I was invited to give this lecture by the remarkable Sisters of Sion, way back in 2011. But with the 60th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate in the news, I'm realising I never posted it before so ... here you go.
The Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 2011
Lord Harries, Baroness Richardson,
Friends,
Particularly the Sisters of Sion,
I am most grateful for the honour of this invitation to address
you.
To know of some of your extraordinary work and the sense of
openness and generosity of spirit that inspires your calling is humbling and
inspirational.
Already, simply to be here, as a Rabbi, as a representative of a
faith once treated as a fossil, at best, or cursed, at worst, is, in the
context of the 2000+ year history of our respective faiths remarkable.
And that, unless I have desperately miscalculated, I feel under no
threat of being lynched or attacked isn’t something that even now, even here, I
take for granted.
I accept this invitation as an invitation to be honest, to share
of my own struggles and those of my faith community – I’m not here to score
points, interfaith dialogue is no longer a zero-sum game where a Jew’s success
means a Christian’s failure or vice versa. We have come so far it’s almost
beyond belief.
Indeed, it seems that much of this credit for this extra-ordinary
shift in the relationships between Church, the Catholic Church in particular,
and the Synagogue belongs to the man whose memory we honour tonight, Cardinal
Bea.
I’m not particularly a scholar of the time, nor would consider
myself an expert in Jewish-Catholic or Jewish-Christian dialogue (I will I hope
justify my place here on a different basis), but I’ve been deeply touched by
real warmth that seems to have existed between the Cardinal and my most
important teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Heschel was the leading Jewish theologian in discussions with the
Vatican in the lead up to Vatican II and Edward Kaplan, Heschel’s biographer,
records how Heschel spoke highly of Bea’s critical edition of Song of Songs –
Bea, of course, being fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic among other languages.
Heschel could castigate, embarrass religious leaders. In a famous
speech to the American Rabbinical Assembly Heschel castigated and embarrassed
Rabbis who led services devoid of spirit and guts. And in a famous speech at a
1960s conference on Race and Religion he castigated and embarrassed faith
leaders of all stripes for their failure to speak out against slavery in
America. But he loved, admired and respected Cardinal Bea for he saw in the
Cardinal both commitment to his own faith and also a commitment to recognise
the faith of others.
Secondly, I’ve been aware of the place in which the Cardinal stood
– in the eye of the storm around Vatican II.
The American Jewish Committee made representations to the Cardinal
in the run up to Vatican II. They submitted a dossier, and I quote the
dossier’s author, identifying and illustrating, ‘slanderous
interpretations, oversimplifications, sweeping statements, unjust or inaccurate
comparisons, invidious use of language, and significant omissions in American
Catholic textbooks’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. That can’t have been
easy reading. It takes a capacious soul to make their way through material like
that and respond with breadth of spirit and warmth.
And
on another side, there were tremendous pressures from within the Church, for
there were many in the Church who felt that accusations of deicide were
entirely correct and a perpetuation of expiatory contempt for Jews was the only
correct theological response to me and members of my faith.
The
Cardinal also had to stand firm in the face of more than just a whiff of
paranoiac anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
The
second session of Vatican II saw the wide distribution of a document called “The
Jews and the Council in the Light of Holy Scripture and Tradition.” This pseudo-anonymous
piece of antisemitism insisted that efforts to alter the Church’s traditional
view of Jews were the result of a conspiracy in the council by Jews and
Freemasons working on behalf of Communism. These paranoiac Catholic flames were
flamed by Arab leaders and clerics, both Copt and Muslim, who pushed and pulled
as their own interests dictated.
The
notion that Cardinal Bea was able to stand as firm as he did in the face of
such great challenge is already a tremendous achievement.
Nostra
Aetate transformed the relationship of the Church and the Jewish people from
one of enmity and fear into one of shared commitment; shared commitments to
monotheism, the pursuit of peace, justice, to recognise that every human is
created in the image of the divine and most important of all a commitment to
oppose genocide and speak out against hatred dressed up in the sheepskin
clothes of religious terminology.
