Religion,Bible

I have read the Bible many times and never succeeded in bringing it into focus.I am the son of a Rabbi and in my younger days, when I didn't understand a passage, I exerted myself heroically to cook up interpretations of the obscure ,to give life to the bland and to find profound,underlying meanings to the offensive and the absurd.I became so proficient at interpretive fraud that I might have applied to become one of Bernard Madoff's accountants. Eventually Mark Twain's admission that unlike those who are upset by the passages they don't understand , he was upset by the ones he did understand,came to me as breath of fresh air. This is mantra that has never left me. It is relevant to many subjects.
And yet I love the Bible. It is often wise(tower of Babel);moving(Elijah in the desert,the loneliness of King Saul);
lofty(for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt);but also barbaric,(the genocidal commandments concerning the Amalekites,The Akeda)
I also love biblical commentary when it is not enlisted as the inspiration for dubious political enterprises.
This morning I attended the Torah session at tne temple where we pored over a passage from the prophet Ezekiel In that passage Ezekiel ,speaking in the name of God(as prophets are wont to do),promised that he would bind the two segments of the people together, restore them to the land and ,after they had demonstrated their commitment to His Laws would make a covenant of peace and unite them under David
Comments;(1) I was struck by the reference to two segments. Who are they? It slowly dawned on me that the two segments referred to the tribes of Judah who remained on the land and the tribes of Israel that had been dispersed by the Assyrians and disappeared. These have never been found though there are a lot of claimants,including at one time the British.Evidently DNA has shown that the most plausible heirs to these lost tribes of Israel are the PASHTUN .What next?
Still it is significant that by "the people "the prophet intends even those who have are lost.Thus even if all the present Jews in the world go to Israel we have to intensify the hunt for those who are still dispersed.
2What is Ezekiel's "covenant of peace" which will make us one people. This week an Israeli minister announced that he looked foward to the time that Israel would be ruled by Divine Law, just as Ezekiel wanted.One of our group asked whether this could ever happen as the law has many interpreters... so many that Israel is closer to a tower of Babel than to a unified congregation(that's why I like it)
3 We discussed the afterlife in Judaism and concluded that though it isn't ruled out it is never very central.I have never been at a Jewish funeral where the afterlife is even mentioned.4. Messiah. WE got on to the Messiah and why the Jews had not accepted Jesus.Finally Rabbi Cohen said simply that Jews could not accept the Trinity, that is the son is equal to the father.
A Christian minister takes who joins our sessions, and who,until now has been silent but who, as it turned out knows the BIble by heart, finally informed us that "The Trinity is never mentioned in the New Testament" I blushed. I didn't know that.