Who We Are  |  Calendar of Events  |  Publications  |  History and Mission  |  Scholar in Residence  |  Bibliodrama  |  Jewish-Christian Relations | Links

Your program planners asked me to focus not so much on the past but rather to turn to the future, note if you will, the title of my lecture: "Facing the Future." That assignment daunts me a bit, for I am loath to prognosticate, to speak about what is likely to happen, ever mindful of the Chinese proverb which holds that "to Prophesy is exceedingly difficult, especially with respect to the future." Yesterday's forecasts invariably are mocked by today's events, and there simply is no telling what shape the morrow will bring.

Moreover, there is a noise beyond the walls of this room, beyond the holy halls of this magnificent sanctuary, that makes talk of the future even more difficult. I speak of a noisy present -- the roaring of a world that is in a state of vast historical change, a world in which opportunity and peril have become near synonymous. It is a world reverberating with the crash of communism, the crumbling of the secular religion of Marxism. It is a world in which the forthrightly preaching of the Jewish prophets -- yes, and of the sermon on the mount -- have found renewed relevance greater by far than the most persuasive "isms" of the past century.

Rabbi Schindler at Temple Israel in Minneapolis

I speak now of the search for a solution to such questions as: Wither our planet? What can we do about global warming?

These very issues bring us face to face with questions of personal responsibility and communal responsibility and how we should live in relation to God's creation. They touch on the very core of our respective religious traditions. They are the very questions that demand our joint response. And over the past several decades, we have demonstrated our ability to speak with one voice and to act in concert on such issues.

I never cease to wonder at the transformation that our respective communities have undergone in their relationship one to another: erstwhile foes become trusted co-workers, indifference and suspicion replaced by mutual respect, and all this in less than a generation, more progress in twenty-five years than in the two and a half millennia before!

In many ways, these changes are a tribute to the best values of that blessed land in which we live. Interreligious dialogue has flourished here as nowhere else. That is due, no doubt, to that pluralism to which America is so passionately devoted; 'e pluribus unum ... out of many, one" ... our nation's proudest motto.

To be sure now, the ideal and the real do not always coincide in this sphere as in any other: all groups have their share of those who disdain the dialogue who would rather revile and scorn and hate. But since World War II, the gap between the grasp and the reach has been substantially narrowed. The United States has become a genuinely multi-ethnic, multi-religious and increasingly multi-racial society. I mean, where else but in America can you hear a Salvation Army Band play Hava Nagila!

The effectiveness of our dialogue is due to something more than a receptive environment. It is due, in the first instance, to our willingness to be honest with ourselves, to engage in what Jewish tradition calls a chesban hanefesh, a self-reckoning of the soul.

The great Chassidic master, Rabbi Bunam, taught:

Our wise men say, 'Seek peace in your place.' That is to say, that you cannot seek peace elsewhere than within yourself, and only when you have found it there, can you seek peace in the rest of the world.

Rabbi Bunam was right. Every journey to our fellow men and women is first a journey inward into the depths of our own being.

We made this painful inward journey, each of us. Somehow, we mustered the strength to do so, to confront our past and present imperfections, to wrestle with the demons in our own soul, and because we did, we were able to reach out to each other and face the future together.

Jews no longer see a Torquemada or a marauding Crusader lurking behind every Christian. And Christians, following the revised theologies of their churches, no longer hold Jews to be the minions of Satin; they do not accuse them of deicide, nor do they insist that by rejecting Jesus they have forever forfeited the grace of God.

The efforts of Catholics and Protestants toward Jewish self-understanding are reflected in the many documents of different churches that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Who, for instance, would have predicted that the anti-Jewish teachings of Martin Luther would be repudiated by the very religious community which bears his name. "We reject Luther's violent invective against the Jews," declared the Lutheran World Federation and the LCA "and we express deep and abiding sorrow over its tragic effect on subsequent generations."

Such scrupulous self-judgment is astonishing. It took guts to render it, and it inspired the kind of trust that makes for a sincere and sustained dialogue.

The Vatican's most recent statement, "Reflections on the Shoah," issued but two months ago, renders a scathing censure of anti-Semitism. It stresses its evil consequences and urges that the "awareness of past sins be turned into a resolve to build a new future of mutual respect."

