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Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
Bases
and Boundaries of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem Dialogue
By Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
excerpts from two articles that
appeared in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and republished
in Paradigm Shift
Our
Dialogue Takes Place in Exile
How
does one live with exile? Exile is one of the ways in which
traditional Jews experience life differently from the way
their Moslem and Christian counterparts do. We are in Galut.
We participate in dialogue against the background of exile.
With the exception of a few exalted souls, Christians lost
the sense of exile in the year 321 when Emperor Constantine
converted to Christianity. The religion of oppressed ghetto
dwellers now sat in the driver's seat of the saeculum
and controlled political events. From that time on, salvation
for Christians became a private matter between the soul and
its God. The messianism of Christians no longer needed this
world to come into its own. Triumphalism claimed its fulfillment
here on earth under the rule of the triple-crowned vicar of
Christ. All that now mattered was the spread of the Holy Roman
Empire. Only oppressed nations after the resurgence of nationalisms
had messianic dreams of temporal significance. If a Christian
felt alienated and marginal, it was interpreted as his or
her personal problem. Until Vatican II the church did not
see itself as the ecclesia in waiting for the end of
the exile, but as the church arrived.
In
Islam, to my knowledge, although there too an expected Mahdi
is part of the eschatology, there is no sense of exile. Once
the Jahaliyin and idolators were removed from Mecca, a new
world order began.
Except
on the Sabbath when we Jews share a few moments of exilelessness,
we stay aware of exile. I ask my partners in this dialogue
to remain aware of exile, which I believe we all share, as
the basic condition of an unredeemed world.
Dialogue
Is Not Arbitration or Disputation
There
is a myth, begotten by marketplace and parliament, that the
individuals involved in dialogue will have power given to
them to change the thinking of the faithful of their own community.
The Jewish community has given me no such power. If I go too
far out, I will be repudiated by my own community. The dialoguer
who goes too far afield is discredited, and with this the
effectiveness of dialogue as a changer of consciousness is
undermined. Dialogue is not even part of seminary curricula.
With the notable exception of the Hebrew Union College of
Cincinnati, there are no chairs in Christianity and Islam
in Jewish seminaries. I suspect that the same is true of Christian
and Moslem seminaries vis-‡-vis other religions. In the
past we have studiously ignored one another, and still there
is tension between us. But in conferences such as this one
we become the instrument of the Power that wants us to connect,
the Power that I believe is at the core of the urge for dialogue.
Thank
God we are not in a disputation. We may look to a discussion
in which all partners are equal, open to each other and caring
for the truth, each responding from the position of a loyal
adherent to his or her own religion, standing in the presence
of the God who witnesses this sharing. As Malachi 3:16 has
it, "Then did those who respect God speak, each to his
fellow, and the Lord heard and listened and wrote it all into
his book entitled 'The dialogues of those who fear the Lord
and honor his Name.'"
Deflating
Inflated Faith Claims
I
am aware that I am treading on pious toes. But please watch;
I also stepped on my own. What I am saying is not that the
world faiths to which we belong have no factual basis at all.
What I am saying is that we are all on shaky ground, and that
we need to deal not so much with the external facts but with
our own acts of faith. These we need to take seriously because
we stake our lives on them and invest them with supreme value.
These acts of faith are not the result of facts. On the contrary,
facts in this world are more often the result of acts of faith
on which we base our actions. Our acts of faith create realities
for us and others. So that we do not become arrogant in the
process of inflating our truth claims that are based on our
own acts of faith and put down those of others, I must make
these statements so that in a sober and humble fashion we
may talk about our traditions without undue triumphalism.
The
major impediment to communication among our three religions
is the dogmatic stance that we assume for the sake of the
propagation of faith. We quote authorities who knew no more
truly than we know but whose energetic assertions "snow"
us. Their energy is the result of worldviews so dominated
by their inner scene that they did not permit any of the doubts
that are brought on by reality maps that did not match their
dogma. Against the refrain, "it ain't necessarily so,"
we bluff others who are not of our faith, and we bluff our
own people - not deliberately as con artists, but out of desperation
at the lack of hard evidence, and we bluff ourselves as a
strategy against our own fickleness, our "crooked heart"
as Jeremiah 5:23 calls it. Then again, acts of faith are not
made on an empty heart. We have within it our soul, the most
reliable teacher. As we watch the process in which the soul
becomes thought or speech, we notice that many a time we ease
ourselves into convenient clichÈs that have little
of the new insight in them. Once more we are trapped by habits
that are the dunghill upon which the creeds feed. It takes
vigilance and humble courage to make acts of faith. After
all, where faith is weak, there is an abundance of beliefs.
