Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

The line lands like a friendly provocation, then quietly turns into a critique of both prejudice and piety. Lionel Blue couches his punch in a deliberately mischievous setup: an "aged rabbi" "crazed with liberalism". That phrasing is a wink at the way liberal religious voices get caricatured as soft, sentimental, or politically suspect. Blue borrows the sneer, then flips it into a declaration of unapologetic normality.

"We Jews are just ordinary human beings" is the anti-myth sentence: it refuses the twin traps historically imposed on Jews, demonization on one end and romanticized exceptionalism on the other. Then comes the sly kicker: "Only a bit more so!" It's a joke that performs double duty. On the surface, it's affectionate pride - a comic, self-aware nudge toward Jewish distinctiveness. Underneath, it's a defense mechanism perfected by minority cultures: if you're going to be assigned a special category anyway, you reclaim it on your own terms, with humor as the shield and the scalpel.

The subtext is that "ordinary" is not a default state but a contested privilege. For a community repeatedly cast as alien, insisting on being merely human is already an argument with history. Yet Blue doesn't stop at pleading for inclusion; he injects a wry surplus, an extra "bit", acknowledging the communal habits of argument, learning, guilt, resilience - the whole messy, human repertoire intensified by centuries of being watched. The joke isn't escapism. It's cultural literacy: how to speak about identity without either begging or boasting, and how to turn the insult of stereotype into the comedy of self-definition.