>From time to time on this group we experience dialogue between Jews and others.

>This piece by Elie Wiesel may help. (Please excuse his sexist language):

>Shalom! Rowland Croucher

>PS. I’m not a Jew, but an evangelical Christian (PPS. I said _evangelical_ not fundamentalist!)

>Judaism, more than any other tradition, manifests great attachments to its past, jealously keeping it alive. Why? Because we need to. Thanks to Abraham whose gaze is our guide, thanks to Jacob whose dream has us spellbound, our survival, prodigious on so many levels, lacks neither mystery nor significance… The Jew is haunted by the beginning more than by the end. His messianic dream is tied to the kingdom of David and he feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbour.

>What is a Jew? Sum, synthesis, vessel. Someone who feels every blow ever struck his ancestors… crushed by their mourning and buoyed by their triumphs. For they were living men and women, not symbols… Thus the Jew remembers them and sees them as they were at the crossroads of their own lives: troubled, exalted, marked. They are human beings: people, not gods. Their quest rejoins his own and weighs on his decisions. Jacob’s ladder rends his nights. Israel’s despair burdens his solitude. He knows that to speak of Moses is to follow him to Egypt and out of Egypt. To refuse to speak of him is to refuse to follow him.

>Elie Wiesel, ‘Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends’, Summit Books, 1976, pp. xi-xiii.