When you do a good turn you feel rich, even if you are broke.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.

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 was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.

If a dish doesn’t turn out right, change the name and don’t bat an eyelid. A fallen souffle is only a risen omelette. It depends on the self-confidence with which you present it.

So many plusses, so many minuses.

In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.

This Christian poison hasn’t stopped yet.

It is not possible to unknow what you do know – the result of that is fanaticism.

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.

The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.

I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul‘s plusses.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.

Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.

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.

I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

What would I have done if I’d been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.

To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn’t wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.

The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.