Polly was my cousin by marriage. Her mother had died while she was a teenager, likewise my cousin who was her bridegroom had lost his mother, and while still teenagers, they were married. I was a bridesmaid, obliged to wear a turquoise blue dress which was ruched from the neck to the knees, a bad choice for an overweight twelve year old. Within a few years, they had three children.

Later in their marriage, they engaged in rackety diversions: wife swapping parties. An ongoing accommodation with neighbours led to Polly and the husband next door going off together, leaving an abandoned husband and an abandoned wife.

Polly engaged in philanthropic works. She did not enjoy robust good health and seemed often to undergo medical procedures. She had a serious operation and, when I saw her afterwards at a family gathering, she told me that Jesus had appeared to her while she was under anaesthetic. Not without a sense of humour, she seemed aware of something absurd in this assertion and giggled when she reported that she had said to Jesus, ‘But I’m Jewish!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jesus replied, which is the most memorable thing I ever heard Polly say, although in point of fact it may have been Jesus not Polly who said it.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. When God appears to you, it doesn’t matter if He’s wearing tefilin, a turban or a feathered fascinator.

I wasn’t immune myself to the attractions of Christianity but realized when I was about twenty-one, that the shortest route to God was the path of my forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and my grandfathers, Yitzhak and Yaakov. I studied my religion during my early married life, later in academia and still, haphazardly, to this day. After retirement, I attended classical Greek classes, hoping to be able to read the Septuagint and, as a bonus, The New Testament; however I quickly forgot how to recognize the aorist tense or decline τριηρης, meaning trireme.

When we reach our limits in theology and the languages of antiquity, we have to hope that God will appear to us in our time of need, like Jesus to Polly.

There is a war at the present time where God is invoked by opposing sides, one side calling Him Allah and the other, Hashem as well as many other names, such as Shaddai, Ha Makom, Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu (the Almighty, the Omnipresent, the Holy One, blessed be He). I believe ‘The All Merciful’ is one of the Islamic names for God, a beautiful concept. It is the depiction of God at His least merciful which drives this secular generation away from faith, to which enlightenment is considered the antidote.

The Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share the belief that there is one God. After Abraham’s funeral, Ishmael goes back to the house/tent of Isaac his half-brother. I imagine that they drink tea in china cups and eat sponge cake and, sitting with crossed legs, marvel at the memory of Abraham circumcising himself when he was ninety-nine years of age.

‘He had a steady hand right to the end,’ Isaac tells Ishmael, but Ishmael, who has not seen his father for many years, does not want Isaac to be the maven on all things Abraham. They have the same father and the same God but, if their perceptions of their father are at odds, how much more so, the perception of their God?

I am moved by a multi-season streamed drama, The Chosen, about the life of Jesus, directed by a Christian film-maker, Dallas Jenkins. The Jewishness of the Judean and Galilean environment is evident in every scene. There is a modern aspect to the expressions of emotion yet it adheres to the narrative of the gospels and conveys numinosity which Hollywood biblical epics so often aspired to and so rarely achieved.

Our lives are a mystery; we can hardly doubt this, but they are not all the same mystery. Each of us lives their own mystery, just as each of us dies our own death, alone. Slavoj Žižek joked (or simply said!) that the light at the end of the tunnel comes from another train on the track, heading straight towards us.

Notwithstanding, don’t we all hope to see the light?