AtD/VL-related: The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Michael Bailey]

 Ian Livingston wrote:


> transform ourselves into a migrating entity floating between a
> multitude of realities, sustained only by infinite Love. Against this
> tradition, the Jews, in a radically anti-millenarian way, persist in
> their fidelity to the Law; they insist on the insurmountable finitude
> of humanity and, in consequence, on the need for a minimum of
> 'alienation'" (255).

much as I agree with a lot of what you go on to say, Ian, and as much
as I deplore the current intransigent settlement policies of the State
of Israel, that gratuitous swipe at the Jews just strikes me as not
cricket.

The little I've learned of Jewish philosophy and religion has still
been enough to show me a vast panoply ranging from the Kabbalah to
Martin Buber, and Jewish thinkers include Marx and Einstein, for
Pete's sake,
To think that the Jews "persist in their fidelity to the Law" is to
laugh, considering that the Old Testament is a saga of straying and
returning...
that the ancillary teachings are a masterpiece of accommodating and
interpreting, that the scholarly rabbinical tradition is one of great
variety.