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1999 - online version
A CATHOLIC VIEWS ZIONISM |
| Part I - Part II - Part III by Rev. Thomas F. Stransky, Paulist Rector of Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies, Jerusalem. In the Holy Land, local Christians are aware of this Jewish crisis at the crossroads, and the outcome will effect their own present and future. Images dominate, not always supported by objective and nuanced descriptions. Here is the image which Christians have of Jewish power: The more religious are Israeli Jews, the more they seem to accept or foster anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian political, even racist positions, even more so during the peace process of the Likud coalition government. Or: the more religious the Zionist, the more deafness to the sane religious aspirations of others, even those fellow citizens who are goyim, the Israeli Christians and Muslims. And the other half of the image which Christians have of Jewish power is this: the more Israeli Jews are non-observant, more secular, even anti-religious or at least anti-religious establishment, the more so many of them at least are willing to listen to Israeli Arabs, whether Muslim or Christian, and to West Bank Palestinians who ask for equal recognition and treatment. Without a religious ideology, Jews seem more to support the realpolitik of the peace process: a negotiated compromise, where converge the present and future self-interests of security and justice of both an established Israel and a rooted Palestinian reality. In Shmuel Goldin’s strong phrase, has the religious right "hijacked" Religious Zionism? The Rabin assassination has given some Religious Zionists an opportunity to correct the distortions which have shaped its religious political vision since the Six Day War of 1967. Emerging in Israel’s public arena are those religious Jews who in their Orthodox tradition wrestle with the obligations and responsibilities to be peace-makers or reconcilers within the Jewish community, whether religious or not, and with their non-Jewish neighbors; such groups as Os VaShalom and the Center for Religious Tolerance. Unlike past Jewish periods, the Torah and Halacha no longer define the collective or individual convictions of the majority of the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere. This normative consensus of classical Judaism has eroded, and in its place, Jewish evolving self-understanding and commitment, Jewish unity and accountability are found in the experience of being a family: "people" and "memory", "history" and "shared suffering" — a family experience reinforced by the establishment of the State of Israel, a common historical home which gave Jews everywhere "a new sense of public dignity and recognition, a new voice in which to express their collective concerns and aspirations." So the question: would this world-wide family consciousness be strengthened, for example, if the State of Israel were to decide that the religious convictions of Reform and Conservative Judaism is kosher in the diaspora, but treif in the Jewish homeland?p> |
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These Orthodox Zionists, such as my colleague and philosopher Rabbi David Hartman, call "a total failure" the use of the legislative power of the Knesset to imbue society with the Judaic religious spirit. In fact, the method has "alienated Jews from Judaism, reinforcing the stereotype of religious as a self-serving, coercive force, oblivious to human rights and the value of freedom of conscience... Without personal identification and respect, no amount of legislation can affect how Jews think and feel about Judaism... The future of religious Zionism depends on separating religion from politics, on allowing the Torah to compete freely in the marketplace of ideas." Keep Israel’s legislative authority outside of the debate. As religious leaders in the West are to their dismay realizing, you cannot use legal language to coerce people who do not share your authoritative premises, presuppositions and prescriptions. Religious education is more influential than religious politics. More profoundly, in Israel I hear echoes of the debate at Vatican Council II, but not in its precise terms. Does truth have rights, and error none, so that if the truth of the Church is twinned with political power, the state is responsible to suppress erroneous non-Catholic religious communities? Or do the human person and communities have innate rights, even if judged religiously erroneous? That is, because of this truth about the human person, the Church should respect and foster the right of the person and of communities to civil religious freedom, forming no coercion to act against conscience or prevention from expressing belief in teaching and religious rites, or even from expressing un-belief. The Vatican II church tries to live by the latter conviction. Precisely because of their being so steeped in the Jewish tradition, this articulate minority of religious Zionists call for a change in the exclusive religious focus on Jewish sovereign control over the whole Land of Israel; that is, the present State plus Samaria and Judea (some add, Gaza). These Zionists insist that attempts at reconciliation with the Arab world, without endangering Israel’s security, "is not a repudiation of the Torah, but an affirmation of God’s covenantal call to Israel to bear witness to the ideals of justice and the sacredness of human life" (D. Hartman). This enfleshes one of the names of God, according to the Talmud: Shalom, Peace. |