And
while the theologians and political bigwigs negotiate over commas and precise
turns of phrase, I know all too personally how relationships between Jews and
Catholics have been transformed by Nostra Aetate
I was
born six years after Vatican II. My Jewish parents made the decision to send me
to a Catholic School, St Anthony’s in Hampstead, where I received an incredible
education inspired by the very best sentiments of open-hearted Catholic
commitments to the value of enquiry and human compassion, shared with me, as a
Jew; commitments given what we in Jewish circles would call a gashbanka – a seal of approval – by the
language of Nostra Aetate. Indeed I know this is an evening in honour of one
great servant of the Church, Cardinal Bea, but I hope the good Cardinal,
looking down on us all today, would not object if I wish also to honour, in
what I share today the memory of another Catholic hero, my headmaster of that
time, Tim Patton.
I’m
honoured and touched that Tim’s successor as headmaster of St Anthony’s School,
Paul Keyte is able to be here today. I’m delighted the school continues to
foster the very best open-hearted approach to the education of generations to
come.
I mentioned earlier that I don’t deserve to be here as a
historian, for I am not really a historian. I’m a practioner. I practice as a
Jew, I practice inter-faith dialogue. I aspire to no level of expertise higher
than that of being a practioner.
So I want share with you the questions at the heart of my
contemporary practicing of interfaith encounter.
How much of one’s own faith does one have to give up on to fully
acknowledge the faith of another?
Is it possible to believe that the other has erred without that
being necessarily disrespectful?
Is it possible to be wholly committed to one’s own faith while
still being a pluralist – can you have humility as well as belief?
And if I am not looking to give up on or
even alter my own faith, as a result of interfaith dialogue, what is the point
of interfaith dialogue?
Two end points in my own personal dialectic
Joseph Soloveitchik, known as The Rav, was the leader of American
Orthodoxy in the 1960s. And he was not interested in Vatican II at all.
The Rav gave an important address to the massed ranks of American
Orthodox Rabbis entitled ‘Confrontation,’ in which he turned his back on
anything that could be considered pluralist – especially in relationship to the
Church.
Jews and Christians should not seek, Soloveitchik demanded,
‘common denominators’ because to do so risks, he argued, frittering away the
unique destiny of both faiths engaged in a singular normative gesture.’
Soloveitchik wouldn’t express any care for what the church may or
may not say about Jews. He simply insisted that Jews reject any suggestion that
our covenant has been superseded. He disdained any attempt to find mutually
acceptable forms of language that iron out this central difference. He rejected
apologetics, revisionism or other sweet words.
Soloveitchik also demanded mutual non–interference. Jews should
not, he insisted, ask for adjustment to Christian rituals – no alteration in
the liturgical readings during Holy week for example - and the same would apply
to any supposed Christian discomfort with Jewish liturgy or ritual.
Our goal, said Soloveitchki, is to pursue our path – the path of
Halakhah, the Hebrew Bible as understood by the Rabbis, and if the cost of
having any other religion or national grouping saying anything nice about us is
giving up on one iota of our commitment to that path, that cost is too great to
pay.
Soloveitchik only spoke of his concern to put an end to attempts
to find middle ground in matters theological, but his impact went beyond this.
It’s hard to find Orthodox rabbis, certainly mainstream orthodox Rabbis willing
to do very much with members of other faiths, certainly in public, certainly
away from the photo-opportunities that seem to boost the ego of participants
more than fix the problems of a broken world.
On my other side is the recently retired leader of British Reform
Judaism, Tony Bayfield who wrote of the importance of transcending the stilted
and lonely interactions between Jew and Christian which results in Christians
praising for Jews for our family life and chicken soup but holding back on
articulating the conviction 'it's a pity you are missing out on the greatest
truth of all.' While Jews grudgingly praise Christians for their 'cathedrals
and self-sacrificing love' while holding back on sharing a belief that
Christianity is all based on a mistake. Bayfield believes that both Christians
and Jews have to moderate our respective truth claims and give up on hubristic
faith claims that claim our beliefs are right while others are wrong. Bayfield
claims that we will only be able to enter into genuine and respectful dialogue
if we can moderate our truth claims.
I consider both positions half-right, though
I’m closer to Soloveitchik. Like Soloveitchik I have no problem with Christians
thinking I have it all wrong. As long as they don't mind my thinking that they
are mistaken. I’m not prepared to sacrifice the creeds of my own faith, the
parts of my own self – to become more attractive in the eyes of a sister faith
whose creeds, ultimately, are not my own.
We live in a society where we are tempted to
embrace syncretism, but syncretism is not attractive to me.
Too often it results in a sort of cherry
picking of superficially attractive
elements stripped of their deeper calls on our souls and integrity.
But I don't accept Soloveitchik's claim that
interaction and engagement risks jeopardising our own unique path. My
experience of serious Christian-Jewish dialogue has been one that has sharpened
my own sense of my own faith, it's forced me to find language to justify my
beliefs and practice when faced by an 'other' who understands God and the quest
for holiness and decency in ways close to, but ultimately other than, my own.
Like Bayfield I accept that much Christian/Jewish
dialogue is bland, politeness transcending honesty, but I don't accept
respectful dialogue demands transcending my own faith claims. Nor, frankly, do
I worry about a surfeit of politesse in Jewish Christian encounters - it's only
been a blink of an eye since the stakes - when Jew and Christian encountered
one another - were far more deadly than being gently bored. A few centuries of
gentle boredom between Jews and Christians would be no bad thing.
Moreover, and it’s probably my most
significant point of – I hope respectful - difference with Rabbi Bayfield, I don't
accept that my Jewish belief that Jesus is not, as a religious fact, a singular
son of God, is necessarily to show a lack of respect to the Church. Similarly,
I would not expect a Christian to show respect for my own faith by abnegating
their sense in my cardinal religious error.
I don’t believe that respect is predicated on
the need to accept the view of the other. Rather, the reverse; a relationship
predicated on the primary need to agree with one another demands politesse
triumphs over honesty and that is where I consider a lack of respect. It’s a
relationship where the end points of agreement are going to be determined by
the fall of a lot – whose turn is it to be right this week – yesterday we ate
Italian, tonight let’s do Chinese, yesterday we did Jesus, tonight let’s do
Torah
Or, alternatively, an overriding commitment
to come to agreement simply reflects the relative hierarchical standings of the
debaters – I’m stronger than you so you agree with me, or vice versa.
Respect means agreeing to suffer the other
views of the other person even if they cause one discomfort. That is certainly
a Jewish position.
Debate and disagreement, the process of
sharpening alternate views is integral to the Jewish faith –
Makhloket – even have the phrase, Mahloket
l’shem shamayim – disagreement for the
sake of heaven - is at the centre of the Rabbinic endeavour. We understand
ourselves in dispute.
One Rabbinic tale to illustrate.
Set in the time of the Apostles
When Reish Lakish, one half of the greatest
Rabbinic double act of its time passes away, he leaves Rabbi Yohanan bereft.
The Rabbis bring another Rabbi to the table who agrees with everything Rabbi
Yohanan says, but this only increases the survivor's sense of despair at the
death of his partner.
Clarity, refinement, honesty and integrity
are forged in the pit of rigorous, principled, engagement.
Not dependent on agreement.
Judaism loves difference. The first Rabbinic text, traditionally
taught to young children features two people arguing over who should own a
found piece of cloth. ‘I found it and it’s all mine,’ they both claim. Talmudic
study is principally the attempt to find ways for contradictory opinions to
stand even in their opposition. For three years, the Talmud records, the Houses
of two of the great Rabbis of the Ancient period, Hillel and Shammai disputed,
eventually a Divine Voice is heard to proclaim ‘[both opinions] are the words
of the living God.’ Perhaps tellingly, the substance of the disagreement is
long forgotten. The point, surely, is that God’s perspective is so
qualitatively beyond that of humans that points of difference visible from a human
perspective melt away when viewed from the level of the cosmos itself. To claim
that my finite human perspective is capable of understanding all the truth
there is an act of appalling hubris.
In 2000 over 220 Jewish scholars published ‘Dabru Emet’ a document on the relationship between Judaism
and Christianity. It noted, ‘The humanly irreconcilable differences between
Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world as
promised in Scripture.’ Indeed.
A last Rabbinic text. In the Mishnah, the foundational document of
Rabbinic Judaism, at least 1800 years old, the Rabbis ask why God created all
humanity from a single ‘Adam’ – a single first human. My favourite answer is
that this was done to increase our wonderment at the glory of God. When a King
of flesh and blood mints a coin, the Rabbi offer as a parable, every coin comes
out looking the same, but when the King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One, made an
original mint –Adam – every human comes out differently. This text justifies
the appreciation of otherness in humanity; be that people with other skin
colours, nationalities and even religions. We come closer to understanding the
glory of God as we appreciate the differences between us and that demands our
engagement with interfaith.
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