Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

Affirming that purity was a matter of the heart cut the connection between holiness and separation as understood by the other renewal movements. That is, holiness was to be achieved neither by driving the Romans from the land nor by withdrawal from society nor by separation within society. Intensifying the Torah by applying it to purity of heart also destroyed the basis for dividing society into the righteous and the outcast, for “once the norms had been intensified . . . so that they were quite beyond the possibility of fulfillment,” applying to internal disposition as well as behavior, no group could claim that it alone was the “true Israel,” for “all alike were sinners.”36 Jesus’s teaching thereby provided a ground for overcoming the fragmentation of Jewish society.37