Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

[…] Strauss remarked on the Epicurean view of history, “Of past sorrows Epicurus takes no heat. He recalls his past only in so far as it is pleasurable. It is the decisive characteristic of the Epicurean, that he is incapable of suffering from his past.” Nothing could be more un-Jewish. And one sees again why the great Rabbis used Epicurean as a term of the greatest abuse. An Epicurean attitude toward memory is antithetical to Judaism.

It looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, in the sense at least, that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem as a social or political problem.