Holocaust itself.
The first shock to the system that alerted me to the fact that I might not have a full grasp of all the angles involved in the Church’s theological and ethical relation to the Jewish neighbor came at an international conference on European Studies, held in The Netherlands, in a session on the philosophical and theological dimensions and consequences of the Holocaust. I presented a paper critiquing the ethical viability of Barth’s Christian theological assumptions. My critique was based on and in agreement with Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim’s critique of Barth in light of the Holocaust as unique and incomprehensible rupture of historical experience. I was, of course, expecting some possible heat from Christian theologians at the table; I was also expecting pats on the back all around from the Jews in the room. However, the heat came—white hot—from a Jewish woman auditing the session. She expressed her anger and contempt at my taking Emil Fackenheim (who was, from my Christian perspective, expressive of the voice of the Jewish other and of Jewish suffering) seriously as in any way authoritative for Jewish thinking, experience, and identity.
I was rendered, if not speechless, then stammering. In my mind, I was turning, with the argument of my paper, on my own tradition in solidarity with the authoritative voice of the other, the Jewish neighbor, which said tradition had and has unjustly victimized. And here, in doing so, I had apparently done an injustice to and made an enemy of a Jewish neighbor—violently denigrating her sense of integrity and identity.
Constructing an ethically viable remedy for Christian faith and theology in relation to the Jewish neighbor would not appear to be a simple matter. Which Jewish neighbor? And who gets to decide?
The challenge of this experience was confirmed a year later when I was lucky enough to spend a year studying modern Jewish history and religion, including the Holocaust, at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. The opportunity to study Judaism and modern Jewish history and identity within a Jewish Studies context introduced me more fully to the contested multiplicity of Judaisms and Jewish identities, and not simply in the abstractions of academic study, but in the context of concrete relationships. I again encountered, and was able to further pursue, strong Jewish resistance to the equally strong Jewish arguments for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, both as a matter of historiography and in terms of its challenge to religious tradition and faith. In addition, I became more acquainted with the internal tensions between various forms of religious Jewish identity, and between religious and secular Jewish identity.
A growing appreciation for the varying possibilities of Jewish identity as such (religious and non-religious), and of Jewish religious identity and faith in particular, began to greatly complicate my attempts to find points of contact and draw easy parallels with Christian tradition and experience. I remember well the wonderful evening spent in an instructor’s home, celebrating the Passover meal. The gracious hospitality, robust enjoyment of the delicious (and endless) food and wine, the singing and lighthearted sense of humor, the sense of fun and mischief for the children, all made a great and lasting impression. But no one made a greater impression than a friend of our host, who, over the course of the evening, generously attempted to explain his relation to his Orthodox Jewish identity to his curious Christian neighbor at the table.
In my Christian skin, I had assumed an Orthodox religious identity meant a firm belief in traditional religious doctrines and the sacred scriptures upon which they were based. Thus, I did not quite know what to make of my neighbor at the table describing his dissatisfaction with the Reform synagogue he had recently attended. He was put off by the sermon’s emphasis on intent spiritual reflection and piety. He felt imposed upon by the effort of concentration on the liturgical and scriptural proceedings that such reflection and piety apparently demanded. By contrast, at his own Orthodox synagogue, according to his description, no one pays much attention to the readings and recitations going on up front, leaving one the freedom to catch up on the news of the week with your neighbors. When I noted, a bit confused, that he had mentioned earlier the importance of the biblical story for Jewish identity, he looked at me and smiled. The biblical story was indeed central to the history of the Jewish people and so to the traditional goings-on in the synagogue and therefore to his identity as a Jew. But make no mistake, he cautioned. It was, for all that, “a cracking good yarn.” His Jewish religious identity was not a matter of belief, as I, as a Christian, understood this term, but of observance.
Needless to say, my Christian categories were scrambling for a toe-hold. How to discern what is necessary for a theological transformation of Christian faith and belief in response to a Jewish religious self-understanding that does not require, and so does not include, elements of confessional faith and belief in the sense traditionally central to Christian identity and ecclesial community? There is no value judgment to be made here; only an acknowledgement of genuine incommensurability.
These difficulties—the internal tensions and contested multiplicity of Jewish identity; the incommensurability between Jewish and Christian understandings of religious identity and faith—confronted and seemed to unravel the transforming remedy I had appropriated for Christian faith in response to the Jewish—or any religious—neighbor: to leave room for the self-understanding and self-definition of the “religious other.” Again, which—or whose—Jewish self-understanding and self-definition?
And, what if the religious self-understanding and self-definition of the “religious other” entails its own demonizing of the other other—of, for example, either the other Jewish other or the non-Jewish other? (And this predicament holds for the Muslim neighbor, the Buddhist, for every so-called “religious other.”) The ethical mandate under which I had been laboring, to leave room for the religious other, seemed to assume a shared ethical core—or sameness—to the “religious” generally understood; we can and should let the other define themselves religiously precisely because it is assumed that such a religious self-definition would or should be inherently ethical in a way that we can recognize and therefore affirm. When the above question is raised—that is, if the self-understanding of the religious other is discovered to express itself in opinion or behavior we find ethically questionable or abhorrent—the answer I found myself giving (and hearing) was that we must then, of course, be willing to engage that neighbor critically with regard to such opinion and behavior. But, I began to ask myself, what assumption does this response entail? Is it not, either that the “religious other” has a non-viable religious self-understanding after all, or that they are simply mistaken as to how their religious self-understanding is related to—is to be related to—the ethical? And this, according to whom? To whose criteria? To whose self-understanding? Ours? You see the problem.
The move to leave room for the religious other seems to come with certain ethical qualifications and criteria required for what that “otherness” could and should entail. In other words, we are willing to leave room for the religious otherness of the neighbor, but not for the ethical otherness of that neighbor. In the latter case, the ethical mandate is precisely not to leave room. Or put differently, religious difference is only tolerable on the basis of shared, common—the same—cultural assumptions with regard to the proper relation of particular religious identity and faith to the ethical.
This was brought home to me quite recently while screening a film to a class of seminary students studying the world religions. The film brought together representatives of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, representatives at various levels of religious and academic leadership. These representatives had no trouble agreeing that the major religions have more fundamental issues in common than they have things that separate them, and therefore each can and should happily affirm the others as legitimate pathways to that which is ultimate. As compelling and inspirational as I found their testimonials to be, what I found more interesting was the rather conspicuous fact that all the various representatives, including those of non-Anglo-European descent, had flourished and/or were flourishing within the higher levels of the educational systems of the West. Equally conspicuous was the absence of representatives raised and educated in religious institutions that intentionally exist outside the reach of those systems in the conviction that their distinctive religious faiths are not reducible to and subsumable
