Today I was inspired by a Rabbi. Rabbi Leo Baeck. Survivor of the Holocaust, man of deep devotion and of great ethical action. A reformer and traditionalist. He organizes my thoughts on living a critical/skeptical religious life.

"A religious ceremony is every action which... expresses a religious thought; in contrast to the actual religious commandment of duty, its purpose is thus outside of it. The observance of the dietary laws, for example, is the practicing of a ceremony... through which the idea of sanctification is to be presented to us."

"Religion appears within reality only as historical religion which is passed on as an inheritance through the centuries. It cannot be transmitted as pure soul, for it is too intangible; it must approach man through a process of gaining corporality, of becoming symbolized. A so-called natural religion exists only in systems, but not in life. Symbolic ceremonies fulfill this function; they are the language through which religious thought is expressed."