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

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

Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.
Lionel Blue

Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.
Lionel Blue

Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.
Lionel Blue

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
Lionel Blue

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

For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.
Lionel Blue

For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.
Lionel Blue

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
Lionel Blue

Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.
Lionel Blue

I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.
Lionel Blue

I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
Lionel Blue

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.
Lionel Blue

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.
Lionel Blue

I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.
Lionel Blue

I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.
Lionel Blue

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

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.
Lionel Blue

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
Lionel Blue