With this in mind we may be more humble about our tradition
and our sureness, yet also a bit more proud of the holy process
in our inner being that keeps teaching and guiding us.
The
Challenge of the New Millennium
Besides
the challenge of past history we also face the challenge of
the present millennium. This era is empirical, experiential,
humanistic, multioptional, fluid, mystical; it is existential,
integrative, ecumenical, aware of nonverbal dimensions, with
a view of God that is radically immanent, while at the same
time utterly transcendental, non-anthropomorphic, and apopathic.
Instead of being particularistic in regard to salvation and
the conditions that make for it; it is universalistic and
noninstitutional; heuristic and empirical. This view takes
most seriously "by their fruits ye shall know them,"
and the fruits are manifest in the realm of better human living
and interaction. It demands to see the fruits in better and
more harmonious relationships, and to see a consciousness
that is higher, more integrated with the physical, multidimensional,
centered, and ecologically aware. The new humanism wedded
to trans-personal psychology has challenged all of us by presenting
a viable and deeply religious option to the Bible religions.
Here,
too, we make some acts of faith. I believe that there is something
in Judaism that is in some sense closer to the divine intent
than even the best that modern psychology can produce. At
the same time I maintain that Judaism without holistic modern
psychology will be farther from the divine intent than psychology
alone. We three can meet the challenge of psychology most
significantly in the field of spiritual direction, Tarika,
Musar, and Kabbalah. About these things we must
talk with one another from real live experience, not only
from books.
The
Dialogue of Devoutness
Once
we realize the shakiness of the factual fundaments of our
acts of faith and come to a tentative agreement that the biblical
and Qur'anic notions of holiness are not too far apart, then
we realize that the holier we become, the stronger the impression
our acts of faith make on the universe. But where do we learn
how to fulfill the command, "Holy ye shall be for holy
am I the Lord your God"? We search the sources of our
traditions and find an entire literature devoted to spiritual
direction. We read about holy souls and the paths they took
on their way to holiness, the anecdotes in which their lives
and conversations taught more than what one can learn in the
academy, the counsels they gave to seekers, and their day-to-day,
breath-by-breath witness.
There
are few conversations in this universe as deeply satisfying
to the heart as the dialogue of the devout. Unfortunately,
such dialogue took place mostly among the people of each religion
separately. If this profound sharing were to take place between
tzaddik, saint, and dervish, monk, murid, and hasid,
we would have a model of what one of the highest forms of
conversation could be. One of the prime topics of that discourse
would be counsel that would help the spirit gain the service
of the flesh for the sake of the divine. This dialogue is
a sharing of how best to surrender and conform to the divine
will, how to receive divine wisdom for our guidance, how to
read scripture for the sake of the spirit, how to emulate
- imitate - divine attributes. The counsel gained in such
dialogue helps the worshiper to worship, the meditator to
meditate, the adorer to adore, and the virtuous one who wished
to become a devotee to become a virtuoso of devoutness, a
saint.
The
Exo/Eso-Teric Switch
Andre
Guenon and Friedtjoff Schuon found in Houston Smith their
American spokesperson. His point is that the greatest sharing
between religions takes place in the realm of the esoteric,
not the exoteric. Behind all religions there stands the philosophia
perrennis. This view accounts for the differences between
religions as mere accidents of time and clime, space and race.
Though I find this view not quite convincing, for reasons
I hope to detail elsewhere, it is nevertheless pervasive in
our culture. There is much agreement today that what all religions
share is more important than are their differences.
