Dabru Emet After Twenty Years: The Question of Authority
by David Novak
As the writer of the original working paper that became Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity, and as one of the four authors of the final document, I look upon the twentieth anniversary of its publication with significant memories of the process that produced it.
The most significant of those memories is of how the question of authority was a key issue at the inception of the process and at its conclusion. My memory of this specific issue is now recalled because we authors knew that our statement would be controversial, and there is no more controversial issue than that of authority.
Controversies over authority were both external and internal. Externally, there have been those who have questioned our authority to produce such a normatively charged statement. Internally, there was fierce debate over the one point in the statement where “authority” is explicitly asserted.
The idea for Dabru Emet emerged in a group of Jewish scholars, all of whom had dealt with Christianity in their scholarship. Most of us had close ties with Christian scholars, especially those concerned with Judaism and Christianity’s connection to it. Many of these scholars either officially or informally had made positive public statements about Jews and Judaism. Thoughtful Jews like ourselves could hardly remain indifferent to them. As such, we took it upon ourselves to compose Dabru Emet in response.
The authorial subgroup charged with Dabru Emet’s actual composition consisted of the late Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, Peter Ochs, the late Michael Signer, and me. Although Michael and I were ordained rabbis, at the time of composing Dabru Emet neither of us was serving in the active rabbinate. Like Tikvah and Peter, we were Jewish Studies professors teaching in non-Jewish universities.
As tenured academics, we enjoyed the privileges of academic freedom. We could speak for ourselves without having to answer to any official body having the authority to either approve or disapprove of anything we did or did not say. Probably no four actively serving rabbis could have composed Dabru Emet because it is most unlikely that the explicitly theological character of this statement’s propositions could get official sanction from all the different Jewish denominations to which any active rabbi belongs. Even a Jewish academic working for an officially Jewish institution would not have had the freedom from official authority we four had. Nevertheless, despite our not having (and not wanting) official authority, we did have an unofficial, informal, authority of sorts.
That kind of authority came with the growing prestige of Jewish Studies both in the academic and Jewish worlds. In fact, when those in the academy or in the Jewish community are looking for a public statement of “the Jewish position” (which is most often “a Jewish position,” or “a precedented Jewish position”) on any major public issue, more and more they turn to professors of Jewish Studies. That is why, although we could say that we were “speaking only for ourselves,” we knew full well that we were not speaking only to ourselves, but to a much larger audience, both Jewish and gentile. (In fact, there have been many gentiles—Christians as well as Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—who have expressed to us and to others their keen interest in Dabru Emet, and in the dynamics of its composition.)
Although the discussions among the four of us were always lively, there was little internal controversy—that is, until we were composing the final version of the statement. The controversy was over the second proposition of Dabru Emet, namely, “Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book: the Bible (what Jews call ‘Tanakh’ and Christians call the ‘Old Testament’).” Despite the fact that this proposition was already in the original working paper, at the conclusion of our work, Tikvah strongly objected to the use of the word “authority,” vehemently disagreeing with the concept it names. As a feminist thinker, “authority” suggested to her hierarchal “patriarchy” (often discussed in her work as a Bible scholar), to which she had been consistently opposed. She only wanted the proposition to assert that the Bible functions (or ought to function) in both religions as a source of “religious orientation, spiritual and communal education.” Clearly ours was a foundational debate in Jewish theology.
I did not totally disagree with Tikvah, but only insisted that both Judaism and Christianity are essentially normative traditions, whose commandments (mitzvot) are authorized by the revelation of God’s will in the Hebrew Bible. Both the Talmud and the New Testament are midrashim (textual interpretation) on the Bible, for there are no normative teachings in either of them that are not based (more or less directly) on the biblical text. Although Jews and Christians disagree about the current authority of some of these commandments, we are in basic agreement about many of them. Hence the fourth proposition, “Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah.”
Truth be told, Tikvah and I were at such loggerheads over the question of authority that each of us threatened to pull out of the whole project—and to publicly declare why we did so—if “authority” either did or did not appear in the final version of the statement. Nevertheless, Peter (whose diplomatic skills are considerable) managed to bring about a compromise by retaining both Tikvah’s and my version of this proposition. In retrospect, Tikvah conceded more than I did, for I didn’t object to her formulation but only wanted it to be secondary to the primary formulation about biblical authority. She, on the other hand, agreed to something she seemed unable to accept in principle.
Although she may have agreed in order to enable Dabru Emet (over which we all had worked so hard) to see the light of day, I would like to think that as the observant Jew Tikvah was, she may have had some reservations about rejecting in theory what she seemed to affirm in her religious practice. But, at least in this world, I can only guess, never knowing for sure.
David Novak, Ph.D., has been the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Professor of Jewish Studies and Philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Academy for Jewish Research.