Lionel Blue Quotes
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I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
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The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.
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In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.
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It's more fun to watch without joining in.
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To change, to convert? Why bother?
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It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.
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I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.
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Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.
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I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.
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This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.
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I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.
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I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.
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I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
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An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!
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I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.
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Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.
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I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
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I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.
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What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.
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I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
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I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.
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My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.
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Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.
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Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.