The
hallmark of the new era is that the esoteric has taken the
place of the exoteric, and there is more agreement concerning
the esoteric teachings and their empirical value than concerning
the exoteric aspects. Many of the exoteric observances are
being discarded, often out of ignorance and carelessness,
or lack of proper instruction in doing them so that they work
in one's life. Pragmatic rationalists among members of the
hierarchies give their consent to this because the practices
seem to divert a person from the essentials toward minutiae
that in superstitious minds have taken on a magic heaven-coercing
quality. Thus the Catholic Church is discarding Latin, novenas,
holy water, incense, and the concern for extreme unction;
"tantric" means formerly at the disposal of the
faithful. This is on the official level, while such practices
as exorcism, use of incense, and anointing have moved to the
counterculture.
Among
Jews there is less observance of the midnight lament, the
ablutions of the mikveh, the kapparot with live
rooster or hen, and the holy days of Sukkot and the New Moon.
As I hear it from Moslems, Ramadan has for some become less
a period for fasting during the day than for feasting at night.
This switch is akin to the one that occurred in the use of
our sacred and vernacular languages. Hebrew, once referred
to as the holy tongue and reserved for prayer and sabbath
conversation, has become the language of the marketplace and
the election campaign, while Yiddish, the once secular, vernacular,
is now used for the study of Torah and colloquy with God.
The
esoteric aspect has become the public face of religions. As
mentioned before, bookshops are stocked well with St. John
of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila, but one will be hard
pressed to find a catechism or a Kyriale. The Kabbalah is
much better represented than volumes dealing with home life
and daily prayer. On the Moslem side, one will find only rarely
a book of Hadiths or Salaat, but Sufism is overflowing the
shelves.
All
this causes the guardians of religion great anxiety and concern.
Does it mean that what once was considered essential is no
longer valid? Was the synagogue/church/mosque wrong in maintaining
our differences all along? Is the effort to get us to dialogue
together nothing but another ploy to homogenize all religion
into some syncretistic mÈlange in which each one can
find some way to cop out from real commitment? These anxieties
cannot be averted by reverting to a strict fundamentalist
position. Whenever tradition is challenged to renew itself,
it must meet these crises. Whenever a religion refuses to
renew itself, it finds itself without adherents. How do we
steer the course between removing all the surface tensions
between religions, thus losing what is special in each, and
the building of concrete walls between us? Perhaps we need
to explore this again and, after exploring, reformulate our
teachings on the differences of our religions. Let us each
look at the teachings concerning the status of the adherents
of our sister faiths.
The
Dialogue of Good News
I
am deeply intrigued to hear the good news others proclaim.
It is in the nature of each religion to emphasize one or another
aspect. Our daily prayer in the grace after meals asks God
to send to us soon Elijah-Al Khidr with the good news of redemption
and consolation. Elijah wears many garbs and disguises. When
a Christian proclaims what he or she knows as good news, I
want to hear it. I cannot hear it though if it addresses itself
only to those who belong to the visible church. None of us
here reject the truth stubbornly out of truculent recalcitrance
to God; hence we can in some sense connect with salvation
in what is called the invisible church. We Jews dealt with
the category of the children of Noah. The Moslems accept non-Moslems
who believe in One God as Muumin. So what is our message?
All three of us share the good news of turning to God, Teshuvah,
Metanoia, Tawba. All three of us share the good news of
the ultimate kingdom of God right here on this planet. Can
we not share in the dissemination of that message? We all
believe in the consequentiality of human life. We all share
the sense of in illo tempore time that allows us to
keep in touch with the seasons of hope and revelation and
the advent of redemption. We all share in the belief that
some of God's blessed will and wisdom are manifested to humankind.
We all share in the belief and hope in the ultimate transcendence
of the limitations of the flesh and society.
In
the areas where we do not share, we still need to be able
to hear what good news the other proclaims, without getting
"uptight." Each one of us has some aspects that
are well developed in the faith and others that are either
overdeveloped so that they have become top heavy or underdeveloped
because we have heard only through a wall and seen through
a veil. We need each other as mirrors. How do I look to you?
I must tell you how you look to me so that we have accurate
reflections of whether we manifest what we proclaim.
The
Dialogue of Indebtedness
James
Parkes once gave a sermon that has often been reprinted under
the title "Christianity's Debt to Judaism." I think
that there are some issues on which we all need to declare
our debt to each other. Islam has given us the first thrust
in the direction of scholasticism. Maimonides and Aquinas
came on the heels of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. It was Islamic
thought and scholarship that made us enter into dialogue with
philosophy. It was so fruitful in its own day that I cannot
believe that there is presently hardly any of this dialogue
going on.
