Читать книгу Jews and Christians Together - A. Christian van Gorder - Страница 4

You might ask, how I can form a friendship with a Jewish person? It shouldn’t be any harder than making friends with a Gentile. Show him by your conversation and actions that you are interested in him as a person. Seek out common interests, such as hobbies, employment, or neighborhood activities as a basis for conversation. Encourage your Jewish friend to talk and you should try to be a good listener. Even if you are only able to do ten percent of the talking it is not how much you say but what you are saying during the allotted time that counts. A good gesture of friendship is to remember to send greeting cards to your Jewish friends at Jewish holiday times like Passover, the Jewish New Year, and Hanukkah. They will greatly appreciate the fact that you respect their religion.

—Moishe and Ceil Rosen, Share the New Life with a Jew, 41

Since Messiah has come and offered his culminating sacrifice, there is, as we see it, no temple, no priesthood, no altar, no atonement, no forgiveness, no salvation, and no eternal hope in Judaism as a religion.

—Vernon C. Grounds, “The Problem of Proselytization,” in Tanenbaum et al., Evangelicals and Jews, pp. 207–8

It (the Holy Spirit) hates them a lot and I do too. / And God hates them and I hate them / and the whole world must hate them / because they do not wish to desist from their errors.

—The Tale of the Bishop of Toledo, in Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Notre Dame, II lines 209–12 p.13

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also altogether out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in the world in all the ages- and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, and no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

—Mark Twain, “Concerning the Jews,” in the Complete Essays of Mark Twain (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1963), 249

O that man might know; the end of this day’s business ‘ere it come; But it sufficed that the day will end; and then the end is known.

—Brutus to Cassius in Julius Caesar, Act V, Scene I,

William Shakespeare