The Stoic Jew

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Don't live as though you were going to live ten thousand years. Fate is hanging over your head; while you have life, while you may, become good. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talmud Bavli – Shabbos 153a Rabbi Eliezer says: Do teshuvah one day before your death. Rabbi Eliezer’s students ask...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:16 – Within ten days you will appear a god even to those to whom today you seem a beast or a baboon, if you return to your principles and your reverence of reason. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Farquharson - Commentary on Meditations 4:16 This is the only passage in the Meditations where the...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:14 – You came into the world as a part. You will vanish into that which gave you birth, or rather you will be taken up into its generative reason by the process of change. 4:15 – Many grains of incense upon the same altar; one falls first, another later, but difference there is none. ------------------------------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:13 - “You have reason?” “Yes, I have!” “Then why don’t you use it? If this is doing its part, what else do you want?” --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Link to "Stop it!" Mad TV Sketch --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Link to my shiur, Chazal&a...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:12 – In these two ways you must always be prepared: the one, to do only whatever the reason of the ruling and legislating faculty may suggest for the benefit of mankind; the second, to change your opinion if someone is there to correct and to guide you away from some opinion of yours. But this change of opinion must proceed only from a c...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Avos 4:1 Ben Zoma says: Which person is wise? One who learns from every person, as it is stated: “From all my teachers I became intelligent, for Your testimonies were a conversation to me” (Tehilim 119:99). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eichah Rabbah 2:9 her kings and her officers are among the...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Epictetus – Enchiridion 1 On the one hand, there are things that are in our power, whereas other things are not in our power. In our power are opinion, impulse, desire, aversion and, in a word, whatever is our own doing. Things not in our power include our body, our possessions, our reputations, our status, and, in a word, whatever is not...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Rough sketch of the meme (which, btw, is "expanding brain" not "exploding mind"): https://imgflip.com/i/4nsl8w Links to other episodes relevant to this one: Aurelius - Meditations 4:7: The Secret to Not Getting Hurt Aurelius - Meditations 4:8: The Stoic Definition of Harm ------------------------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:9 – It was a law of necessity that what is naturally beneficial should bring this about. 4:10 – “All that comes to pass comes to pass with justice.” You will find this to be so if you watch carefully. I do not mean only in accordance with the ordered series of events, but in accordance with justice and as it were by someone who assigns w...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Epictetus – Enchiridion 25 Has someone been honored above you at a banquet, or in a greeting, or in being called in to give advice? If these things are good, you should be pleased for the person who has received them. If, on the other hand, they are bad, do not be upset that you did not receive them yourself. Remember, with respect to acqu...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! What does not make a man worse than he was, neither makes his life worse than it was, nor hurts him without or within. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aurelius - Meditations 2:1 I cannot be harmed by any of them, for no man can involve me in any wrong … -------------------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Get rid of the judgment, and you are rid of the “I am hurt.” Get rid of the “I am hurt” and you are rid of the hurt itself. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Epictetus – Enchiridion 5 It is not circumstances themselves that trouble people, but their judgments about those circumstances ... Therefore...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! These are natural and necessary results from creatures of this kind, and one who wants this to be otherwise wants the fig-tree not to yield its acrid juice. And in general remember this, that within a very little while both he and you will be dead, and a little after not even your name nor his will be left. --------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Death is like birth, a mystery of nature, a composition out of identical elements and a decomposition into the same. Looked at generally this is not a thing of which man should be ashamed, for it is not contrary to the nature of a rational animal nor to the principle of his constitution. ----------------------------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! If mind is common to us all, then also the reason, whereby we are rational beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do. If this be so, there is a common law also; if this be so, we are fellow citizens; if this be so, we are members of one political community; if this be so, the wo...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Finally, therefore, remember your retreat into this little domain which is yourself, and above all do not distract or strain yourself, but be free and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a creature that must die. And among what is most ready at hand into which you will look have these two: the one, that things do no...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! Well, then, shall mere glory distract you? Look at the swiftness of the oblivion of all men; the gulf of endless time, behind and before; the hollowness of applause, the fickleness and folly of those who seem to speak well of you, and the narrow room in which it is confined. This should make you pause. For the entire earth is a point in sp...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! For what is it that shall move your repugnance? The wickedness of men? Recall the judgement that reasonable creatures have come into the world for the sake of one another; that patience is a part of justice; that men do wrong involuntarily; and how many at last, after enmity, suspicion, hatred, warfare, have been laid out on their death-be...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:3 – Men look for retreats for themselves, the country, the sea-shore, the hills; and you yourself, too, are peculiarly accustomed to feel the same want. Yet all this is very unlike a philosopher, when you may at any hour you please retreat into yourself. For nowhere does a man retreat into more quiet or more privacy than into his own min...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 2:1 – Begin the morning by saying to yourself: “Today I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful, the envious, and the unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and bad. But I, who have seen the nature of the good that it is right, and of the bad that it is wron...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:2 – Nothing that is undertaken is to be undertaken without a purpose, nor otherwise than according to a principle which makes the art of living perfect. [1] [1] Long: “nor otherwise than according to the perfect principles of art.” -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 4:1 – The ruling power within, when it is in accordance with nature, so confronts what comes to pass as always to adapt itself readily to that which is and that which is presented to it. This is because it requires no definite material; rather it moves towards its purpose with a reservation, and then makes the opposition which encounters i...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:16 – Body, vital spirit, mind: to the body belong sense perceptions; to the vital spirit, impulses; to the mind, principles. To be impressed by images belongs also to the beasts of the field; to be pulled by the strings of desire belongs to wild beasts, and to men who sin against nature, to a Phalaris or a Nero. To have the mind as guide...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:15 – They have not learned to know how many things are signified by the words theft, sowing, buying, keeping quiet, seeing what ought to be done. This depends not on the bodily eye but on another kind of vision. [1] [1] Farquharson Commentary: One of those intrusive fragments, disturbing the natural sequence. The meaning is enigmatic, th...

Have any questions, insights, or feedback? Send me a text! 3:14 – Do not wander from your path any longer, for you are not likely to read your note-books or your deeds of ancient Rome and Greece or your extracts from their writings, which you laid up against old age. Hasten then to the goal, lay idle hopes aside, and come to your own help, if you care at all for yourself, while still you may. ----...