Its treatment of the Holocaust, however, disappointed some Jews in that it sidesteps the religious roots of anti-Semitism and blames its fearsome consequences not on the prior teachings and actions of the church, but rather on the anti-Jewish prejudices "imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts." It lacks the unequivocal acknowledgment of responsibility contained in the statement of the French Bishops, who decried the silence of their own clergy when Jews were herded into the death camps. Nor did it concede, as did the Bishops of the Netherlands in their declaration, that "a tradition of theological and ecclesiastical anti-Judaism contributed to the climate in which the Shoah could take place."

I, myself, am not so disappointed by this most recent document emanating from the curia in Rome, possibly because my own expectations were not as high as were those of some of my colleagues, who joined our mission to Castel Gondolfo back in 1987 when a Vatican Statement on the Shoah was first explored. Some hoped for at least a sorrowful condemnation of Pope Pius XII lamenting his deafening silence during those fearsome forties. But it was unrealistic to expect a Vatican document to criticize a recent Pope, all the more so when moves toward his beatification are presently afoot.

Nor do I find this document insufficient in its contrition. After all, it reiterated Pope John Paul's own 1990 call for "t'shuva." Yes, he used that very Hebrew word "t' shuva" in his solemn summons for repentance, beseeching all Christians to ask God's forgiveness for Christian culpability -- as perpetrators and bystanders during the Holocaust. What more could be asked? What more could be expected?

At any rate, this is not the final Vatican word on the subject. Others will surely follow even as several others preceded it, back to Nostra Aetate which, marginally noted, also received mixed reviews when it was first propounded -- but is now universally acclaimed as a seminal, ground-breaking document.

The normalization of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel further substantiates the sea-change in Jewish-Christian relations these past twenty-five years. There can be no gainsaying it: the sword and the rack no longer are the church's primary sculpting tools, as they were in the middle ages. They have been shelved, hopefully forever, to be replaced by the moral power of faith and of prayer and of the creative force of words. It all began when our respective communities mustered the strength to confront our own past and present imperfection before we went out to confront each other in dialogue.

The effectiveness of our dialogue is due not to the fact that we were honest with ourselves, but also, and above all, because we have learned to be honest with one another. We do not mince words or feed each other pabulum. We do not say only what we think will please the other to hear, but always the truth as we perceive it. And because this is so, we have been able to withstand the several shocks to Christian-Jewish relations during the past few years: such as, say, the ugliness of the Carmelite convent controversy, or the trespasses by Jewish fundamentalists in Israel against Orthodox Christian properties and people.

Rabbi Alexander Schindler, Rabbi Barry Cytron,
Rabbi Max A. Shapiro, Msgr. Terrence J. Murphy,
Br. Deitrich Reinhart, O.S.B., and
Abbott Timothy Kelly, O.S.B.

It is in this spirit that I would like to make some brief comment concerning Israel and its role in the Middle East, for its policies continue to be a source of some tension between our communities.

On this matter of our disquietude concerning Israel's security, we are of course fully aware of its vigorous strength and indeed, we are exceedingly proud, and have a right to be, of all that the modern Jewish state has accomplished in the now fifty short years of its national being: the prodigious achievements of construction, agriculture, and industry; the miraculous regeneration and relocation of our people from all around the world; the creation of a democratic oasis in a harsh landscape of dictatorships and fundamentalism; the weaving of a whole Jewish tapestry from countless threads of language and culture; all of this in the face of continuing warfare and external threat, all of this in a political wilderness, and all of this at a dizzying pace.

Still, we fear for Israel's safety ... for we know that Israel is a feisty democracy, that open debate rages in that free land and nowhere else in the Middle East, that it is surrounded by some 21 Arab nations with a combined population exceeding hundreds of millions where debate is repressed and where few voices echoing Israel's yearning for peace are heard, thus failing to nurture the trust of the Israelis, and to help them overcome their deep sense of vulnerability.

It is a sense of vulnerability which I myself feel, let it be confessed, for I experience myself at this podium as a senior leader of a multi-million member religious community, less as a secure citizen of our powerful United States, and more as a German Jewish refugee from Hitlerism, a Jewish survivor on the banks of that long river of European anti-Semitism, to which Christian Churches constituted the major tributary.

