I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.

Even in darkness it is possible to create light.

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

Abraham is trying to obey God, but not to kill. I feel that moment is one of the defining moments of Jewish faith.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

My anger rises up within faith and not outside it.

The story [of the Sacrifice of Isaac ] is much more a part of theology than of history.