Quotes about Certitudes

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

God has defied the purity laws! In doing so the God of the trance has violated Israel's definition of chosenness. All of the old certitudes about chosenness are coming unglued. There is no distinction between pure and impure, clean and unclean. So is there no distinction any longer between chosen and unchosen?