Judeo-Christian dialogue: a revolutionary transformation

Judeo-Christian dialogue is not, in our day, a banal exchange of courteous, conventional remarks. It is a historical experience — unprecedented, original, a revolutionary transformation within a deeply conflict-ridden religious world. This encounter, in its present form, begins in the aftermath of the Second World War. In France it brought together lay people and clergy who had shared, in the dramatic hours of the Resistance against the Nazi occupier, an experience of solidarity and mutual understanding. But this unhoped-for, unforeseen, magnificent dialogue has never won unanimous assent, neither in the ranks of the churches nor in those of the synagogue.

Great Jewish voices did, it is true, lay down the markers of the encounter as early as the postwar years. Jules Isaac, Edmond Fleg, Léon Algazi, André Neher, Emmanuel Levinas, Léon Ashkenazi, Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, André Amar, and other figures — lucid, sensitive, intelligent. But others would voice their reservations, even their skepticism. Among these skeptical voices, an eminent professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a scholar recognized across a rainbow of scientific disciplines — philosopher, physiologist, biochemist, Talmudist — Yeshayahu Leibowitz. In 1968, in the newspaper Haaretz, he wrote a very severe article entitled “Judaism and Civilization: No Room for Judeo-Christian Dialogue¹”. Leibowitz sets two concepts of differing foundations against each other. On the one hand there is theological dialogue, and on the other pragmatic cohabitation.

Christians, he writes, are for us, the Jews, neighbors, friends, fellow citizens, fellow students, fellow workers. It belongs to the logic of a pluralist society to establish a coexistence without tension among citizens who hold different worldviews. This is a matter of daily life. But, he says with much bitterness and severity, in the space of faith, Jews and Christians will never be able to dialogue. And he adds this terrible sentence: “a good Christian can only hate the Jews.” If this hatred is not universal — for one does not encounter it every day or everywhere — it is because Christians today have a watered-down faith! And so Jews and Christians can dialogue about all manner of things in all manner of colloquia — about philosophy, the sciences, the theory of evolution, political upheavals, Euclidean geometry, in short about every question of the contemporary world — but they cannot dialogue about their respective theologies. In that domain, the faithful of the Church and the faithful of the Synagogue live in two isolated crypts, two doctrinal fortresses with no possible passage between them.

More nuanced is the attitude of a great contemporary philosopher and Talmudist, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, of Yeshiva University in New York. For him, believers of every origin and every sensibility must take part together in the work of Tikkun Olam (the reform, the improvement, the restoration of society and of the world). They can and must exchange views on their ethical and philosophical convictions, in matters of health, medicine, research, and education.

In this spirit, Rabbi Soloveitchik gave lectures at Loyola University, a stronghold of American Jesuit teaching, in Chicago. But, he says, theological dialogue is the exception; it is an impossible dialogue. One must acknowledge the fact that there is a domain in which believers must preserve their intimacy: the domain of faith. Here is the limit and the paradox: we discuss everything, except what lies at the heart of our existence, our spiritual life as lived.

Rabbi Haïm David HaLévi, a great contemporary halakhic authority, former chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, proposes two radically different attitudes. Toward Christians: respect, openness, understanding, recognition, friendship. Toward Christianity: a refusal to forget the heavy legacy of persecution, hatred, and massacres of the past. To dialogue with Christians, yes; to dialogue with Christianity, no. But these reservations, which come from traditional Judaism, from rabbinic orthodoxy, are shared by secular and humanist Jewish intellectuals such as George Steiner, who likewise expresses a rather disenchanted opinion. For Steiner, Christianity would be structurally the adversary of Judaism.

This is not an occasional detestation such as, for example, the pagan anti-Judaism of certain Hellenistic milieus in Egypt under Roman rule — an anti-Judaism that was not rooted in the deep structure of pagan thought. In the relation between Judaism and the new christological faith, by contrast, it is the very nature of Christianity that is at stake; hence Steiner’s skepticism toward Judeo-Christian dialogue.