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In the Holy Land we local Christians see in the press, in some school texts, and on the streets what I call anti-crossism — a Jewish fear, or caricatured disdain of Christians. Much of this understandably has been engendered by the anti-Jewish persecutions and houndings in the West, and now perhaps is unconscious retaliation taken out on the local Christians. At the same time, many Israeli Jews, including religious, are not only conscious of this offended dignity of local Christians, but they anguish how they can better influence their fellow Jews to cut down unwarranted anti-christian prejudices and unjust acts of religious discrimination. As Jews they are deeply committed not to do to Christians in Israel what Christians elsewhere and for centuries had done to them! Nevertheless, the indigenous Christian minority responds: "We have enough problems without bearing false projections which some Jews may have because of their experience with Christians elsewhere." Two examples: anti-semitism and the Holocaust (Shoah). Anti-semitism as a term confuses the Palestinians. They also are Semites. They regard the Jews as their "cousins". In fact, they call anti-semitic those generalized caricatures which Jews have of other Semites who are neighboring Arabs. I detect in the Western world that more inclusive anti-all-Semites in attitudes and stances of prejudice. A crude summary: "Arabs and Jews in the Middle East have always been a strange lot. Always quarreling, if not warring with one another, over-emotional if not fanatical and arrogant, seldom really meaning what they say. And let’s be frank, over-sexed. Of course not like us Americans. But alas, the Middle East has the oil and trade-routes, so we need to enter into the frays, even with heavy finance, until we don’t have to rely on that oil supply, those harbors and airports. Then we can leave the Arabs and Jews to themselves and their tribal religions." The second example, the Holocaust in the Nazi-Europe of World War II. Horrifyingly unique though the Shoah was, and whatever Western Christian responsibility there was and guilt there should be, Palestinian Christians do not regard the genocide of six million European Jews as of their own direct or indirect making. If such an obscene event is objectively unique in its horror, subjectively other peoples have had experiences of imposed sufferings, inflicted wrongs and perceived injustices which in fact also shape their self-identity. The Jewish experience and living memory of the Holocaust cannot strip away another people’s memory and experience. So for the Palestinians today. A central event for their self-identity is the sum of their own sufferings and humiliations — the 1948 and post-1967 uprootings with massive numbers of refugees, prison detention without trial, collective punishments, confiscation of family lands, and denials of several basic human rights as a people — too much of this under that all-too-frequent guise from too many governments — "national security." |
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So local Christians ask the Jews: "Because the Holocaust experience has rightly seared your memory and should also be part of ours, must you protect yourselves with an ethics of survival at any cost, that is, also at our expense, even by your denial of our won history in this same land? Or is there not an ethics of solidarity based on your won history of suffering and humiliation: tying your destiny to all other insecure minority peoples, including us Palestinians, your neighbors?" But understandably for the Jews, an ethics of solidarity functions only when there is also an assurance of Israel’s survival and the security of its citizens vis-avis not only Palestinian neighbors but also Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis and Iranians. As the Israeli philosopher and Holocaust survivor, Emil Fackenheim, often remarks: "We Jews are commanded to survive, lest we hand Hitler a posthumous victory." In the crisis over who has rights in the Holy Land, what about the religious faith of Palestinian Christians, whether Israelis or not? For the Christians the Land is their watan, their homeland. For centuries they are born and live upon it, cultivate it, and bury their dead under it. It is the land which God, in the divine wisdom of ordinary providence, has chosen to give them, and others who live there, as stewards of the land, in the same way — they say — as God has given you your watan — the United States, and God requires your responsibility to be good stewards of America and of all the peoples who live there. Furthermore, in God’s providence Palestinian Christians live in the same watan of Jesus. Here he was born, walked, preached and healed, suffered, died and was resurrected. They experience and cherish the Land as "the fifth gospel." They are very much at home with the biblical events, stories and parables, their landscapes, their contexts. For Christians, Jerusalem continues to be, in the fourth century expression, both "the Mother Church" and "the Mother of all churches." The Mater ecclesiarum is not Geneva, not Canterbury, not Wittenberg, not Constantinople, not Rome. This consciousness of standing faithfully on the shoulders of almost two millennia of fellow Christians of the Mother Church fosters their primary identity. Dating from the 330's, the Nativity basilica in Bethlehem is the oldest Christian building anywhere, but it continues to be the active parish church of living Christian communities, more than a site for hurried foreign pilgrims. The reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in their historic homeland had not changed this special attachment of local Christians to their watan. Cultural and religious co-ownership is beyond the strictly legal. No law can wipe away the facts. In the context of the last conflictual decades, Palestinian Christians are ever conscious of biblical passages and interpretations about God’s love and choices which seem to contradict God’s equal care for all peoples in one Land. Passages that confirm God’s steadfast love for the Jews cause anguishing doubts among Palestinian Christians about the same love of the same God for them. |
