Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice by David Ellenson

Author:David Ellenson [Ellenson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL040000 Religion / Judaism / General
ISBN: 9780827611832
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

When persons will not speak with the other, a dehumanization of the other easily arises and a demonization results. As a committed Jew, not only the past history of Jewish-Christian relations but recent events like the slaughter of Muslims engaged in prayer in Hebron in 1994 and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 all too painfully remind me of the tragedy that can ensue when the path of dialogue is not taken.

Colloquia and meetings like the one analyzed in this paper are more than exercises in which the identity of all those who participate is both strengthened and reformulated in the meeting with the other. They also embody additional moral and religious dimensions. By confronting the other in his or her full integrity as a person embedded in tradition, we—as persons informed by and conscious of the imperatives of the modern world—are each reminded of the ineffability of God and of the mystery and infinity that lie at the heart of religion and culture, history and memory. Our traditions and our symbols as well as our rituals—constructed and mediated as we are aware they are through human agency—are fragile and tentative gropings for the reality of the divine whose presence they purport to represent in the world. They are all penultimate. They point toward, but do not fully contain, the Divine, Whose plenitude is beyond all words and rituals. The Colloquium and the setting of interreligious learning it fostered teach us a great deal about how religious identity is constructed and transformed. More importantly, it testifies that members of each tradition can learn from one another even as the uniqueness of each community’s own memory and identity are asserted and affirmed.

The enterprise of interreligious learning, so assessed, reflects more than the social dynamics involved in the process of forging a particular community’s sense of religious identity. It also contributes to the creation of an atmosphere of mutual respect between former rivals who were all too often actual foes. Interreligious learning, carried out in the manner of the Catholic-Jewish Colloquium, permits its participants to forge a new sense of religious identity. It allows the Jew to assert, as Eugene Borowitz did in Contemporary Christologies over a decade ago, “To be sure, I see a substantial difference between my faith and that of the [Christian] theologians I have studied here, but I cannot say that their wisdom is only ‘human wisdom.’ They know a great deal about the God of my people and their knowledge has consequences for their lives [as well as my own] in ways . . . which are recognizably directed to God’s service” (Borowitz 1980, 190).

Note

1. “The Dynamics of Interreligious Learning” in Religious Education 91 (Fall 1996): 420–66.

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