It
is clear to me that Mohammed, in his hadiths and in
the formulations of the Koran that depended on his vocabulary
and the state of his awareness, did what he conceived as bringing
the shariya of Judaism and Christianity into line with
the condition of his day and age. Even during Mohammed's life,
Islamic law changed to fit the changing conditions. There
must have been developments in the shariya to deal
with the industrial revolution. I would like to learn more
about this. I would like us to be able to enter into a dialogue
on ecology, holy places, medical ethics, food technology,
etc. We all owe Islam a debt for keeping an untarnished Tawhid-unity
of God-before our eyes in the past. We now need to dialogue
on Tawhid in cosmic terms.
The
issue of abrogation also needs detailed and caring exposition
so that we know clearly what Islam teaches on the abrogation
of the other Bible faiths and prophecies. It will be delicate
and difficult, but necessary to do, since there were many
developments in Judaism and Christianity after the Koran.
It is a situation similar to that of Vatican II when it dealt
with rabbinic Judaism after Christianity.
Judaism,
in its concern for the practical and the mystical, owes much
to Christianity for systematic theology. The current rabbinate
as a clerical and pastoral, instead of a judicial, vocation
came to us as a result of the influence of Christianity. One
cannot listen to synagogue music without sensing the influence
of sacred music from the church. Modern seminary education
is clearly modeled after the Christian paradigm.
At
times I wish that the dialogue had developed before we copied
from Christians and Christians from us. We might have voiced
our caveats to the total vernacularization of the Christian
liturgy. Our experience with Reform Judaism might have helped
the church. Conversely, we needed to learn some of the caveats
for candidacy to seminaries without a sense of vocation. Heinrich
Heine said, "Wie es Christelt sich, so Juedelts sich,"
"As Jews jewel, so do Christians crystal." I only
wish that had been the result of critical scrutiny, not merely
external emulation.
The
Dialogue of Hermeneutics
In
this dialogue we need to share information. How does a Jew
read the Bible? What are the canons of legitimate interpretation?
How does the Christian come to an interpretation of the same
text? In recent years teams of scholars have worked together
in new and very helpful translations of the Hebrew Bible.
Some Jews have made fine contributions to the understanding
of the New Testament, bringing to bear parallel sources from
the Talmud and the Midrashim. Other Jews have worked
on the Koran and made worthy contributions quoted by Moslem
scholars.
For
all that books can offer us, the vital contact comes from
studying texts together and getting to see with the eyes of
the other. In this way I have come to a fair understanding
of Roman Catholic and Neo-Orthodox Protestant hermeneutics.
I have met a number of Christian Old Testament scholars who
knew our hermeneutic of Tanakh, though I have yet to meet
a Christian scholar of Talmud rabbinics.
We
Agree to Disagree
What
is it that we will not be able to agree on? What is it that
we will have to learn to live with in each other? It seems
to me that a Jew will have to learn to live with the following
aspects of Christianity: the person of Jesus of Nazareth is
bound to stay central and in the position of the Christ, the
Messiah of the first coming. Both Jew and Christian will have
to wait for the Shalom order to be instituted by the one who
will complete history and fulfill the messianic expectations
dealing with turning swords into plowshares and having lions
living with lambs. The teachings of Paul concerning the Law
will remain a shibboleth between us until the day comes
when we all no longer see by looking through the glass darkly,
and the Tree of Knowledge will have been supplanted by the
Tree of Life.
With
Moslems we will have to negotiate matters of the shariya and
the issue of abrogation. On the matter of the Razulship of
Mohammed, we may find accommodation. I pray that we learn
to agree first on matters dealing with more practical issues
and find a way for the children of Isaac and Ishmael to live
in peace. I am convinced that learning Torah together is an
important prelude to the kind of dialogue we will hold with
each other when our eschatological expectations will have
been fulfilled. I trust we each will find that we were right,
though not quite in the way we thought we would be. Only by
holding on to our shape and color do we form the mosaic in
which we are God's tiles.
Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
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