The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedAndre Schwartz-Bart
Title QuotedLast of the Just
Date (Year/Month/Day)1962/02/15
ImprintNew York : Atheneum. 1960
QuotationGuess what, I just got through reading The Last of the Just. I think it is a really great book. It has helped crystallize out a whole lot of things I am thinking about. Chief of these is of course no news to anyone: that the Jews have been the great eschatological sign of the twentieth century. That everything comes to depend on people understanding this fact, not just reacting to it with a little appropriate feeling, but seeing the whole thing as a sign from God, telling us. Telling us what? Among other things, telling Christians that if they don't look out they are going to miss the boat or fall out of it, because the antinomy they have unconsciously and complacently supposed between the Jews and Christ is not even a very good figment of the imagination. The suffering Servant is One: Christ, Israel. There is one wedding and one wedding feast, not two or five or six. There is one bride. There is one mystery, and the mystery of Israel and of the Church is ultimately to be revealed as One. As one great scandal maybe to a lot of people on both sides who have better things to do than come to the wedding.
Quotation SourceThe Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1985, p. 535
Letter toZalman Schachter
Notes 
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