Abstract
The Orthodox Jewish community has only recently begun to respond to the Catholic Church’s overtures of reconciliation that began in 1965, when the Second Vatican Council retracted the Church’s position that the Jews are guilty of deicide, or God-murder, in a declaration known as Nostra Aetate. Two recent statements produced by Orthodox Jewish leaders, To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven, issued in 2015 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, and Between Jerusalem and Rome, issued two years later, indicate that dialogue can only take place when boundaries which distinguish Jews and Christians are respected, and when both dialogue partners are committed to upholding the dignity of one another. These two statements allow for the possibility that interfaith dialogue need not only be embraced because such dialogue helps to prevent hatred against Jews. Dialogue can also shape and enhance a Jewish person’s religious identity. The writings of Rabbi Sacks offer a path forward for this approach by presenting a model of dialogue that celebrates the joy of human encounter.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper will focus on the Jewish relationship with the Catholic Church. This is because the Protestant communities, whether mainline or evangelical, or too diversified to be subject to productive generalization. The relationships between Jews and Protestants vary widely and operate on a mostly local level. The Catholic Church, however, has a centralized body of policy decisors which, in theory, should impact the way every Catholic relates to Judaism. Of course, this does not work in practice, which is why this article treats documents produced by the elite and has little to say about what’s happening “on the ground.”
- 2.
The text of Dabru Emet is accessible at https://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/jewish/dabru-emet.
- 3.
Jon D. Levenson, “Dual-Covenant Theology vs. Dual-Truth Theory: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue,” Commonweal, February 10, 2014, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dual-covenant-theology-vs-dual-truth-theory. For another response to Dabru Emet which expresses similar concern, see David Berger’s essay, available at https://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/analyses/dabru-emet-berger.
- 4.
To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven, 4–5, 7. This text is accessible at https://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/jewish/orthodox-2015dec4.
- 5.
Malka Z. Simkovich, “The Changing Mesorah: Orthodoxy on Interreligious Dialogue and Women’s Leadership,” in From Confrontation to Covenant: Jews and Christians Reflect on the Orthodox Rabbinic Statement of “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven,” ed. Eugene Korn (Jerusalem: Urim Press, 2021).
- 6.
Between Jerusalem and Rome, accessible at https://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/jewish/cer-cri-rca-2017.
- 7.
See, for instance, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Al Ahavat Ha-Torah veGeulat Nefesh haDor,” in Be-Sod haYahad vehaYahid, ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusalem, 1976), 410–11.
- 8.
Rabbi Sacks made his case knowing Rav Soloveitchik’s influential position that Jewish-Christian dialogue demanded a quid pro quo relationship in which concession on one side would demand concession on the other. For Soloveitchik, “the mere appraisal of the worth of one community in terms of the service it has rendered to another community, no matter how great and important this service was, constitutes an infringement of the sovereignty and dignity of even the smallest of faith communities.” Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition 6, no. 2 (1964): 5–29. Sacks was willing to consider the possibility of personal transformation as part of the interreligious encounter, and in his first edition of The Dignity of Difference, touted this transformation as enriching and desirable. See Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).
- 9.
Sacks insists, for instance, that “We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet God.” The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Revised ed.; New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 51. Sacks’ position that interfaith dialogue can and should transform the observant Jew changed over time and is too complex to discuss in detail here. His approach to interfaith encounters as internally enriching, however, and his insistence that the interfaith encounter was an ends in itself, remained consistent.
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Simkovich, M.Z. (2023). Joy in the Interfaith Encounter. In: Brown, E., Weiss, S. (eds) An Ode to Joy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28229-4_30
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