Neusner defines religion in the preface to this book as follows:

Three Propositions about Religion that Judaism Illustrates

a.. "Religion explains particularly well the progress of humanity through the cycle of life, from birth to death.(xiv)." - "First religion informs the life of home and family, and whatever its power in the social order and the life of nations, derives its strength form the intimate and fragile bonds of child to mother and father. (xvi)."

b. "Religion serves particularly well to help a defeated society endure defeat." -- ". . . religion offers the best explanation for the human condition because the human condition, if groups live long enough, is more often one of defeat and disappointment than of victory and triumph (xiv-xv)." - "Second, religion is for the losers, who by religion in time are turned into, if not the winners, then at least the survivors--the ones who get to tell the story later on (xvi)."

c. ". . . religion is always historical, and yet it invariably thrives in the acutely contemporary world. . . . religion transforms the past into something memorable and the present into an occasion for celebrating past events (xv)." - "And, third, religion turns history into the reality of the moment, reshaping a received past into the materials for a useable future (xvi)."

1. How is his use of the definition above evident in Chapters One and Two (See especially pp. 14 and 30)? How would you support or modify this definition?

For more information about defining religion, please see Defining Religion

2. How does Neusner use the categories of time and space in Chapters One and Two? Give several examples. How does his notion of "enchantment" (see for example, p. 9) strike you? For Chapter One, how do grace after meals and the Passover illustrate his key points?

Here is one  example from Chapter One:  "I have eaten an ordinary meal in the here and now. I invoke the entire history of Israel, refer to the holy land and food produced there, and so transform a cheese sandwich into a foretaste of eternity in the land of God’s choosing for me. I eat anywhere, nowhere in particular, but am located by the sacred words in some one place. Eating is turned paradoxically into a locative experience." (7)  . . . . . "But the experience of hunger and of eating is turned, through the medium of words, into an encounter with another world of meaning altogether . The rite, an act of thought and imagination, transforms time and space, moving us from nowhere in particular to a particular place, changing me and all of us from the here and the now into the social entity of the past and the future then. The words we say change the world of the I by telling me I am more than in the here and now and live more than in the perceived present, because I am more than a mere I but part of a larger we–all because of words I say when I eat lunch." (7-8)