Arguments for the Sake of Heaven and Earth
by Christopher M. Leighton
Beginning in 1998, a working group of four Jewish scholars spearheaded a project that resulted in the public statement known as Dabru Emet, and two companion volumes designed to model the academic and communal disciplines of the Jewish–Christian encounter. ICJS served as the host of this venture and, as executive director at the time, I had the privilege, along with my colleague Dr. Rosann Catalano, to attend all the sessions that went into crafting these works.
Nearly every claim in the document was subjected to intensive interrogation. Points were argued vociferously. Whenever positions hardened and movement ground to a standstill, I wondered if the whole enterprise would come to naught. Then, something extraordinary happened. One of the scholars would make a fist, pound a beat on the table, and start chanting a nigun. The others immediately loosened their defensive postures, joined the melody, and filled the room with song. After a few moments of raucous harmony, the group would return to the discussion, sometimes making concessions, sometimes putting the debate on hold and moving along to the next point.
I do not want to romanticize their labors. There was plenty of ego involved. But these Jewish scholars—fearless in the face of passionate disagreement—modeled a way of doing theology worthy of emulation. There are arguments that aim at victory and are driven by the hope of the opposition’s surrender. There also are arguments for the sake of heaven, makhloket l’shem shamayim—these are said to endure (Avot 5:17).
Lamentably, Dabru Emet does not make explicit the internal debates beneath the textual surface. The statement is misconstrued if read as an immutable testament. Dabru Emet is an interdenominational Jewish document, not a magisterial declaration that sets down apodictic truths and transcendental norms. If read in the spirit in which it was composed, its claims will be contested, subjected to interpretation and reinterpretation, denounced, refined, and embellished.
When I began at ICJS, my rabbinic colleagues frequently asserted that Christians do theology, not Jews. Jews inhabit sacred texts and discern the holy by joining the rambunctious and interminable conversations of their ancestors. Fair enough. Yet, if the project that resulted in Dabru Emet and its companion volumes has lasting value, these efforts may help to embolden the larger Jewish community to map out its core affirmations, discerning and articulating the meanings of its communal life and practice, sharing its wisdom and beauty with the larger world, and challenging itself and its neighbors to live together creatively in the midst of irreconcilable differences.
Twenty years after the publication of Dabru Emet, in an environment more divided than ever, this we know: Our religious communities will continue to rub against one another. There will be heat, but what about light? In what directions will the conversations and encounters move? Will the Jewish–Christian encounter offer a template or constructive clues about the possibilities and limitations of interreligious encounters with Islam and other world religions? Will this experience offer any insight into struggles with racism, sexism, and socioeconomic inequities?
We find ourselves in a moment when cynicism and disenchantment have gripped the public imagination, and temptations to retreat into familiar enclaves are great. The political tumult might seem to render theological inquiry a diversion from the hard labor of social transformation. Yet the words of Rabbi Joel Zaiman echo in my mind. When asked why he believed the work that went into Dabru Emet mattered, he decried the reflexes that confined Jews within the role of “victim” and froze the Jewish community in a posture of fear and distrust. He noted that many of the most creative moments in Jewish history occurred when there was a robust engagement with the surrounding religious culture. Therefore, the proposal to bring together a broad cross-section of Jewish scholars to explore the ways in which the dynamics of accommodation and resistance went into the making and remaking of Jewish identity struck him as a vital pursuit.
The gift that the other offers is the possibility of seeing ourselves from a distance. The inquiry might not exactly pull us outside of ourselves, but it offers the chance of being interrupted and finding ourselves arrested by some unfamiliar questions, prompting us to ask anew what really matters to us as individuals and religious communities. The questions that bring us together also set us apart and couldn’t be more momentous: What do we live for, and for what are we willing to die and possibly even kill?
For many years, I assumed that the work of interreligious study revolved around efforts to cross into foreign territory and learn how to see the world through the lens of others whose history, beliefs, and practices set them apart. I maintained that the central task was to suspend judgment, at least temporarily, in order to discover the beauty and wisdom of a tradition to which we do not belong; recognize and affirm the dignity of the other; do honor to our common humanity; and expand our awareness of divinity’s reach.
Without dismissing this labor, I increasingly think this is not enough and not the place where the heavy lifting of interreligious theology can rest. Our religious identities are constructed in the heat of conflict, and theological categories that define each of our traditions carry something like a genetic disposition from which there is no escape. The embers continue to burn beneath the surface, and often turn hot at the suggestion that all religions are fundamentally equal, interchangeable—that our differences make no difference.
When participants from vastly divergent communities, cultures, and experiences come into close enough proximity, there is a tension. The story of conflict binds us together, and we need not travel far to recover indictments of idolatry, apostasy, and perversity directed at one another. Our interlocking histories quickly bring us to places we wish to avoid. Yet here is where we may find a surprising opening. If we can push through the embarrassment, fear, and defensiveness, the inquiry into this inheritance brings us face to face with the non-negotiable. We reach a greater clarity about where we draw the line and where we each stand.
The promise of theology is in making possible a meeting where we can take off the armor, make ourselves vulnerable to disruption, and listen in that awkward silence to one another—aware of the ache and the longing between, within, or perhaps beneath our religious traditions. We are not simply stuck with one another. We need each other if we are to learn how to transmute arguments for the sake of conquest into arguments for the sake of heaven.
The Rev. Dr. Christopher M. Leighton is an ordained Presbyterian minister who served as the founding executive director of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies (ICJS—now the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies) from its inception in 1987 until 2016.