The only way for us to help ourselves is to help others and to listen to each other's stories.
I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.
I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.
Everything is in it: the promise and the hope and the fear and the challenge and the defiance. The test is a double test: Just as God tested Abraham, Abraham tested God: "Let's see if you really want me to go ahead with it and kill my son." Then the angel says, "Do not raise your hand against the boy" [Genesis 22:12]. It was the Angel of God who says this, not God. God was embarrassed. [All laugh]
You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.
At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.
My approach is not a scientific approach. For that, we have greater minds than mine. My approach is: I am in the possession of a text, it has survived so many centuries, and it is my task, my pleasure, to try to decipher it and find all the things that have been said about these few words by generations and generations of commentators. That is what I'm doing. I don't innovate anything. I'm just repeating.
Refugee today means somebody who has no home. No homeland. No security. No government to protect him or her. And it is of course one feels not only uprooted, one feels useless. One feels always surrounded by hostile forces. Arousing suspicion.
What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.
For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.
Holy War is a contradiction of terms.
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.
Love makes everything complicated.
If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible.
Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.
The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.
Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.
Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?
Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.
My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.
"Not to remember is not an option."
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