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In his pastoral letter (November, 1993) on how to read and live the Bible in the Land of the Bible, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Nazareth-born Michel Sabbah, frankly mentions that some Christians are "exasperated by the abuse of the Bible in the present conflict. They have begun to declare that the Bible or the Old Testament is nothing more than a simple history put together by the ancestors of the Jewish people." Yet, the patriarch insists that in Christian faith the First and Second Testaments form a single Book which contains the whole of divine revelation for the salvation of humankind, including the peoples of the Holy Land today. "In his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purposes of his will (Eph. 1:9). Christians rebel against those interpretations of biblical promises which claim that the same land has always been divinely and preferentially given solely to the Jewish people which is represented by that State of Israel which Palestinians have experienced for 50 years. Is the biblical "Israel" equivalent to this modern State? In the words of an influential rabbi, God is the "Guardian of this State and all its claims for itself". The Christian asks, "Do God’s claims include your claims against us non-Jews? Does your possession of the Land dispossess us?" Religious Jews believe the land of Israel anticipates God’s blessing for all humankind. Local Christians ask: "Should not that blessing include their closest non-Jewish neighbors, within Israel and in the Territories? Is not this same Land for the Jews, Christians and Muslims, our common watan, our shared homeland?" If not, and this be the will of God, then what kind of God is this? Thus the Palestinian Anglican pastor-theologian, Naim A’teek, insists, "The whole issue of the Land must begin with a discussion on the nature of God." Christians in power know to their shame how chosenness had been misused in their conduct towards the powerless Jews in their midst. By chosenness God intends to bring out the best in one by the call for selfless responsibility towards the neighbor. Alas, it too often brings out the worst. A faith’s assurance in chosenness stands in direct relation to a faith’s demand of accountability. Ethical demands are central to election and to law. The Exodus — the freedom from slavery by others — led to Mt. Sinai — the freedom for generous obedience of divine commands that lead us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Many Israeli Jews, religious or not, admit to their never-ending suspicion of, or distrust in the goyim or the rest of humanity, and for many religious Jews certain biblical passages reinforce their own implacability against the neighboring Palestinians, who by being goyim will always be a threat. The experienced crisis of the Bible among Palestinian Christians thus leads to a crisis in their theology about the Jewish people as a whole, who that people continues to be, and what is the relation between the Church and the Jewish people. |
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I hear these biblical passages in monologues of Christians and of Jews about the other. So I confess to an ever-throbbing pain. As Monsignor Oesterreicher was graced, so was I by the first-hand experience of the decision of the Catholic church at the Second Vatican Council. Nostra Aetate was an irrevocable act, a hesbon ha-nefesh, a reconsideration of soul which began to shift 1,900 years of relationship between Catholics and Jews, and to open locks that had been jammed for centuries. I am a Catholic who is whole-heartedly committed to the turn-abouts in my church’s self-understanding of its relation to the Jewish people, and to Islam. Now during my twilight years in my final watan, I experience that the conflictual context in the Land is feeding remnants of the classical anti-Judaism in both the Western and the Eastern Christian traditions which Nostra Aetate has declared against biblical teaching: in divine punishment, the Jews should continue to wander the earth forever, and not enjoy the gift of a restored homeland; and with the complete replacement of the Old Covenant by the New, the synagogue kneels before the church, whatever numbers and power the Jews may have, in Israel or elsewhere. [Remember, most of the Middle East Christians are not of churches which had a Vatican II "rethinking"]. Often the dialogue consists of disparate monologues. Both Jews and Christians — now I add, Muslims in the West — find it so difficult to listen before speaking or so easy to judge the others, even their intentions, before allowing them truly to state the essential traits, traditions and experiences by which they define themselves and make their decisions. In North and South America, in Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the dialogue partners are aware of the contect: Christian majorities vis-a-vis Jewish minorities. But the reverse is the unique context of the Holy Land — a large Jewish majority vis-a-vis a small Christian minority. Here the Jewish/Christian religious dialogue is almost exclusively between small groups of foreign Christians like myself and the olim, those Israeli Jews who have come from Western contexts. Most Palestinian Christian clergy and laity absent themselves from almost any religious dialogues with Jews. They tell me: "There may be other legitimate, indeed necessary priorities on the agenda in the West, but here we drink from our own cisterns, and the Palestinian political problem is a non-negotiable basic referent in any religious dialogue": the interpretation of biblical history and of present "facts on the ground"; the nature of the sanctity of the Land and who share in its blessings; the rights and responsibilities of all human persons on the Land, all created in the image of the same God; and the mutual religious significance of Jerusalem, as the holy city which all the children of Abraham should share equally, also politically. To leave these urgent subjects off the table of dialogue would in itself be using what’s on the table as proof that all is well, the status quo is normal, the partners are equal, and that neighborly behavior implies that a true neighborhood already exists. |
