I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.
I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
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.
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.
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 have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
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.
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 recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.
During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.
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.