If you lack not just hope for survival, but hope for something greater in the future, you cannot go on fighting.
With only a past and no future, you cannot continue.
People also cannot go on living in the past, even if the past was entirely nice – and ours was not.
You see, the shtetl, wherever it was, cannot be recreated.
There is no need and no use for it.
For many people, the State of Israel is a vicarious answer for unsolved problems.
But you cannot go on living vicariously.
Just as I cannot eat for someone else, I cannot sleep for someone else, and no one wants me to beget his children for him, I also cannot pray or study for anyone else.
Life is something that you have to do on your own.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz