Dabru Emet and the “Dialogue of Masks”
by Victoria J. Barnett
Interreligious statements are always markers in a much longer conversation. I used to give a presentation at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum tracing the history of post-Shoah Jewish–Christian dialogue decade by decade, showing how each statement addressed a certain stage in the dialogue but also reflected its political context and the concurrent popular and academic works on the Shoah. After the 1980s, for example, there was a dramatic rise in the number of statements acknowledging the more critical historiography about the churches during the Nazi era. Several European churches took the 1995 anniversaries of the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of the Second World War as occasions to confess their own guilt and complicity during the Holocaust. All these statements drew on the foundation of theological conversations between Christians and Jews going back to Seelisberg in 1947.
These decades of Jewish–Christian dialogue were not just significant in terms of their theological or historical content. They marked a new kind of process in interreligious and even intergroup dynamics. In the wake of horrific genocide, evil, complicity, and shame, the post-Shoah Jewish–Christian project has been an attempt at repentance, repair, new understanding, and relationship.
Dabru Emet can be read as an assessment of this process at the end of the twentieth century. The Jewish scholars involved were insightful observers of Christianity, long involved in interreligious projects and scholarship. One of them, the late Michael Signer, published a short reflection in 2002. In Dabru Emet: Sic et Non, Signer noted the following:
At its very core Dabru Emet is a response and recognition of historical change. Therefore it is not simply a haphazard articulation of what is ‘politically correct.’ Dabru Emet recognizes the profound difference between Judaism and Christianity. It provides a temporal foundation for the continuation of them both until the final redemption. This status quo implies that neither side should set the agenda for the other, but should live in mutual respect and an on-going life of enquiry about the reality of God.
Continuing this process, there was a response—A Sacred Obligation: Rethinking Christian Faith in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People—written by the Christian Scholars Group (CSG), a group of Christians who had devoted decades to theological scholarship and dialogue with Jews. It is no accident that the CSG had close ties to the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies (ICJS), which hosted the Dabru Emet project. Nor is it an accident that 20 years later, ICJS is now the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. As the contribution to this series by ICJS staff scholar Matthew Taylor shows, the interreligious conversation has expanded, deepened, and shifted since 2000.
But is the Jewish–Christian dialogue project really finished? Antisemitism is again on the rise. It is crucial to understand this long hatred in its own right, as well as in its intersections with White supremacy, Christian nationalism, and hatred and violence against Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious minorities. Moreover, the number of Christian churches and theologians that have truly incorporated a post-Shoah, post-Nostra Aetate understanding of Christianity remains small. Do we not still need clear, careful theological parameters for what remains an unfinished project?
By describing Dabru Emet as a “temporal foundation” for an “ongoing life of enquiry” Signer emphasized the transitory nature of dialogue. That seems counterintuitive to what we expect of a statement: a clear, authoritative, defining response to the moment, marking the way forward.
But I wonder whether a temporal, process-oriented reading of Dabru Emet might be more useful these days. Perhaps the importance of interreligious statements should be measured not by their momentary mark, but by whether they can create bridges between the ever-deepening process of mutual commitment that began in Seelisberg almost 75 years ago and the challenges of interreligious relationship today.
What gives such dialogue lasting power and influence? Conversely, what prevents it from taking root and finding relevance for new generations? For many years I have had a quotation above my desk from the Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. Like all such things, his words are a snapshot in time; Paz later praised authoritarian rule in Mexico and today his legacy is mixed. But in the 1960s he wrote insightfully about the contentious relationship between Latin America and the United States:
We fight to preserve our souls; we speak so that the other may recognize our soul and so that we may recognize ourselves in his soul, which is different from ours. The powerful conceive of history as a mirror: in the battered faces of others—the insulted and the injured, the conquered or the ‘converted’—they see their own face reflected. This is the dialogue of masks, that double monologue of the victimizer and the victimized. Revolt is the criticism of masks, the beginning of genuine dialogue. It is also the creation of our own faces. (Alternating Current, 202)
The haunting notion of a “dialogue of masks”—a “double monologue,” an encounter that never becomes transformative because we never get past our masks—describes all-too-many encounters today. But it happened for many Christians and Jews during the post-Shoah decades of Jewish–Christian dialogue. For us Christians, it led to the recognition that the true face of Judaism is not that centuries-old projection of our own face that Christians imposed upon a vulnerable minority, but an entirely different and rich tradition about and from which we must learn, and before which we must repent for the violence we have done. Only then do we discover our true face, historically and theologically.
Dabru Emet can be read as a Jewish reply to this process in which the participants took a certain risk in dropping their own masks and offering their own understanding of the face of the Christian “other”—with an implicit invitation to wider circles that they do the same.
Victoria J. Barnett, Ph.D., served as director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2004–2019. She has taught, lectured, and written extensively about the role of different religious organizations during the Holocaust, with a particular focus on German Protestantism, the international interfaith and ecumenical bodies, and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Follow her on Twitter @V_J_Barnett.