On the Christian side, certain eminent voices remind us that dialogue might be impossible, or at the very least very difficult, with irremediable obstacles standing in the way of any authentic communication between the believers of Israel and the believers in Christ. I was deeply troubled to read a most pessimistic sentence in a learned text of the very first order, from the pen of a great contemporary philosopher, Rémi Brague, an eminent Hebraist and, moreover, a specialist on Maimonides. Brague, in a reference work, the Dictionnaire critique de théologie (Critical Dictionary of Theology, 1998) published under the direction of Jean-Yves Lacoste, wrote an article “Judaism.” Here is Brague’s disquieting conclusion: “Are there two peoples of God? The Church will truly be the people of God only after the conversion of Israel.” The author can be called neither an integralist nor a fanatic. He merely confirms the christological hope that has accompanied the Church since its origins. For him, no dialogue could efface what constitutes the eternal hope of the Church: to become the people of God, one day, when all human beings, including the faithful of the ancient Hebrew Covenant, the Jews of the Synagogue, will have accepted the messiahship of Christ. In a similar vein, the Jesuit Father Paul Valadier holds that dialogue, whatever its merits, will not efface the permanent, eternal conflict between Church and Synagogue.

And so the question arises. Does dialogue imply the recognition of the other as other, in his radical, irreducible alterity — or does it leave standing the hidden hope of the other’s change and his eventual conversion to what appears as the one truth?

In opposition to all the authors I have just cited, Jews or Christians, I hold for my part — and this commits no one but myself — that Judeo-Christian dialogue is one of the most creative, the most original, the most revolutionary undertakings of modernity. It is the will to overcome the most death-dealing, the most hate-filled antagonisms of human history. And this by way of encounter, of speech, of exchange, of communication.

One of the great figures of this dialogue is the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. And he speaks of this dialogue, on January 14, 1933, in his discussion with the Lutheran theologian Karl Ludwig Schmidt. For Buber, the Judeo-Christian encounter — of which he speaks at the very moment of Hitler’s accession to power — is the expression of the very essence of the human being: homo dialogus, dialoguing man, the man of dialogue. We must not, according to Buber, shut ourselves away in the monologue of the I with itself, in the narcissism of isolation that lies in wait for all thought. We must boldly accept the risk of encounter, the risk of communication, the risk of the I–Thou relation — a relation, he reminds Schmidt, in which the I remains the I and will so remain, in which the Thou remains the Thou and will so remain. Each is as if transformed, transfigured, purified, sublimated by the encounter with the partner, yet neither one disappears. Dialogue does not, in fact, abolish the singularity of the one who dialogues before his alter ego. One must recognize, says Buber, the historical legitimacy of distance, the ethical value of separation — or, in the felicitous and very recent phrase of the chief rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks, “the dignity of difference.”

And so the moment has come to reflect on the meaning of our common undertaking for us, Jews and Christians. We live in a planetary civilization in the grip of a violent, death-dealing, hate-filled, fanatical return of the religious. In the name of God, people kill, burn, behead, bomb, torture. After a period of secular revolutionary and nationalist violence, after the rise of secular political ideologies, we are witnessing a return of the sacred in the baleful form of a return of the wars of religion. We are far from any philosophical or scientific rationality. We are witnessing the rise of a terrorism in the name of a totalitarian or prophetic divine mission, for which murderous violence in the name of the supreme, messianic good has once again become a form of fanatical passion — the passion to destroy the other, to annihilate difference, to root out the bad subject, to drive the planet down the path of sacred terror.

But, faced with this, we have the privilege of living in a society where dialogue is possible. We must recognize that Judeo-Christian dialogue has succeeded far more than all the other forms of interfaith and intercultural dialogue in the world. This dialogue, established on the very stage of one of the most hostile, the most death-dealing, the most vehement forms of religious passion, can serve as a paradigm for the future dialogue among all the beliefs and spiritual, philosophical, and religious families of the planet.

I believe we have reached an era in which Jews and Christians can discuss what is essential. From this point of view, the phrase of Shmuel Trigano, who once spoke of Judeo-Christian dialogue as a “diplomatic dialogue,” seems to me today outdated. For we have, very happily, moved beyond the state of courteous exchanges.

We are in an encounter where the fundamental problems are posed with courage, and so we can say that this experience may be exemplary, not only at the level of France but at the level of the planetary village. And why not in Jerusalem, where this dialogue is more necessary than ever? Let us say it plainly: the worst is by no means inevitable.

Notes