Whither - or Wither - JewishChristian Relations?

The celebrations are just a memor y now. The Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) spent 2012 marking its 70th anniversary. It was — and is — rightly proud that it is the oldest national interfaith organisation, formed in 1942 by Archbishop William Temple and Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz. That their vision took concrete form in precisely 1942 is a measure of how the organisation has always been on the side of radical hope. In the middle of war and industrial-genocidal hatred, they insisted that another world is possible. Such hope is as needed in 2013. CCJ is now examining with deep seriousness where the dialogue is, and where true reconciliation might be found.

As always, it depends where you look. CCJ’s work, generation by generation, of interpreting each faith to the other, goes on. The formal dialogue itself has reached a stage of maturity. Some look back at the Second Vatican Council’s declaration, Nostra Aetate, and find it old-hat and over-cautious. More exciting may be the first serious attempt at a Jewish response (a controversial one, of course), known as Dabru Emet (Speak the Tr uth). CCJ also has its own group for the Theology of the Dialogical Encounter. Here, eight Jews and eight Christians have committed themselves to dialogue and theological analysis for three years. Gone are the days when the only realistic topics for discussion were Jewish festivals and Christian guilt!

Yet CCJ’s hope is very different from naive optimism. In our days the mood-music around the dialogue has shifted to a minor key. To be candid, those most heavily involved have seen and see deterioration. The Jewish community reports an increase in anti-Semitic activity. (The Community Security Tr ust recorded 586 attacks in 2011, the fourth highest on record.) We can see a new strong threefold cord: racial anti-Semitism can combine with the Churches’ historic anti-Judaism, and increasingly with atavistic feelings about the State of Israel. (The attacks do correlate to Israel’s prominence in the news.)

In this country, at least until recently, it has looked as if Jewish-Christian relations will be dominated utterly by the web of concerns that come under the heading ‘Israel-Palestine’. It is a many-sided conflict. No party should be prevented from speaking with passion, but all sides need to listen with the same intensity. There is no monolithic ‘Jewish view’ on it all, any more than there is a Christian one. However, there are sensibilities that are shared by many Jews, whatever their politics. They call for empathy.

The fact is that historically Christians have often gloried in Jewish powerlessness. They have interpreted it theologically as a sign of God’s punishment. So, when the contemporary situation is set up as an ill-willed JewishIsraeli polity surrounded by good or neutral forces, this resonates. It can look like the scales are unequal: while all other peoples can more or less be trusted with that ambiguous and messy thing – power - Jews must pass a test of moral perfection or be judged to have failed.

Again, when others call for the ‘illegal Zionist entity’ to be pushed into the Mediterranean sea, this cannot be domesticated as merely forceful rhetoric. How can this not be heard as deadly serious and life-threatening to Jews who have experienced in their own families the reality of genocide? The devils are in the details of our debates. But if ever we – all of us - needed to move away from a binar y model of blame, it is here.

Alas, there are reasons to expect additional tensions ahead for our domestic dialogue. Most obvious are the legal challenges in parts of Europe, both to shechitah (Jewish supervised animal slaughter) and to brit millah (male circumcision). Again, a threefold cord might be discerned.

First comes the set of age-old claims about the alleged cruelty of the practices. These are a hugely involved questions, but not ones the Jewish authorities shy away from.

Second is Western Europe’s sense that normal religion is something like liberal Protestantism: it concerns doctrines, which are abstract and at least sometimes optional, and ethics, which are broad-brush only.

Third comes the ethos of ideological secularism, which sees the autonomy of the individual (constantly free to reinvent one’s identity) as the only common or public virtue. But – and this cannot be stressed enough – Judaism just does not start there. Mainstream Judaism is about what you do, inheriting as you do your responsibility to the Jewish people and to God. You are a creature before you are a consumer. At this level of generality, many Christians might feel the same. But we still struggle to understand that it really does affect, often in great detail, everything you eat, how you rest, and, yes, your sex life.

The Council of Christians and Jews is heartened by all it has achieved. It is also blunt enough to report back to the Christians: must try harder. Or, to put it positively, let us renew our commitment to Jewish-Christian dialogue in all its complexities, and pray that it be, in the words of the Mishnah, ‘a controversy for the sake of heaven’ (Avot 5:20). The Rev Patrick Morrow is Programme Manager at the Council of Christians and Jews and an Anglican priest in the

Diocese of Southwark