Interfaith Begins with Faith
by Susannah Heschel
In the late 18th century, a wealthy, sophisticated Jew living in Berlin, David Friedländer, came up with a plan to eliminate tensions between Christians and Jews: Jews would convert en masse to Protestantism, while Protestants would abandon the Trinity in favor of Deism. The plan went nowhere: Jews were not interested in giving up their Judaism and Christians had no interest in abandoning their belief that Jesus was Christ, the son of God.
Like Friedlander, Dabru Emet wants to find a zone of neutrality that can be affirmed by both Jews and Christians: let’s claim we worship the same God; base our faith on the same Bible; and share the same moral principles. What is the purpose of issuing statements, whether by Jews or by Christians, regarding our relationship?
Theology is never written in a vacuum. Historically, such statements became important only after the Shoah when they had resonance because of the shock that some European Christians would seek to murder every Jew on the face of the earth. Out of respect for Jews and out of horror over their own lack of Christian conscience, efforts to express appreciation for Judaism took shape, occasionally including ending missionary activity, rejecting antisemitism, and taking responsibility for the Shoah.
Ignoring history even while immersed in the politics of the moment, Dabru Emet offers an anodyne set of principles that fail to represent the distinctiveness of either Judaism or Christianity, and it avoids recognition of the remarkable historiography or the influences of each religion on the other over the past two thousand years.
Ultimately, Dabru Emet sidesteps challenges and responds to a Christian wish for dialogue with Jews. The problem is that few Jews are interested in the document or have heard of it, let alone recognize their Judaism in it. What is acceptable in its six claims is so watered down that it is meaningless or irrelevant; what is of utmost importance is absent.
Do we worship the same God? For Christians, this is a Trinitarian God, a God who became flesh, who sacrificed his son: anathema to Jews; we do not recognize our God there.
What is our “worship”? For Christians, bread becomes God’s body and wine becomes God’s blood and their worship is to consume both. Again, anathema to Jews.
Do we work together for justice and peace? Whether or not we work “together,” we have yet to agree on just what constitutes “justice.” We disagree among ourselves on the most pressing justice issues of our day: climate change; women’s right not to be pregnant against our will; LGBTQI+ rights; the death penalty; systemic racism; health care, education, a living wage; and the most controversial of all, the State of Israel’s relationship to Palestinians—not simply the Jewish claim to the land.
Dabru Emet offers no insights into any of these issues, nor guidance for debating our differences. Among the elements Dabru Emet shoves under the carpet are the polemical dimensions of both religions. Are we to ignore their incorporation into our liturgy? At the beginning of the Passover Seder, Jews hold up a matza and declare, “This is the bread of affliction!” Historian Israel Yuval argues that this is a refutation of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, when he held up bread and declared, “This is my body.” If a new relationship between Jews and Christians is not to weaken practice, what are we to do with such polemics? Should Christians pray for “perfidious Jews”? Should Jews pray for the destruction of “pagans”? Resolving those questions would make a good interreligious statement!
Far better than searching for some neutral and ultimately weak set of principles to unite us, Jews and Christians might examine the many ways we exist within each other’s theological imagination, in both positive and polemical fashion. We are, after all, mired in a two-thousand-year old competition for who has the best interpretation of the Hebrew Bible: Christianity or rabbinic Judaism? How should we judge? That would make for a great dialogue!
Dabru Emet stands in a rich tradition of modern Jewish thinkers’ explorations of Christianity. Some were challenging (e.g., Abraham Geiger’s rich scholarship on the New Testament) while others were conciliatory (e.g., Martin Buber writing that Jesus was his brother), and some used Christian motifs to give voice to Jewish experience (e.g., Chagall’s crucifixion paintings depicting persecution of Jews). Most interesting are the Jewish efforts to find elements of Christianity within Judaism—the Shekhinah of the Zohar incorporating motifs of the Virgin Mary or Hasidei Ashkenaz imitating Christian monks in displays of sexual self-control. None of this is reflected in Dabru Emet.
An alternative approach is articulated by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Rather than strive for shared theological doctrine, he argued, let us look for shared depth theology. Agreement on doctrine can never occur without either formulating points of agreement so vague as to be meaningless or abandoning religious convictions on one side or the other.
In a striking break with previous modern Jewish thinkers, Heschel does not discuss the figures of Jesus or Paul. He finds affirmations of Christianity in classical Jewish texts, is generous in asserting that anti-Judaism cannot be the true heart of Christianity, and argues that the piety of Jews and Christians is affected by one another. His notion that “no religion is an island” applies to challenges, as well. Enlightenment figures who attacked Christianity also attacked Judaism; we need allies because antisemitism destroys religiosity and hence all religions.
Heschel’s turn to depth theology is a turn away from the theological propositions outlined by Dabru Emet. Interfaith dialogue, he writes, begins with faith; it is not a program for political gain nor for doctrinal debate. The question is not doctrine, but “whether we are alive or dead to the challenge and the expectation of the living God” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity 236). Absent from Dabru Emet are God, faith, prayer, religiosity, the soul: the elements that constitute the inner life of a religious person. The purpose of “interreligious cooperation,” he writes, is:
learning, to cooperate in academic ventures on the highest scholarly level and, what is even more important, to search in the wilderness for wellsprings of devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures forever as well as here and now (MGSA 249-50).
Susannah Heschel, Ph.D., is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish–Christian relations in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of antisemitism.