Dabru Emet and the Era of Respect
by Elena Procario-Foley
Ghetto Heroes Square, Krakow, Poland. Each chair represents Krakow Jews that were sent to Auschwitz. Photo credit: Elena G. Procario-Foley.
I was four months pregnant, juggling two toddlers, and quickly flipping through the pages of Sunday’s The New York Times on a Monday morning before leaving for work when my eyes lit on the full-page advertisement from the National Jewish Scholar’s Project, Dabru Emet. Relatively new to the community of scholars in the dialogue, my jaw dropped as I had not known this project was in process. Excitedly, I grabbed the paper from the table, punted my lesson plans, and went to class eager to demonstrate for the students that the practice and study of religion and interreligious dialogue was public and relevant. Dabru Emet was applicable that day to two courses: “Introduction to the Study of Religion” and “Jesus and Judaism.”
Ten years later, Dabru Emet became integral to my new course: “Memory and Reconciliation: The Churches and the Holocaust.” The course is organized around learning the long arc of the Christian teaching of contempt, its devastating culmination in the Shoah, and the improbable emergence of the teaching of respect. During spring break, my students and I travel to Poland to study at the former Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. Dabru Emet is studied in the latter part of the course as part of the era of respect.
To provide a common foundation in the historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity, the first lessons involve an overview of biblical history, the origins of these two religions, and a comparison of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible. In advance of our travel, we read a Holocaust memoir in parallel with learning about the main elements and texts in the teaching of contempt.
Memorial at the site of the former Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, Poland. Photo credit: Elena G. Procario-Foley.
After bearing witness at Auschwitz, the Kraków ghetto memorial, and the Płaszów labor camp, students need to learn about Christian responses to the Shoah. Texts such as Nostra Aetate, the Ten Points of Seelisberg, and We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah are studied in havrutah style. My students are predominantly Christian (though cohorts have included atheists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims). Adopting havrutah as a Jewish mode of study in an interreligious key heightens their engagement with the documents and their understanding of Jewish traditions. Having confronted the Shoah and the teaching of contempt, students become clear-eyed textual critics, pointing to weaknesses in these Christian documents grounding the new teaching of respect.
Dabru Emet provides students with an opportunity to appreciate more deeply the connections between Judaism and Christianity they learned earlier in the semester, and to understand the necessity and complexity of twenty-first century Jewish–Christian dialogue. The historical facts and theological reflections of the first weeks of class can feel remote for students with limited understanding of the connection between the history of Jewish–Christian relations and the Shoah. By the time students examine Dabru Emet, however, they have listened to survivors, viewed material remains of the Shoah, and studied the theological violence of Christians against Jews. The positions proposed by Dabru Emet are viscerally felt as deeply important.
When students read Dabru Emet’s assertions that Jews and Christians worship the same God (claim 1) and seek authority from the same book (claim 2), they raise points of contact with earlier portions of the course such as the comparison of sacred canons. They value the importance of understanding different interpretations of shared texts. They see the possibilities of mutual understanding when Jews and Christians study scripture together. They make connections to the idea of covenantal relationship and G-d’s freedom to be in relationship with different groups of people, and they ponder the significance of the creation of the State of Israel (claim 3).
Having confronted the Shoah, students vehemently articulate the inherent value of every human being. They affirm Dabru Emet’s assertions about being made in the image of God as the basis for shared moral action (claim 4) and not forcing one’s religious tradition on another (claim 6). They note that Nostra Aetate also rejects discrimination of any kind on the basis of the imago Dei. Authentically respecting the other allows people to ground themselves in their tradition without fear of loss of identity (claim 7) while creating the freedom to work together for justice and peace (claim 8). Dabru Emet affords students an opportunity to draw systematic connections among its claims, as well as to similar ideas in new Christian texts of respect.
Unsurprisingly, students are very concerned with claim 5 (Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon) and debate, as the scholars did when it was released, whether Dabru Emet absolves Christians for the Shoah. In general, Christian responsibility for the Shoah was not a question for students before they learned of the Christian teaching of contempt; Dabru Emet affords students a nuanced Jewish perspective to consider.
After working their way through Dabru Emet, students work in havrutah groups and compare the statement to the 2002 Christian document A Sacred Obligation. As students engage in comparative analysis of these two documents, they gain insight into the groundbreaking work of Dabru Emet to respond to Christian efforts to repent of the teaching of contempt. In light of Dabru Emet, students are baffled by conservative Christian criticisms of A Sacred Obligation for its position that “Christians should not target Jews for conversion,” especially given Dabru Emet’s positive assertions about ‘cherishing’ each tradition to pursue the dialogue with “integrity.” Most importantly, perhaps, Dabru Emet prompts an agenda for future dialogue. Students recognize that the dialogue will require uncoerced partners who are willing to:
honor the sacredness of the other’s religious tradition;
learn about how the other tradition views its own scripture, theology, and ethics;
address the continuing problem that some continue to view conversion as a mandate of their tradition;
engage Christian self-reflection about responsibility for the Shoah.
The gift of Dabru Emet is that Jewish scholars cared and dared enough to dialogue with Christians after 2,000 years of Christian hostility. After a semester fraught with all the intellectual and emotional challenges of studying the Shoah, students are inspired by the remarkable courage and genuine humility of Dabru Emet’s authors, and they want to speak the truth of the era of respect.
Elena Procario-Foley, Ph.D., is the Driscoll Professor of Jewish–Catholic Studies at Iona College.