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This is a harsh way of setting up an impasse: just as things spiritual can nullify the political, so the political can nullify the spiritual. But such an impasse, at least objectively, will slowly disappear if there be peace-of-sorts, justice-of-sorts, equal-to-equal partnership. Yet patriarch Michel Sabbah insists: one has to begin walking across the bridge of indigenous Christian-Jewish-Muslim dialogue, even if there be awkward, embarrassing stumblings. The crisis is actual, decisions to be made, opportunities for reconciliations to be seized. Already conversations on such subjects are beginning to take place among Jews and Palestinians, Christian and Muslim. At institutes like Tantur, or through departments of Israeli and Palestinian universities, or through organizations such as the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, the Inter-Faith Association, the Israeli Palestinian Center for research and Information; in Bethlehem, the Al-Liqa Center of Christians and Muslims; and perhaps most fruitfully, through women’s groups. Green grass is growing through the asphalt. When there be true equality among all the partners of the dialogue, when they are truly neighbors, then I foresee a wider participation on the local level and in the local context. Together indigenous Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, should face up to specific challenges that affect the common good: the enhancement of family life, from the youngest child to the aged; the respect for the rights of the unborn and the dying; the increase of drug addiction and related crimes; the promotion of ethical values among doctors, staffs and students in nursing schools, hospitals and other medical-care institutes. Perhaps most critical is a common evaluation of educational materials, such as textbooks and teacher manuals. How objectively are the Jews imaged in Arab classrooms, and the Christians and Muslims in Jewish? A two-year research project of Tantur and the Truman Institute of Hebrew University (Jerusalem), at its half-way point, is revealing that Israeli Jewish materials are replete with caricatures and falsehoods about Christians. The former Israeli government was admirably sensitive to Roman Catholic claims in the negotiations which led to the Agreement between the Vatican and Israel (Dec. 30, 1993). And lest one narrowly interprets this agreement as Catholic oneupmanship by affirming exclusively Catholic claims, one year later (De. 8, 1994), the Catholic and all other heads of the local Churches in Jerusalem detailed the same claims in their joint-statement. Christians have few votes to deliver. They seek political influence not to dominate but only to survive through civil recognition of their inherent and historical rights as religious communities and as individuals, and through representation lest those recognized rights be ignored or violated, Christian claims include more than full freedom of access to the holy sites. They embrace the same inherent fundamental human rights which all citizens, religious or not, should enjoy as individuals and communities: freedom of conscience and of worship; the carrying out of religious, education, medical and other duties of charity; the ownership of their own institutions, churches and shrines, and their own selected personnel to operate them. Much of this is but detailing the principles of Israel’s Declaration of religion, race or sex"; "freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture." |
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Frankly, most local Christians seldom talk about their holy sites but lament over experienced discriminations both because they are Christians, but also because they are non-Jews. Beyond patriotic rhetoric, the measure of democracy, anywhere, is the equitable ways by which the majority relates to the minorities. Does the Jewish majority accept the working principle that Israel’s tax-paying Arab citizens have a right to an equitable share in the common resources? For example, unlike all Jewish sections of Jerusalem, in most Arab sectors one faces unpaved streets, infrequent garbage pickups, inadequate water lines, lesser school subsidies and withheld building permits. I conclude with Jerusalem, the city of so many mirrors. The Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict, in all its dimensions, is realized, condensed and symbolized in Jerusalem. It is blessed and cursed by its religious, political and military history, and by present divergent, indeed conflicting claims to the City’s future by cousins who vie for their heritage. It’s so hard to think rationally about Jerusalem, because the feelings also count, and they often dominate. Political perceptions are shaped by flawed reason and half-blind passion. They clothe naked facts. Jerusalem symbolizes more than the geographical fact, for "the political imagination often invents its own geography" (Amos