The following is a ritual I developed for the 7 hakafot, based on the idea of the seven ushpizin (holy visitors to the Sukkah). I modified it slightly to use for the hoshanot ritual this past Saturday, while Rabbi Shoshana (my wife) used the same ritual to introduce each hakafah on Saturday night at her congregation.

Hakafot Ritual:

The Talmud says that when we read the writings of a person who has passed away, it is as if they are speaking from the grave, it is as if their lips are moving and they are again alive and speaking to us. With that teaching as our guide, for each of the seven hakafot, let us welcome in another guest, another ushpiza, another modern and holy Jewish ancestor, and read some of their words, letting them come back from the other world to speak to us for a few moments.


Albert Einstein


"A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."

"I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever."

"Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed."

"I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws..."

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

David Ben Gurion
• In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
• If an expert says it can't be done, get another expert.
• Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
"We extend the hand of peace and good-neighborliness to all the States around us and to their people, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its Land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East." Israel's Proclamation of Independence, read on May 14, 1948
"Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent." Israel's Proclamation of Independence, read on May 14, 1948
"We accepted the UN resolution, but the Arabs did not. They are preparing to make war on us. If we defeat them and capture western Galilee or territory on both sides of the road to Jerusalem, these areas will become part of the state. Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don't accept?" David Ben-Gurion to his cabinet, May 12, 1948 [1]
"If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel." David Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation). [2]
"Well done, now give it back to them." David Ben-Gurion to Louis Nir, after his unit captured Hebron in the Six Day War. [3] [4]

Shalom Aleichem
A bachelor is a man who comes to work each morning from a different direction.
Gossip is nature's telephone.
Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.
The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger.

Shlomo Carlebach


"Everybody believes in God, hopefully. But do you know how much God believes in us? The world still exists. That means God believes in us; believes we can fix everything."

"If you love someone, never ignore him. When you love someone, it means you exist. Ignoring somone means, 'In my book you don't exist.' If you love somone but in their book you don't exist, that really hurts."

"Thank G-d, the religions are getting together more and more, people are getting together. And I don't mean to make gefilte fish (a Jewish delicacy which is made out of many different kinds of fish) out of religions, which sadly enough, hurts me a little bit. Some people think, let's make a gefilte fish out of all religions; everybody put a spoon in, and let's make a new soup. This is not what I am talking about. What's happening in the world is that everybody really wants to know: What do you think? What do you believe in? It doesn't mean that I have to change. If I see that somebody else has a beautiful nose, it doesn't mean that I have to take off his nose to put it on my face. He has his nose and I have my nose. I'm just looking at his nose and seeing that it is beautiful. You know, people have to realize that basically every religion is a revelation of G-d. All I can ask is, let me know a little bit of what G-d is revealing to you. But I have to do what G-d is revealing to me, because if I cut myself off from my own revelation, then again I'm not living up to G-d.We need something that G-d will reveal to all mankind, beyond everything in the world, deeper than any previous revelation, something so deep and so holy. I think the world is getting ready for it."


"If you want to become one with someone else, you can only do it with joy." Reb Shlomo Carlebach

"There is no greater simcha [joy] than to know that G-d hears our prayers. That is the greatest simcha in the world." Reb Shlomo Carlebach
"The question is not how much you love each other. The question is how much you love each other when you aren't getting along with each other." Reb Shlomo Carlebach
"The Ishbitzer Rebbe says that the greatest, highest, deepest, the most glorious G-d revelation is, when G-d lets you know that He needs you." given over by Reb Shlomo Carlebach

Rabbi Abraham Heschel
"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."
- Rabbi Abraham Heschel
"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space....Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time....Eternity utters a day."
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, "The Sabbath," p.10

Shalom Asch
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
The lash may force men to physical labor; it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.
Through our soul is our contact with heaven.
Without a love of humankind there is no love of God.

Golda Meir

I thought that a Jewish state would be free of the evils afflicting other societies: theft, murder, prostitution... But now we have them all. And that's a thing that cuts to the heart

I have faced difficult problems in the past but nothing like the one I'm faced with now in leading the country.
• Women's Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It's the men who are discriminated against. They can't bear children. And no one's likely to do anything about that.
o Newsweek (23 October 1972)
• Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!
• To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be.
o When questioned on Israel's future, The New York Times (12 December 1974)
• Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
o The Observer (29 December 1974)
It is not only a matter, I believe, of religious observance and practice. To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it.
My Life (1975)
• I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.
o To Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat during his unprecedented visit to Israel (21 November 1977)
• We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.
o Quoted in obituaries (8 December 1978)

Zelda
On That Night

On that night,
as I sat alone in the still
courtyard,
and gazed at the stars--
I resolved in my heart--
I almost took a vow--
to devote every evening
one moment,

a single tiny moment,
to this shining beauty.

It would seem
that there is nothing easier than this,
simpler than this,
still I haven't kept up
my oath
to myself.
Why?

... On that night, when I sat alone
in the silent courtyard,
I discovered suddenly
that my house too was built on the shore,
that I live on the bank of the moon
and the constellations,

on the bank of sunrises and sunsets.

Anne Frank
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
• God never deserted our people. Right through the ages there were Jews. Through the ages they suffered, but it also made us strong.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world.
There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
• I don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains.
• It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death...and yet...I think...this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
• Laziness may appear attractive but work gives satisfaction.
• Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
• The only way to truly know a person is to argue with them. For when they argue in full swing, then they reveal their true character.
• The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

Hanna Arendt

• Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
o The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16
• What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
o On Revolution (1963), ch. 2
• No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
o Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963): Epilogue
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
The New Yorker, 12 September 1970
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
Crises of the Republic (1969): "On Violence"
• Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
o Crises of the Republic (1969): "On Violence"
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
Crises of the Republic (1969): "Civil Disobedience"
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The Life of the Mind (1978): "Thinking"

Emma Goldman

• The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.
• The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.
o If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
• No sacrifice is lost for a great ideal! (p. 135)
o I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.
Anarchism, What it Really Stands For (1910) [1]
• Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
o Anarchism: What It Really Stands For
• The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.
o Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure

Emma Lazarus
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
The New Colossus
• Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, --
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.
o In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport
• The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
We know not which is sadder to recall;
o In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport