By Rabbi Daniel Allen
Can we Jews accept love and admiration from others without suspicion? We are conditioned over centuries to be skeptics about gestures let alone explicit embrace from others telling us that we love you as Jews and wish only that you prosper. Last week I became less skeptical and less cynical having spent 4 days at Domus Galilaeae with 400 Catholics and Jews, Rabbis, Priests, Cardinals, Bishops and Catholic lay leaders from 27 countries.
We were brought together by the Neo-Catecumenal Way, a lay led very conservative movement within the Catholic world of more than two million souls. It is led by Kiko Arguello, a most fascinating fellow who is an artist, musician, writer and clearly the charismatic leader of his flock. It provides post-baptismal formation to adults who are already members of the church.
They love the Jews, honor and study our Torah, support the State of Israel and have incorporated the recitation of and belief in the Shema as central to who they are as Catholics.
To be sure we do not agree on many issues and certainly not on doctrine. Nonetheless, we studied together, dined together and prayed – if not together but at least in each other’s presence. The more than 150 Rabbis – men and women – represented the entire spectrum of our folks including Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Modern Orthodox, and Charedim. A member of the Chief Rabbinate participated as did Blu and Rabbis Yitz Greenberg, Shlomo Riskin and Jay Rosenbaum the head of the North American Board of Rabbis under whose auspices we came from America and Canada.
As North American Rabbis we chose to issue a statement from this experience. Drafted by Rabbis Michael Zedek and Gary Bretton Granatoor, we declared it publicly for any who wished to sign.
The take away message to me is that loving relationships – even between and among those about whom we were once skeptical can bring understanding and Godliness into all of our lives. If we can do so with “others” perhaps we can do it among ourselves as well.
Rabbi Daniel R. Allen is Executive Vice Chairman Emeritus of the United Israel Appeal and past President of Association of Reform Zionist of America (ARZA) and Masorti Foundation.
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I too was an attendee at last week’s event in the Galilee and concur with much of Rabbi Allen’s observations. But not all. First a couple of words of context:
I have had the honor and privileged to be very involved at leadership levels in international interreligious matters over the last 15 years. The overwhelming majority of those encounters have been positive, gratifying, and edifying. Many have been the very top leaders of other religions, or those representing them. [Not every religion has an obvious hierarchical structure so leadership is often diverse.]
To be sure, we talk to those who want to talk to us, just as our Jewish contingents typically include only those willing to have interfaith connection. None of us is so naive to think that we or they represent all of any religious group but for those of us who have had these experiences, we have learned to recognize those with whom we have authentic openness, trusting, and reliable dialogue and those with whom we don’t. For example, there may still be some Roman Catholics around the world who don’t accept or know about Nostra Aetatae but it is the official position and theology of the Catholic Church. Sadly, too many in the Jewish world still think of Roman Catholicism as the religion of the Middle Ages and don’t know or believe that the Church has changed. Profoundly. The Church is not an enemy of Judaism or the Jewish people. Period.
There are those in the Church, 50 years after Vatican II still trying to make sense of how to reconcile 20th Century theology with 1800 years of theology. In our meeting last week, the underlying theme of our Roman Catholic hosts was that. They are lovers of Jews and some parts of the Jewish tradition but with a theological reconciliation quite different than the official Vatican position. We who participate in open participation with them need be attuned to these nuances, even as we can, as Rabbi Allen correctly points out, share study, time, and mutual understanding.
Rabbi Allen is also correct that sometimes Jewish divides show up in the most unlikely places. As one who has participated in meetings with leaders of other religions in many places, I can attest that the Jewish leaders have learned to keep our internal divisions and disagreements to ourselves. IJCIC, for example, has been a consortium of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox [and others] for over 45 years, and there is never an intra-religious divide. Rabbi Allen is correct that we should and can model how our internal divisions need not divide us. My one disagreement with Rabbi Allen was not the content of the statement to which he referred but how and when it was offered. Its intent was beyond reproach, but It did, implicitly, make Jewish internal division evident to our Roman Catholic hosts.
In balance, he is right to insist that there are those who are our friends and we must accept friendship when offered. I think we need to model that we can accept our own internal divide with the same loving acceptance.