If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Elie [Wiesel], when you ask, "Why do I want to know," I'm trying to grab the holy. And I'm getting thrown back.

When you come to the New Testament you can't even swing a cat without hitting three demons and two spirits. And magic becomes something that is everywhere. In the Hebrew Bible this sort of thing doesn't go on.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

If I had to choose between the two ways of approaching the deity, I should prefer the existential relational way, to the abstract philosophical way. I think it is truer, or in any case, less misleading, to say that God is an old Jew with a white beard whom I love, than to say that God is the ground of being and meaning, or to say that God is a name denoting the ultimate mystery. I prefer the bold primitive colors of the Biblical way of describing God.

I do think that the Josianic return to the archaic form of the Passover is appropriate and, indeed, historical. Josiah does go back to a different, earlier tradition, the time of a central sanctuary in which the law code was read. But then there were accretions to the Book of Deuteronomy.