Lionel Blue

“My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charlest...”

“Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.”

“The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.”

“Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.”

“It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.”

“Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.”

“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.”

“I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.”

“At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.”

“I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.”

“I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.”

“An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!”

“I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.”

“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 son...”

“To change, to convert? Why bother?”

“I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.”