Holy Uncertainty and the Promise of More Intersectional Engagements: Reflections on the Legacy of Dabru Emet
by Laura Levitt
I come to this discussion out of the religion department at Temple University, once a leading center for post-Holocaust Jewish–Christian exchange. While each were in graduate school, Katharina von Kellenbach and Susannah Heschel (then at the University of Pennsylvania) were both very much engaged in these conversations in Philadelphia.
I arrived at Temple just after those heady days and was not a part of those theological and ethical discussions. I came to post-Holocaust work following the literary turn in that scholarship, working more closely with scholars of literature than with theologians and ethicists. But traces of the Temple University legacy continued.
Some of my first graduate students were German exchange students who came to Temple out of the work of my predecessors. They, too, wanted to work across difference, but their work, like my own, was informed by feminist, literary, and critical theory, and Holocaust memory. Working with my womanist ethicist colleague Katie Geneva Cannon, those students came to ask ethical questions about gender, sexuality, and race. My own first doctoral student wrote about the literary turn in New Testament scholarship after the Holocaust with attention to parables. Later, in Switzerland for her second Ph.D. at Basel, she wrote a book about passion narratives after the Holocaust. These experiences and these commitments inform my engagement with this forum and the many powerful essays that it has occasioned.
What strikes me about this rich collection of responses are the ways that many contributors push for a more expansive, more critical framework for working across our many differences—the intersections, the overlaps, the tensions among, between, but also within ourselves and our respective communities (even these are plural) (Halla Atallah, Ruth N. Sandberg) as a kind of intersectional interreligious vision of justice (Heather Miller Rubens, Zeyneb Sayilgan). Perhaps the most capacious of these accounts refuses the pinning down of those differences and instead calls for “holy uncertainty” (Maeera Y. Shreiber), a respectful unknowing.
These essays call on us to risk addressing hard questions (Christopher M. Leighton). They demand that we work from the margins and question what happens when those on the outside speak (Halla Atallah). How does the power of critical engagement across multiple differences make us uneasy, off balance (Mary C. Boys), vulnerable, but profoundly engaged? I leave this forum wanting to more fully embrace the hope and fear of what is out of our control, that uncertainty. I want to consider what “reflective believing” (Robert Cathey) might contribute to these more expansive encounters, and I see glimpses of the promises of these alternative approaches in so many of these essays (Elena Procario-Foley, Edward Kessler, Yehezkel Landau).
I want to suggest that such undertakings need to risk civility (Benjamin Sax, Katharina von Kellenbach, Victoria J. Barnett) for the sake of more honest engagement with historical legacies of profound differences of power. That said, there are issues that remain abiding concerns, and others that demand more consideration or attention in this context because they were not a part of the original statement at all. These include the following:
Holocaust Memory and Responsibility in Relation to the Holocaust
What does Christian teshuva look like over the long haul (Katharina von Kellenbach, Edward Kessler, Malka Z. Simkovich)? What does it mean in a world where antisemitism is once again an active and growing force, where neo-Nazis rise in insurrection alongside White Nationalists in the US Capitol? Given all of this, how do we find ways to build on Dabru Emet’s call for justice and peace as part of a response to the Shoah and racism in the present (Heather Miller Rubens)? What might these kinds of coalitions look like?Palestine
What might it mean for Jews and Christians to really talk about Palestine (Edward Kessler, Adam Gregerman, Yehezkel Landau, Sam Brody)? How can we begin to reckon as thoughtful Jews and Christians and Muslims about Israel/Palestine? How does occupation profoundly challenge commitments to peace and justice, and how are these commitments to be understood in relation to theological claims to Israel/Palestine by Jews as in the original Dabru Emet statement and its demands that Christians respect and acknowledge this claim? Is the original claim itself now up for revision as some of these thoughtful critics suggest?
As Adam Gregerman pointedly asks, what does it mean to demand that Christians share in a Jewish theological commitment to the Land of Israel alongside Jews? How might Palestinian voices—Muslim and Christian voices who are nowhere to be found in the original statement—be a part of these conversations?