After all, the Shoah did not happen in a wilderness, amongst primitive peoples, but in the heart and center of European and Christian civilization. And the slaughter was engineered by leaders of a nation that stood in the van of progress, whose universities were Mecca for seekers after truth, whose poets were world figures, and the symphonies of whose composers are still played wherever orchestras assemble. I studied at these universities, I valued that poetry, I thrilled to that music -- but then came that whirlwind of destruction which pulverized my people, among them many I knew and loved. And so I see in myself how personal and communal vulnerability remain paramount in the Jewish psyche, and on a level that most of our Christian allies cannot comprehend, and because they don't, the depth and concreteness of Jewish devotion to the State of Israel remains a mystery to them.

To be sure, now, there is a difference between perception and reality. Thus I fully recognize the disparity between my feelings of personal vulnerability as a Jew, and my knowledge of the actual -- if not tenuous -- historical empowerment that Jews have experienced during the past five decades. No longer are we the meek of the earth, as we were for a millennia. Having survived the Nazi genocide, we have now, in the State of Israel, gained a degree of secular power, power enough, we pray, to prevent our "meekness" from ever again leading to victimization; power as well to test the conscience of the Jewish people and to test our mettle as peacemakers. And this is precisely why I have made it my task as a religious leader, to help heal the Jewish psyche and to prod the Jewish people to meet the challenges of peacemaking.

Those challenges, I might add, have been greatly complicated by the fact that so many of the critical statements including those that emanate from Christian church groups focus almost exclusively on Israel's sins of commissions and omissions, whilst the Arab failings on this subject are overlooked. Nary a word about the fact that the ruler of the emerging Palestinian State is corrupt and brutal, that Arafat loudly arrests militants in the morning and then quietly releases them in the afternoon, that he denounces violence in speeches to the West even while lauding Jihad, Holy War, for domestic consumption. Arafat's comment on one such occasion, that those who refuse to accept Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian State "can go drink the seawater" was a chilling reminder of his pre-Oslo pronouncements exhorting his minions to drive all Israelis into the Mediterranean. Indeed, he has not yet amended the inter-Arab charter which calls for the destruction of the entire Jewish State ... but all this rarely finds its way into critiques of Arab-Israeli relations.

How facile, also, the analysis that the heart of the Middle Eastern problem is the plight of the Palestinians. Solve that and all else will fall into place. What a naive conception this is! Even if modern Israel had never been created, re-emerging in history out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Iran and Iraq would have slaughtered each other, Arab fratricide would have cannibalized Lebanon, Syria would have butchered Christians and turned their artillery on Palestinian refugee camps there as they did, and Iraq would still be seeking to devour its neighbors.

Jewish vulnerability is likewise at its height in Eastern Europe, where the dissolution of totalitarian "order" has brought forth among its fruits, the bitter grapes of resurgent anti-Semitism. Where are these masses of Russian Jews to go if not to Israel? All other ports are virtually closed to them, America limits Eastern European immigration, both Jewish and non-Jewish to 40,000 immigrants a year.

This is not to say that Israel is above reproach ... it clearly is not. Much has happened there that is sobering: ethnic and religious tensions have dangerously heightened; there has been a devaluation of values among Israelis, more materialistic, more like the values of the rest of the world; and the reality of conquest has functioned like a chronic disease draining vital resources, most especially the precious resource of morale.

We Jews know all of this, are painfully aware of it. The Israelis know this too. There are qualms and there are doubts and many self-accusing lines that can be and are spoken.

This does not place Israel above the critical judgment of others. We Jews will have to learn that non-Jews, and that includes Christian clergy, have the same right to criticize Israel as we do, and that to automatically equate their criticism with anti-Semitism is religious McCarthyism. But there is a greater need for balance, and I implore the Christian Churches, not to vent all of their moral indignation against Israel at a time when its actual and psychological vulnerability clearly remains at its height. The failure to do so buttresses, in Jewish eyes, the ongoing Arab effort to deligitimize the Jewish State, to wipe its name off the maps, and off our lips, and eventually off the historical record altogether.

Now I am reconciled to the fact that we will never fully see eye to eye on this issue. Nor is this the sole contemporary matter to cause tension between our communities -- and others will surely arise. Nonetheless, we will be able to pursue our common agenda if we continue to be forthright with one another, if we will listen to each other not just with the hearing of the ear, but also, and above all, with a hearing of the heart.

