Dear Friends,
This past year we marked three anniversaries that have great significance for Jewish-Christian relations.
The Council of Nicaea was held is 325 CE. It addressed definitional theological issues in early Christianity, especially the divine nature of Son of God in relation to the Father. It also set a uniform date for Easter and its rationale for doing so includes harsh anti-Jewish language. It is, therefore, an important milestone in the articulation of Christian anti-Judaism.
On October 28, 1965, sixty years ago, as part of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI promulgated the history-making declaration Nostra Aetate. Its fourth chapter addresses Jews and Judaism. It speaks of the spiritual “bond” and “patrimony” Jews and Christians share and recognizes that the Church’s roots are in the Old Testament and in the Jewish people. In renouncing both the charge of deicide - that “the Jews” are responsible for the death of Jesus - and the notion that, as a result, God has rejected the Jews, Nostra Aetate repudiates the two concepts that lie at the heart of what Jules Isaac called the “teaching of contempt” for Jews and Judaism. This break with centuries of tradition is one of the defining features of Nostra Aetate. While other Christian groups and churches had previously addressed some of these issues, the prominence of the Roman Catholic Church, along with the media attention focused on the Second Vatican Council, helped Nostra Aetate become emblematic of the sea change in post-war era of Jewish-Christian, not just Jewish-Catholic, dialogue. (Indeed, I note that is also the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland ‘s On the Jewish Question.)
Finally, it was twenty-five years ago that Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity was published as a full-page ad in the New York Times over the signatures of more than 170 rabbis and Jewish scholars from around the world and across the Jewish spectrum. Dabru Emet called on Jews to acknowledge the changes represented by Nostra Aetate and to appreciate both the commonalities and the differences between Jews and Christians. It has been hailed as the Jewish Nostra Aetate, though there is a crucial difference between the two. Nostra Aetate is an authoritative document of the Roman Catholic Church, while Dabru Emet has no institutional authority; it represents only the opinion of its authors and those who endorsed it. Like Nostra Aetate, Dabru Emet grabbed the attention of the Jewish and Christian world and, in public perception, the two are often seen as complimentary - the Jewish and the Christian statements of the post-Shoah age of dialogue and relationship.
Nostra Aetate effectively repudiated the kind anti-Judaism one finds in the argumentation of Council of Nicaea. Dabru Emet and Nostra Aetate together demonstrate the potential for overcoming a toxic past and working together to build a relationship in which Jews and Christians can be blessings to one another and to the world.
I rehearse this history fully aware of state of our world and especially the strains in interreligious relations that have emerged among the three communities that are the focus of the work of the ICCJ – Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is essential, especially when some question the value of staying at the table and having difficult conversations, to remind ourselves that - 1700 years after Nicaea – Nostra Aetate and Dabru Emet represent something quite new in human history: the notion that we can harness religious difference so that it is a force for social cohesion and common action. This is a powerful idea and when we look back, we can see that it is changing our world. Let this knowledge give us courage to face the challenges of the year to come.