Moreover, a deeper engagement with the politics of Israel/Palestine means wrestling with the different alliances already forged between some Jews and Christians in one direction and with other Jews and Muslims and yet other Christians in a quite different direction. Sam Brody offers a stark and powerful assessment of these quite adversarial political positions. And these, too, demand our attention, especially as so many of our students come to these issues without the kind of attachments to Zionism that informed the original Dabru Emet statement, even as more Evangelical Christians have come to embrace Zionism more forcefully as Christians.Islamophobia
And, once we open ourselves up to these questions, we need to deal with a whole slew of related concerns. What are our responsibilities as thoughtful Jews and Christians to our Muslim neighbors? How do we confront the injustice of Islamophobia post 9/11 (Mark Silk, Heather Miller Rubens)? Dabru Emet does not offer a pathway into the need for Jews, Christians, and Muslims—in all of our diversity and complexity, coming from our complicated intersectional realities—to critically engage with one another (Matthew D. Taylor).
These are large and urgent questions, but they are not without precedent. As Susannah Heschel's recent work on German Jewish scholars of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries makes clear—as do references among many contributors in this series to the longer legacy of Medieval philosophical and polemical interchange among these communities—there is a rich history that is beginning to powerfully shape these engagements.
Before moving back to what that more capacious vision might be, I want to address some of the sites for ongoing engagement. Here, many of the contributors to this forum point to the rich intersection of theological and scholarly engagement.
These often fruitfully contradictory avenues include what it might mean for Jews and Christians to talk more openly together about Jesus and questions of Christology missing in the original statement (Mark Silk, Edward Kessler). Others suggest new avenues opened up by recent scholarship on the Trinity where it seems that in the first century there was more room for Jews and early Christians to consider the diversity within a monotheistic God (Alan Brill, John T. Pawlikowski). We learn that contemporary scholars and theologians are revisiting ancient sources to explore these questions in ways perhaps not contemplated 20 years ago.
As so many of these essays suggest, more historical work on the complicated and complex interactions between and among ancient Jewish and Christian communities—their polemics and their coexistence—need to be more of a part of these discussions (Laura S. Lieber, Shira L. Lander, Julia McStravog). Matthew D. Taylor focuses on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eschatological fantasies of our own vindication at the end of days and reflects on Dabru Emet’s vision of biding time together in the present.
Still others find hope in the radical theological possibilities expressed for both Jews and Christians in the original statement’s openness to shared theological commitments (Ellen T. Charry, Peter A. Pettit). Other contributors read the statement from the opposite direction, calling attention to its clarity about fundamental differences between Jews and Christians expressed via the statement’s notion of authority (Jason Poling).
This last point brings me full circle to what it might mean to reconsider questions of authority that are more feminist and intersectional. Given the story we are told about the tensions around authority in constructing the original text of Dabru Emet (David Novak), I want to wonder with all of you about what Tivka Frymer-Kensky might have to say about these matters. How might she narrate this story? And, with Frymer-Kensky in mind, what might these discussions look like were we to really expand our vision of who speaks for our various communities? What if more women had spoken then and now? What might Jewish, Christian, and Muslim folks of color have to say about how they think about their relationships with each other and with the dominant folks (Halla Atallah), like many of us in this forum, who often speak for their/our communities? How might racism and antisemitism be more fully addressed together? What would such a cross-cultural, multiracial, gender inclusive conversation begin to look like?
Finally, I think we need to consider where these more capacious conversations take place. We need to acknowledge the growing precarity of the study of religion in academic institutions where so much of our vital critical thinking takes place. This forum early included the powerful haunting words of Katharina von Kellenbach, who built the department of philosophy and religious studies at St. Mary’s College in Maryland and who, along with this very program and many of her colleagues in the humanities, has been “downsized,” eliminated by the stroke of an administrator’s pen. These are difficult days for all of the humanities, but especially for religious studies. And, as this forum makes clear, this is happening at the very moment when we need to expand—not retract—these venues for our best thinking. We need these academic departments and programs not only to sustain this work, but to teach new generations more and not less about the world’s religions, ourselves, and each other.
Laura Levitt, Ph.D., is a professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender at Temple University. Levitt was one of the founders of the Jewish Studies Program at Temple and, for many years, served as its director.