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1 " They weren't interested, because I was the one who wanted to join them, and not the other way around. "
― Matti Friedman
2 " At first these stories were one of many threads making up the national life of the Jews. They also had a land, and a language, and a temple that was the center of their religion. But that changed with the destruction of the temple by Rome in AD 70 and the exile of the Jews. There was no precedent for a scattered people’s remaining a people; dispersion meant disappearance. If the Jews were to be an exception, instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, they needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words. "
― Matti Friedman , The Aleppo Codex: The True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the International Pursuit of an Ancient Bible
3 " Since the rise of Islam, Jews had lived as a tolerated minority, or dhimmi, a status granted to Jews and Christians because they were monotheists. Despite a growing tendency in our own times to paint the premodern Islamic world as an Eden of religious tolerance in which Jews flourished, they always lived by the whims of fickle rulers and the mood of a hostile majority. In the eyes of that majority they were effete, lacking in honor, and powerless by definition, but as long as they accepted the supremacy of Muslims they were usually allowed to live and observe their faith and occasionally to prosper. "
4 " The Jews of Syria have no connection with the Zionist question,” read one plaintive advertisement that a Jewish youth club in Damascus, Syria’s capital, published in local papers in 1929. “On the contrary, they share with their fellow Arab citizens all their feelings of joy and sadness.” Muslims, it read, must “differentiate between the European Zionists and the Jews who have been living for centuries in these lands. "
5 " The hatred of people who aren’t like you, the idea that something will be solved if only such people can be made to disappear—this sometimes starts with Jews but tends not to end there. "
― Matti Friedman , Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
6 " The stadium was quiet. Cohen raised his hands and parted his fingers. He switched from English to Hebrew—not the new Hebrew of the Tel Aviv streets but the archaic language of the synagogue and the Diaspora, of the old men at the Gate of Heaven, the language of the priests, fifteen words. He blessed the people, and left the stage. "
― Matti Friedman , Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai
7 " Michael wasn't just happy to see his son again, he was relieved. He said something that Isaac never forgot, and which he repeated to me in a little kibbutz house a few hundred yards away from where this moment had happened forty-seven years before. He'd repeated the sentence, turning it over in his head, many times. His father said, "I'm so happy you came to the war."Isaac loved his father until his death. He keeps a large photograph of him, one he took himself, on the wall. But he never forgot those words—the way his father was willing to sacrifice him, the idea that there were things more important than his only living son. It's an unsettling story, one of our oldest, from Genesis. If this were a novel, the character of the boy would have to be named Isaac, but in a novel you wouldn't dare call him that. It would be too much. "
8 " Let there be light.” He created the world with words, which are therefore a kind of blueprint for creation and for the nature of the universe. "
9 " You need the instinct of a person who knows how to fit in, to remove the sharp edges and curve into the society." But when he wasn't a spy yet, just a proud youth perceptive enough to notice condescension, it hurt to round his edges. "
