On November 21st, the National Jewish-Christian Dialogue—an interfaith gathering co-sponsored by the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the National Council of Synagogues (NCS)—convened on the campus of Hellenic College Holy Cross (HCHC). The Huffington Ecumenical Institute (HEI) at HCHC was pleased to host nearly forty representatives from various Jewish and Christian denominations and organizations for a morning of discussion, reflection, and fellowship. This was the third official dialogue HEI welcomed to campus this semester and the first of an interfaith character.
After an opening presentation from Rabbi David Saperstein on the extent of domestic political polarization and its impact on the interreligious landscape, the dialogue broached the urgent matter at hand: the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Israel and its regional and global repercussions. There was a general sense conveyed by the speakers that the compounding tragedies within Israel are symptomatic of a deeper crisis of communication plaguing the modern world. When and if the violence ends, it will require more than a return to “10/6,” as many of them stressed. It will take a new vision of communion that emerges from the sometimes painful and always uncomfortable effort of self-reflection, self-critique, and self-sacrifice which is necessary to clear the path for interpersonal growth.
For those gathered, it was clear that even the language used to discuss the crisis requires further examination. Antisemitism, real and perceived, remains a major barrier to interfaith cooperation. It is an ugly instantiation of the general resurgence in hardened particularism we are witnessing across many social and political fronts today, stymying our ability to build bridges when the torrents of division swell between us. Genocide, another fraught term the speakers brushed up against, is more often wielded as a rhetorical cudgel than an objective categorization. At this point, one begins to wonder if it truly matters whether the accurate term for a type of killing is applied, if the killing itself will not seem to stop.
The unavoidable truth is that such terms have the power to enchant us to our realities. Their effective meaning is lost when the common context, the substantive world we share, is exchanged for the insular worlds of our own making; we end up talking about others but never with them. In moments such as these, how we use charged language can be a deciding factor between preventing further interpersonal estrangement and exacerbating it beyond the point of reconciliation. Images of crumbling hospitals and decimated churches provide a silent but powerful witness to the horrors that have already occurred in Israel. Yet the inexpressible and uncapturable reality of 20,000 dead children should strike directly at our shared humanity. The thought alone transcends the realm of polemics and particularities; it urges us unconditionally to collective mourning and repentance.
As people of faith, the speakers addressed the grave circumstances before them with inspired realism and critical hope. Referencing our shared scripture, the figure of Abraham emerged as a paradigm for making sense of the growing existential precarity we all seem to feel in these unstable times. In a particularly rousing speech delivered by Rabbi Noam Marans, our attention was drawn to the oscillation between self-sufficiency and powerlessness that has defined the Jewish historical experience. Without fully plumbing the spiritual depths of this insight, we were nevertheless challenged to examine its social dimensions, beginning with the notion of what it means to belong to God’s chosen people. Rabbi Marans noted that even mighty Abraham was forced to humble himself before his Hittite hosts to bury his beloved wife: “I am a sojourner and stranger among you. Give me therefore a burial place among you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight”—a request promptly granted him with great honor. He suggested the trouble for Jews today is that they feel alone in their struggle, and perhaps even desire to be left alone. Instead, the life of Abraham testifies to the importance of cultivating genuine and hospitable relations with our neighbors and denying the urge to turn inward, whether out of fear or a false sense of security. In Rabbi Maran’s own words, “The Jewish people have a particularness that serves a universal mission,” a unique gift and purpose bestowed upon them by God. For our purposes, a similar tension of self-transcendence manifests in the trajectory of any positive interfaith encounter: a grateful embrace of particularity; a willing recognition of fundamental self-insufficiency; and a joyful welcoming of others to be our “windows into the world”—a wonderful image provided by Fr. John Chryssavgis in his introductory remarks. The morning concluded with plan-making for a joint trip to the Holy Land in the imminent future. Somewhat fittingly, this forward-facing endeavor seemed to generate the widest diversity of opinion. Who and what to see, when and how to travel—the discussion of these details was imbued with a sense of the absurd. It was hard to ignore as an observer that as their plans were being laid before me, the people they hoped to meet and the sites they dreamed of seeing could be lost to the forces of destruction at any moment. That absurdity, the nagging suspicion that our faith in God has no resonance in the troubled world we see before us, has its antidote in a simple line of scripture: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” As Jews and Christians, we are supposed to recognize in our precarity not a curse or a damnation but an opportunity. Rather than despairing, we should be discerning; rather than complacent, we should be receptive and dynamic. While we may not know what tomorrow brings, today God allows us to discover His will, if only we embrace the discomfort and instability that accompany His presence in our midst.
Author: Benjamin Malian, First Year Master of Theological Studies (MTS), Hellenic College Holy Cross School of Theology