Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?

Abraham Joshua Heschel

How to Be

Topic: Temperance & Humility

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Wikipedia
Born: January 11, 1907, Warsaw, Poland
Died: December 23, 1972, New York City, NY

(1907-1972) Judaism
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

Heschel, Abraham Joshua, and Susannah Heschel. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 264 ["No Religion is an Island"].

Abraham Joshua Heschel