being limited. Love is more precious knowing the sun will set."

-Rabbi David Wolpe, from his weekly "Off the Pulpit"

-HaRav Joseph Soloveitchik