a fulsome funbag of phantasmagoria

Oh, this “noble” culture of ours! It speaks so piously of human dignity and human rights and then disregards this dignity and these rights of countless millions and treads then underfoot, only because they live overseas or because their skins are of different color or because they cannot help themselves. This culture does not know how hollow and miserable and full of glib talk it is, how common it looks to those who follow it across the seas and see what it has done there, and this culture has no right to speak of personal dignity and human rights.

I have been told by angels that it is impossible for our life to be changed after death, because it is organized around the love and faith we had, and the things we did as a result. If our life were to be changed, it would tear apart that whole structure, and that could never happen. Changes in that structure are completely impossible in the spiritual body once our physical body has been cast off.

‘Choice’ in education is a term that must be stripped of its false innocence. The prevailing use of the word conceals a deep scepticism about the whole idea of education as serving a common interest, providing a language for public debate and moral wrangling. Choice in this context looks remarkably like the successful assertion of will when you analyse it; and the supposed goodness of free choice in education is not very different from the desirability to my being able to defend and sustain my interest - albeit through another party, the child, whose interests are seen as an extension of mine.

If we are serious about understanding God’s being in social terms, thinking of God as the power at the beginning, the power of relationship, then the continuation of creation depends on the strength of love among human beings. Whether or not the nuclear winter comes depends on how many people rise from the death of unrelatedness and are converted. God lures anew each day, to repent.

We are very strong in our emptiness, our capacity to protect ourselves. But if we open our hearts, the knowledge breaks through that we too are part of the totality of good, we too are being used. The certainty of God in us does not then grow as a certainty of authoritarian might that it will be right in the end, but as the certainty of the subversive power of justice.

Transcendence is radical; in other words, it is immanence loved and affirmed from the roots. If in our immanence, in what we experience and do, we really enter into the radicality of love, then our immanence contains transcendence. In that case what we call ‘God’ appears in our everyday affairs. The compassionate man from Samaria finds God and is found by God on the road. So, too, the truth, love, beauty of God can shine forth in our everyday life.

In the Talmud the image of God in human beings is not understood as a spiritual image; rather, we are the image of God, which means that we can act like God. Just as God made clothes for Adam and Eve, so too we can clothe the naked. Just as God fed Elijah through a raven, so we too are to feed the hungry.

How can we distinguish good power, the power of life, from evil power, the power to dominate? This question is central to a feminist and thus humane way of thinking. The most important criterion for answering it is that good power is shared power, power which distributes itself, which involves others, which grows through dispersion and does not become less. In this sense the resurrection of Christ is a tremendous distribution of power. The women who were the first to experience it were given a share in the power of life. It was the tremendous certainty of God which now entered their life.

The question which is often put to me, ‘Do you believe in God?’, usually seems a superficial one. If it only means that there is an extra place in your head where God sits, then God is in no way an event which changes your whole life, an event from which, as Buber says of real revelation, I do not emerge unchanged. We should really ask, ‘Do you live out God?’ That would be in keeping with the reality of the experience.

Here God is not spoken of as the supreme object, but as the mutual, significant, actively experienced relationship to life… What takes place in the encounter with God is that the searching ends not with finding, but with being found. God was always already standing behind me, even when I was rushing in the other direction.

Here God is understood as will, not as being resting in itself. Of course, God remains an infinite mystery that we cannot interpret, but in ethical terms that is a foolish statement, because what God wants of us is quite clear and recognizable: ‘You have been told what is good and what the Lord requires of you’ (Micah 6.8). It is quite clear how meaning is to be received and to be brought into the world.

Giving and taking are two-sided: we know God only if we also know how much God needs us… Love itself wants mutuality; God wants our joy, our power, our creative participation, and not us as mere vessels of divine inpouring.