If a dish doesn't turn out right, change the name and don't bat an eyelid. A fallen souffle is only a risen omelette. It depends on the self-confidence with which you present it.
In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.
I once asked God what I could give him. "Your problems," he said. "I've got everything else.
The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
When you do a good turn you feel rich, even if you are broke.
To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.
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 Charleston.
The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.
I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
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.
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.
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.
On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.
Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.
I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.
