Remarks to the Presbyterian General Assembly

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Presbyterian Church USA extended an invitation for me to join you, on behalf of Judaism’s Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform movements. This invitation and the Jewish community’s positive response tells your community and mine that we share something important, something which is controversial in some circles – we both value inter-religious theological dialogue. Talking about God and faith goes beyond conversations about inter-group relations, what our Jewish tradition called mipnei darkei shalom,” to insure the smooth running of society” and also extends beyond common charitable and even social justice activities.

Our Jewish interest in inter-religious dialogue is of course, not about religious coercion or even seduction, nor a desire to engage in any form of religious syncretism. Nor are we today interested, as Jews and Christians were a generation or two ago, in creating a common American “Civic Religion.” We are currently part of a world that has dropped the melting pot in favor of a salad bowl.

Since the time of the Talmud more than 1,500 years ago, Jews have taught that the righteous of all nations have a place in the world to come (Talmud Sandredrin). This flows naturally from the prophetic insistence that Adonai is the God of all the earth, and from our prophets’ concern not just for Israel but for all peoples.

Again since rabbinic times, Jews have talked about the seven laws of Noah, imbedded in the book of Genesis, which form the basis of a religious code for non-Jews, who are not bound by the covenant of the 613 commandments of the Torah

Since the time of the great medieval scholars Moses Maimonides and Rabbi Menachem Meiri Jews have recognized that Christians and Muslims are not idolators but that their religions are a valid non-Jewish form of monotheism.

We have much in common: we hold a common belief in One God. We both believe in God’s insistence on righteous action, and we share a common reverence for Scripture, and place high importance and value on its study. Yet, we should not ignore that we have very different experiences, and that in some way there is a chasm between us.

In his classic book: Jewish-Christian Dialogue A Jewish Justification, David Novak writes: “No Christian no matter how well versed in Judaism can ever directly understand the covenantal intimacy of the Sabbath without first literally becoming a Jew. Similarly, no Jew, no matter how well versed in Christianity, can ever directly understand the covenantal intimacy of the Eucharist without first literally becoming Christian. These areas of covenantal intimacy lie too far within for them to be jointly perceived by Jews and Christians who share a border.” Or perhaps better expressed in language closer to the experience of our current conference: As a Jew it is difficult for me to fully appreciate the emotional meaning of Jesus to you, my Presbyterian neighbors, yet it is obvious to me that Jesus is very precious to you. And as Christians, it has been difficult for you, my Presbyterian neighbors, to fully appreciate the emotional significance of my ties to the land of Israel, the place of my people’s birth, the direction to which I face in prayer, the land to which Jews have been attached through all the generations and upon which they have lived continuously through all the years of foreign domination ( except during the Crusades) , the homeland and religious center of my people, a place to which I make pilgrimage regularly and where people I love and care about live their day to day lives.. Just as the experience of God is in some ways ineffable, so too is the experience of our own particular faith tradition.

Why then meet and talk, why have dialogue and discussion?

I believe that we each have something to offer the other, particularly in the current situation in which we live. What is the current situation? I don’t think I am telling tales out of school when I state that we in the United States no longer live in a Christian society.

I remember when I first discovered that one of our fourth graders was missing Sunday school for hockey practice. But it’s Sunday morning, I said to his dad. How can he have hockey practice on Sunday morning? That’s when it’s scheduled, the father explained.

Where are our churches when we need them? For the first fifteen years of my rabbinate Sunday mornings were safe for religious education. That is no longer the case.

Perhaps what Judaism has to offer Christianity is a discussion of something Jews have long dealt with: ‘ how a minority community survives within a larger society and the culture of an alien religion, one at best unsympathetic and at worst hostile.” Today, Christianity finds itself set within an alien religion —it is of course not Judaism, but secularism. Christians are experiencing what American Jews know in all but the largest centers of Jewish population, that is, that one cannot become a Christian by osmosis and that the religious community needs to be extremely intentional in providing opportunities for instruction not only for children but for adults as well.

The experience of Judaism in the Diaspora can offer some perspective on Christianity’s new situation. And so too do the challenges which Judaism has experienced since the onset of modernity, and which continue to challenge us today. As we left the shtetl’s, the small intimate Jewish communities of the past, and came out of the ghetto, we gained much in terms of freedom and opportunity, but we also lost some things. We lost the comforts found in homogeneous community observance and the ability to live within one’s faith in an automatic, take it for granted way, with full cultural support.

Rabbi Chayim of Tsanz used to tell this parable. A man wandering lost in the forest for several days, finally encountered another. He called out: Brother, show me the way out of this forest. The man replied, Brother I too am lost. I can only tell you this, the ways I have tried do not lead me where I want to go. Take my hand and let us search for the way together.

Let us search, Jews and Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, for the way through the forests of modernity and post modernity together.