Dear Mr. Funk: Please forgive me for the delay in answering your letter, and also for the fact that I find it simply impossible to answer every point that you mention, interesting though each of them is. I wish I had an opportunity to be in Chicago this year, so that we might discuss these problems face to face. Doing so by mail imposes certain natural limitations which I do not know how to overcome. Nevertheless, I will make an effort to respond to some of your remarks, adding as an aside that you certainly seem to be quite perceptive and that I truly admire the spirit in which your letter is written. Your first point concerns your friend's question about why religious experience is not granted gratis; and, especially in view of the fact that Hessed is one of the attributes of God, why does not He, as an act of this love, grant the awareness of His existence to mortal men.The source for the attitude betrayed by the question is both old and new. Thus, for instance, the experience of Teshuvah has usually meant in Judaism an act of conscious return, requiring superhuman spiritual and intellectual effort, by man to God. In Christianity, however, the act of ״conversion” usually indicated a sudden settling of spirit upon man whereby he is pulled out of his mundane affairs and suffused with a divine light -- totally without preparation or forewarning. (One of the early issues of Tradition carried an article by Howard Levine comparing William James and Maimonides on this point.) The new source for the same attitude, however, is a kind of Hlppyism — that is, mystical ex-periences cheaply acquired. I am not trying to answer a problem by be-coming pejorative or arguing ad homlnem. I am, rather, first establish-ing that you are quite right that this is not the Jewish attitude.Now, it is quite true that God acts out of Hessed. Saadia points out, although obliquely, that this Hessed takes two forms: metaphysical and an ethical form. Metaphysically, Hessed means the overflowing …