From the “National Jewish Scholars Group” to Dabru Emet: Encountering Intrareligious Rifts
by Shira L. Lander
As with all origin stories, the history of Dabru Emet has variable accounts. This version emerges from my role as the inaugural Jewish Scholar (1990-1994) for what was then the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies (ICJS, now the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies) and focuses on the intraJewish differences that it exposed.
Much of my ICJS work was based locally in Baltimore, where denominational study groups were engaged in a three-year study of the history and theology of Jewish-Christian relations. On the national level, ICJS sponsored the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations. Both lay and clerical, academic and not, participants were engaged in the hard work of dredging up polemical texts and reevaluating their legacy for Christian self-understanding. The power of this metanoia struck a deep chord, and I began to ponder why the burden of wrestling with the adversus judaeos tradition and its sad history rested completely on Christian shoulders.
What followed in 1991 were a series of extensive, weighty conversations about convening a group of Jewish scholars to investigate the history of Jewish-Christian relations. The result was the Jewish Scholars Project (JSP), chaired by my teacher and colleague, Rabbi Dr. Michael Signer. After a few academic-style sessions of reading and discussing scholarly papers, the group decided to produce a more accessible theological result with broader appeal, and the idea of the public statement, Dabru Emet, was born.
The process of confronting how Judaism had been profoundly shaped by Jewish historical encounters with Christians exposed profound internal differences among Jewish scholars. This rift within the Jewish community is not new; it has been ever-expanding since the Enlightenment. The divide is not merely sociological, cultural, or intellectual, but deeply theological. It is rooted in the biblical myth of Jewish impermeability, which asserts the view of an essentialist core to Judaism that has consistently repelled and resisted outside influences. Dabru Emet, by acknowledging that Jewish-Christian historical interaction has had an impact on Judaism, took the side of modern historiography in this debate.
Because of this unstated historiographic commitment, certain claims of Dabru Emet were unacceptable to Jews whose weltanschauung is rooted in theology (or philosophy) and tradition rather than scientific historical method. Two affirmations in particular evoked heated debate: (1) Jews and Christians worship the same God; and (2) Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon. A few of these debates were addressed in the two volumes that followed the publication of Dabru Emet: Irreconcilable Differences?: A Learning Resource for Jews and Christians (2001) and Christianity in Jewish Terms (2002). Other debates were aired in op-eds, sermons, and public pronouncements. Much of the controversy fell along denominational lines, with Orthodox Jews demurring and the liberal movements assenting.
The first statement is an ontological assertion about the reality named God that Jews and Christians worship. It is not about the way that divine entity is worshiped, imagined, or described, nor is it about what “God” has professedly done in the course of human history. As an unverifiable ontological statement, it is best understood as a belief. That this belief was perceived as threatening the inviolability of the Jewish-Christian boundary mentioned above can be seen in the analysis provided by Jon D. Levenson: “the strategy Dabru Emet takes—stressing (or inventing) commonalities at the expense of mutually exclusive structures and truth-claims—makes syncretism and conversion seem much less dangerous” (24-25).
Like Levenson, other Orthodox Jews found the entire project to be a dangerous form of “theological reciprocity.” It is not merely Christianity’s demographic threat that poses a problem for such thinkers, but the theological assertions that contribute to it. As I have written elsewhere, there are deeply troubling trends in Jewish thought that comprise the alternative “non-reciprocal,” or traditional, theology (149-169). This traditional theology posits that the unique oneness of God parallels the unity of the people Israel. As expressed by theologian Michael Wyschogrod, “God appears in history as the God of Israel and there can therefore be no thought about God that is not also thought about Israel” (175). Admittedly, Dabru Emet names the object of Jewish and Christian worship as “the God of Israel.” Yet this designation is for identification purposes only; it is not a theological assertion about the inviolable unitary oneness of Israel, a theology that excludes Christians.
Dabru Emet stands as a watershed in the history of Jewish–Christian relations for those Jews who reject this traditional strand of theology, but those who embrace it will continue to resist any such attempts to wrestle with the theological challenges posed by the fraught history shared by Jews and Christians.
Shira L. Lander, Ph.D., is the inaugural Jewish Scholar at ICJS. She is the founding director of Jewish Studies and senior lecturer at Southern Methodist University.