Religion has often suffered from the tendency to become parochial, self-indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge the body of doctrines.  It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle for truth; to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular.  Yet the task of religion is to be a challenge to the stabilization of values.  Religion is not for religion’s sake but for God’s sake.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) Polish-American rabbi, theologian, philosopher

God in Search of Man, ch. 42 “The Spirit of Judaism” (1976)

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