Elon). Is Jerusalem in Meron Benevisti’s cynical phrase, "an enigma without a solution"? The reality of Jerusalem is not neat, nor will the political solution be neat. Perhaps the initial solution should not be too detailed in finalities and allow an evolving process itself to be the solution. "Jerusalem will never be divided" is a future hope. The city is already de facto divided. The question is, can it ever be united? West Jerusalem, bereft of Arabs, remains in advantageous isolation; it never had been the object of urban planning for new Arab or mixed (Jewish/Arab) neighborhoods. And East Jerusalem is intentionally divided by Bantustan-styles physical enclaves of Jews and of Arabs. The city is already divided by psychological walls, a cultural web of mutual antagonisms and fears. These walls have become far more divisive that a Berlin Wall, a Gaza fence, or a border checkpoint. Can Jews, Palestinians and other residents, together for the common good of Jerusalem, allow the city to become more human, to respect and rejoice in our ethnic, religious and human diversities? Historically, successive exclusive governing claims for Jerusalem by those in political power never "worked", even when (alas, not always) governors had granted limited guarantees and protected status to the minorities. Can an exception realistically "work" by the dominant Israeli claim: "Jerusalem should remain the unified and eternal capital of the States of Israel, under the absolute sovereignty of Israel alone"? This is a slogan. Is it a solution? Equally a slogan: "East Jerusalem (including the Old City) should be solely Palestinian-ruled". Is it a solution? |
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Israeli/Palestinian shared authority in Jerusalem and limited sovereignties over it — whether territorial, functional or both — would be by pragmatic political compromise, which takes into account, not impossible dreams, but at least the minimum legitimate, sometimes competing vital national and religious interests of both Israeli and Palestinians. If there be a pragmatic compromise which results in a tolerated co-existence between Israel and the new Palestinian State, but if Israel and Palestine would not compromise over Jerusalem, I fear the Holy City would become the only place in the Land which will be cursed by increased divisions, unholy tensions, indeed, recurring violence. Earthly Jerusalem is more than a provincial city. It bears a universal character and evokes a unique religious dimension of the human, as Florence evokes in art, Zurich in business, Oxford in intellectual culture, and Salzburg in music. Earthly Jerusalem mirrors the meeting place between God and the human, the eternal and history, in particular for the children of Abraham — Jews, Christians and Muslims. This historical religious vocation of Jerusalem is to be a peaceful meeting place or shared living room, not a battlefield, not a house of locked room. The city often mirrors too much of politicized religion, too little of authentic faith. Aberrations of piety move quickly into the political arena, and politics corrupts the pieties. The religious dreams of one become the nightmares of the others. "The claustrophobic geography of the Old City is an apt metaphor for the cramped ideological space in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam interact ... The basic problem is not space, but control" (David Hartman). With realism, the "Jerusalem" that the Christian leaders join the Vatican (and others) in proposing for the walled Old City, is a special juridical and political statue, stable and permanent, which the international community guarantees: "Jerusalem is too precious to be dependent solely on municipal or national political authorities, whoever they may be." This plea is based on distrust of future decisions of those who have the power and the coffers. The demographic trends of Jerusalem will continue without surprising shifts. The religious Jews will predominate. Most of them will obediently vote in municipal elections. The city’s government will continue to be a fragile coalition which includes religious parties with political clout. One can realistically suspect they will not be overly sensitive to the needs of Muslims and Christians. Likewise on the Palestinian side. It will always be an Islamic majority. It could happen that Muslim extremists would be in a position of coalition-power which threaten the Christian minority with de facto discriminations. In the Israeli/Palestinian conflict seeking resolution, Jerusalem mirrors the paradox of politics as the art of the possible. The first step of institutionized political equity allows for the further, far more critical, steps in creating an environment where it becomes easier to depoliticize human existence; that is, not to reduce persons and human communities to their political and ethnic dimension. Human beings and human communities are wonderfully complex and mysterious, not mere digits on any computer, esepecially the political counter and the passport surveyor. Religious faith asserts that the human is not limited to what makes immediate political sense. |
