Instead of aspiring to turn Christians into Jews and to triumph in a religious disputation, it would be better for Judaism to reconcile with and respect the religions that human civilization has created.
Whereas Christian discourse aims at conciliation, Orthodox Jewish discourse responded to Christianity with growing hostility, which predated the Second Vatican Council and deepened thereafter. An unconscious affinity with Christian patterns of thought is also discernible in the conception of the Diaspora Jew who is homeless and therefore universal. The disconnect from the practicalities of political life made him an alienated, abstract being, in the same way that Christianity preferred to abstain from material life, the biblical commandments and sexuality, and became a religion of spirituality itself.
The religious-messianic approach of these advocates also lent a new dimension to the old dispute between Christianity and Judaism about the prophecies of redemption and solace uttered by the Hebrew Prophets. Jewish thought in the Middle Ages considered them a promise of the future to come.
Now the future had become reality. Yet one could wonder: If the prophecies of the destruction of the First Temple successfully predict the razing of Jerusalem that occurred proximate to their time, and if the solace prophecies were able to foresee events that took place 2, years later — why did no prophet foresee the destruction of the Second Temple? And what about the long exile of the Jews, which lasted 2,, not 70, years, or the Shoah, the most terrible disaster that ever befell the Jewish people — why were they not foreseen by the prophets who peered into the remote future?
Every unbiased reader of the prophecies of consolation understands that they refer to the return to Zion after the one and only event of destruction in B. But faith and naivete are often intertwined. A second reflection evoked by the book relates to its almost exclusive occupation with rabbis. But hostility to Christianity is found among Orthodox intellectuals as well. Flusser had expressed his satisfaction that Eichmann was unwilling to take the oath on a copy of the New Testament in court.
At the conclusion of a class at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in , during which I quoted passages from the New Testament, a student approached me and asked whether I would be citing more quotes in future classes.
I told her that I would give her two answers. The first: yes. The second: In all the 2, pages of the Babylonian Talmud, there is only one quotation from a non-Jewish book, namely from the New Testament Babylonian Talmud Tractate Shabbat a-b.
What is allowed to the Talmud is allowed also to a talmid pupil. She never showed up in my classes again. This suggests that the dialogue between the two religions is only in its infancy, because Judaism is not the religion of the Bible but the religion of the Talmud, the rabbinical literature, the kabbala and prayer.
Christian theology is still conducting a dialogue with itself — not yet with the Judaism that existed parallel to it. Against this background, the pioneering academic research on both sides stands out favorably. Over the last generation, Jewish and Christian scholars in academia have shown great interest in parallel developments in both religions even after their paths separated.
Dozens of books and hundreds of articles published during recent decades have been devoted to addressing the intimate and complex relations between Judaism and Christianity throughout history. Thanks to the empathy the author shows toward her subject, the final product is not only an illuminating research study but also an intellectual, cultural and political challenge.
This is an important book for Jews, separately, and for Christians, separately, and also for anyone for whom the Jewish-Christian story is an important element in defining his or her identity. The story of Adam and Eve is a minor theme. There is no grand narrative in the Hebrew Bible, certainly not one that would culminate in the coming of Jesus, but more a collection of individual stories, sayings and teachings that together constitute a tissue of instructions on how to live a good life as a Jew.
The prophetic books do not come last so as to lead into the New Testament, but follow the Torah the books of Moses as commentary on it. The Bible is so variegated that it can support both these and, probably, many other ways of reading it, while mandating none. The Christian and the Jewish readings of the Hebrew Bible are both driven by forces external to the actual text. For Christians, the writings of Paul, part of the New Testament, are one such major influence. He initiated the reading of the Hebrew Bible in terms of a universal human disaster, followed by a rescue mission focused in Jesus.
This interpretation then became standard in the Church throughout the early centuries, and has remained so to this day. For Jews, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE—an event that forced a reorientation of the way the religion was observed—the rabbinic tradition increasingly saw the Bible as a closed corpus that could be used as a guide for living in the present, rather than as orientated to the future of the world.
Mainstream Judaism has continued to read the text as torah —guidance for living a Jewish life—though there have been, and are, groups that still look for a coming divine intervention in world affairs. We could portray the relation of the Bible and the faiths that claim it as their basis by a diagram of intersecting circles. Both Judaism and Christianity overlap significantly with their Bibles, and are not thinkable without them. Yet from the Bible one could not read off either faith as we in fact encounter them.
Nor could one predict the contents of the Bible from either faith. All would then be resurrected. The fortunate few would receive eternal happiness, but the wicked majority would be cast into the eternal fires of hell. So too, with the God of Muhammad. At the end of the world, God would act as a God of justice. God would then reward or punish each person in the gardens of paradise or the fires of hell according to their deeds.
Each would be presented with a record of his deeds — in the right hand for those to be saved, in the left for those to be damned to the fires of hell. For those who were saved, the delights of paradise awaited.
Those who died in the cause of Allah, however, did not need to wait for the Last Judgment. They would go straight to heaven. Further reading: Paris attacks — why Islam and Christianity are twin religions of war and peace. Like the God of Moses, Allah was a lawmaker.
The Quran provided often varied guidance to the believing community in matters of marriage and family law, women, inheritance, food and drink, worship and purity, warfare, punishments for adultery and false accusations of adultery, alcohol and theft. In short, it provided the foundation of what was later to be much elaborated in sharia law. Muslims, Christians and Jews do all worship the same complex God. Yet, in spite of this, all believe that their religion contains the full and final revelation of the same God.
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