To be honest with ourselves, and to be honest with each other, these are the necessary ingredients of a successful dialogue. But there is a third, and it is this: that we work together on issues of common concern, our divergence's to the contrary notwithstanding.

In our search for allies, none of us requires, and we Jews certainly do not look for, ideological congruence, for a full agreement on each and every doctrinal or even socio-economic issue before we join forces. We Jews can, for example, disagree with the Roman Catholic Bishops on abortion and birth control but still work with them full heartedly on such burning issues as nuclear disarmament and economic justice. We can disagree with many of our Protestant colleagues on matters affecting the Middle East but still join them in the quest to achieve racial harmony and to overcome world hunger. Indeed, we Jews are determined to join with them and anyone else to amplify and pursue these issues with all the resources at our command.

Here we are, with medical technology and savvy that brings the ailing to our hospitals from all over the world yet fully one-third of our own people are without medical insurance without the ability to receive care from the hospital and medical professionals of their choice.

Rabbi Max Shapiro, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, and Sr.
M. Christine Athans, B.V.M., preceding the program at Temple Israel.

Here we are, built to the pinnacle of power and substance by the joined labors of countless immigrants and yet without the morally committed leadership who could lead us beyond the racism and bigotry that disturb the American dream.

As citizens of the world, moreover, the American record is worse than negligent. We participate unthinkingly or callously in what Father Theodore Hesburg calls our "Systemic Geographical Discrimination." Our population, comprising less than 5% of the world population, consumes 25% of its daily calories and energy. Our children confront the frightening prospect of a glutted market for college graduates, even Ph.D.'s, while Southeast Asian children too often never step foot in a school room. Our people are overfed and overweight, but in South America systemic malnutrition is causing mental retardation on a wholesale scale across a generation of newborns.

We are only the 11th among the developed countries in per capita giving of foreign aid, and apart from military aid, we are dead last. And then we look with pity and despair upon swollen bellies, the shrunken limbs, the hopeless poverty, and the senseless violence -- look with pity and despair, rather than with a sense of deep personal responsibility and t'shuva, with soul-felt repentance.

Yes, consider our demeanor as a nation. And consider also, if you will, how we live in relation to the world, to this planet earth, how we take God's handiwork and despoil it: the sweet air God gave us to breathe, the fresh water with which God blesses us, and the fertile green which delights the eye. Instead of acknowledging and making proper use of all these gifts, we poison them, "we tear apart the ozone, we carbonize the oxygen, we acidify the refreshing rain."

No, it isn't carelessness or callousness which makes us do all this! It is greed, that corrosive materialism of our time which we too must join hands to counter!

The depletion of the rainforests and the daily extinction of still another species is not a function of the "human condition." It is the work of a specific peasant forced to slash and burn for want of his own land. It is the work of a specific cattle rancher selling meat to the "chains," those "fast food" spots, that burgeon when a culture becomes too insanely pressured to take pause for a blessing before the meal.

The Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, or the radioactive disaster zone of Hanford, Washington, or the proliferation of every form of cancer in our society, are not the price of "progress." They are not the price of profit, the price of corporate thinking about human values, the price of a materialism so corrosive that it can rupture an oil tanker's hull or a nuclear reactor's containment vessel.

Such so-called "political" or "economic" matters are religious in their essence -- and in their solution. The dichotomy between the "secular" and the "religious," between "activism" and "commandment," is diminishing to the point of irrelevance in our world.

We in the religious community should stand together at the forefront of the struggle to integrate politics and the spirit as we turn this century.

It is true, is it not, that Judaism and Christianity are oblique paths that join us not only in the past, but in the future. The arrival of a Redeemer is central to the vision of both faiths, and the preparation of the human race to be worthy of that arrival -- to herald it with our works of love -- is central to our respective undertakings.

Rabbi Jochanan ben Zaccai, the savior of Judaism at the time of the rebellion against Rome, put this matter well:

"If you hold a seedling in your hand and you hear the people shout, 'The Messiah has come,' you must plant the seedling first and then come out to greet the Messiah."

In a somewhat like vein, the Great Midrash declares:

"All the calculated dates of redemption have passed, and now the matter depends upon repentance and good deeds."

 
Rabbi Alexander Schindler and Monsignor Terrence
Murphy conversing at dinner preceding the program.