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The political can condition but not dictate the non-political. The slow, relentless process of "the winning of hearts" will never be "final," but it can move beyond initial coexistence. Coexistence means that one only tolerates the other as the lesser of two evils. If not enemies, they still remain strangers to each other. Not quite truly human, is it? Jews, Christians and Muslims in the same Holy Land — a unique context for a unique living dialogue for these children of Abraham who in their own ways are to be obedient to God’s common call through Abraham: "to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just" (Gen. 18:19). The three partners share in the same religious crisis created by the conflict and its hesitant resolutions of peace and security. In all three "religions of the Book," the duet that must be safeguarded and protected from distortion is God above all, and the human being, his or her dignity and destiny. The primary appeal is: Let God be God! Let the human be human! The histories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are strewn with the horror of evil executed in the name of God and God’s revealed truth. Too often and too consistently the worst in ourselves, our sinfulness, our sickness, our pathologies are transferred to God for divine sanction and approval, and masquerade with "The anack, or the Bible, or the Qu’ran, tell us so", "So speaks the Lord", "Here-we-stand, we-can-do-no-other." The word of God is taken away from God. One smells what Paul Tillich calls "the demonization of the holy." God, God’s holiness, God’s truth become replaced by a panoply of idols shaped in the worst image of ourselves. Too many gods. The one God is not allowed to be the One God. Let God be God! Not only does one violate the all-holy God, but one is reducing the mysterious human to many political digits or worse, demonizing the Other in order to relieve guilt in violence against that Other. Rabbi Abram Heschel confessed: "One is embarrassed to be called religious in the face of religion’s failure to keep alive the true image of God in the face of man." Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not merely tell God’s love for the human person as the central key to life and history. They stand and fall on their fundamental claim that, therefore, the human being, an ikon of God, is of ultimate and absolute value. In this faith-conviction are the deepest origins of understanding human rights. Let the human be human! Thus, one calls for the liberation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim theology and spirituality from those falsifying versions which justify the structures and wielders of abusive and destructive power wherever and by whomever; and which deny social justice and the defense/promotion of personal and collective human rights for all peoples, all classes, all religions in the Holy Land. |
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At the same time, one cannot reduce human beings to even their legitimate political/economic rights, or worse, to their becoming units of a political class, whether it be the powerful or the subjects of that power. This "politicalization of existence" (John Paul II) misunderstands the foundational meaning of the Bible and the Qur’an: the reign of God and the transcendence of the person. It begins to sacralize politics, and to de-sacralize the human person. Faith is betrayed, religion becomes one more political ideology in the overcrowded pot. In the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, the center of God’s revealed Good News is this: shalom, salaam, the peace — the unearned gift of a merciful, compassionate God; in the words of Pope Paul VI, "the liberation from everything that oppresses man, above all, liberation from sin and the Evil One, in the joy of knowing and loving God and being known and loved by God, of being turned over to God." Into God’s hands we commend our spirit. This is why all human freedom, every authentic expression of liberation, is at its root religious freedom: the right and duty of individuals and religious communities to move toward God by doing the truth in charity. The First Commandment from Sinai remains the first. Conclusion I end with a personal note. Another pioneering pugnator veritatis (Fighter for Truth) in Catholic/Jewish relations, the layman from Scotland, Malcom Hay, who died in 1962, on the eve of the Vatican Council, wrote: "In this world we are not meant to see the truth triumph, but only to fight for it." May I add the instruction of Rabbi Tarfon shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70 AD: "The work is great, ... and the Master is urgent ... It is not our duty to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from doing it" (Avot 2.15). In November 1965, two weeks after the promulgation of Nostra Aetate, I was working with the French theologian Rene Laurentin on the history of the text, with commentary, for a Paulist Press edition. I now suspect this more seasoned priest detected too much triumphalism in my joyous reaction to the council text, too much comfort in my youthful, naive eyes to the future. He simply asked if I had remembered the last page of The Plague by Albert Camus. No, but I looked it up immediately: "As Rieux listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, he remembered that such joy could always be imperiled. He knew that those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when it would rouse up its rats again, and send them forth to die in a happy city." Indeed, thirty three years ago, I learned from Camus that with the promulgation of Nosta Aetate, Catholics, indeed all Christians, should go ahead, fight for the truth, but be more vigilant than ever. We are not free to desist from doing the "great work". Note: If you are interested in other articles written by the author, please check: "Crisis of Religion in the Holy Land’, America (April 27, 1996); Openings for Reconciliation in the Holy Land Today, the Malcolm Hay Memorial Lecture at Aberdeen University (Aberdeen University Press, 1996); "Civil Rights to Religious Freedom, Christian Claims", in Religion and State in Israeli and Palestinian Society (Jerusalem: IPCRI, 1996); "Can Jerusalem Become More Human?", Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture (Autumn, 1996). |
