Lionel Blue Quotes

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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 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 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.

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

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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