Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.
Zygmunt BaumanWe already have plenty of fundamentalism and fundamental sects like for instance Rabbi Schneerson and Chabad Lubavitch. They feel more secure because they are in the warm, caring/sharing community. This is the difference between community (Gemeinschaft) and what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft: a kind of setting in which you have no rights to do anything unless you pay for it, and no right to get anything unless you prove that you are 'credit worthy'. In a Gemeinschaft, however, you have a place at the table guaranteed whatever happens.
Zygmunt BaumanThe problem of insufficient security was, until quite recently, a matter of a minority; now it is becoming very quickly a majority matter. That is a major change.
Zygmunt BaumanWe are living at the moment in revolutionary times. Argentineans probably are more aware of it than anybody else, because they tasted it several years earlier - but now the whole world is in trouble.
Zygmunt BaumanJews and Gypsies were well-nigh the only Diasporas in 19th century Europe. Now go to London, it is a collection of Diasporas.
Zygmunt BaumanOnce we realize that the strangers are here forever and won't go away, then, like husband and wife in the old-style marriage, we would try to find a way of living together peacefully and with mutual benefit. The sooner we understand that in a globalized world the diasporic nature of cohabitation is never likely to end, that it will always be with us, I believe such modus vivendi will be found.
Zygmunt Bauman