Judaism and Christianity both claim to be true, but they have rival versions of the truth.
TheJerusalem Post editorial on January 7 spoke of the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” That fabled tradition does not exist, nor does the “Judeo-Christian ethic.” Though sharing a common origin in the Hebrew Scriptures, the two faiths read the scriptural texts differently. They believe in God, but view Him through different lenses. They each have a story, but they are not the same. They each have a concept of man, but they are not the same. They are both ethical religions, but with separate ideas of man’s nature, salvation and destiny.
For Christianity, Jesus is central; in Judaism he does not figure even though he was a Jew. Christianity, says Leo Baeck, prefers the “finished statement” of dogma: Judaism, the “unending process of thought.” Judaism and Christianity both claim to be true, but they have rival versions of the truth. There are commonalities, but so many differences.
Arthur A. Cohen argues in The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition that the Judeo-Christian ethic is a myth produced by “Christian guilt and Jewish neurasthenia,” to obscure the fact that Christians and Jews are “theological enemies… living in the same street as neighbours.” But is sharing the street what Cohen calls “reconciliation of contradiction, the dissolution of paradox,” or mere politeness, propriety and political correctness? Are we merely, in Cohen’s words, “inundated institutions making common cause before a world that regards them as hopelessly irrelevant and meaningless”?
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik does not talk of enemies but strangers. Jew and Christian cannot always grasp what goes on in the other’s head. Martin Buber says the Jew thinks the “daring” Christian believes the unbelievable; the Christian says the “obdurate” Jew cannot see the truth. Soloveitchik says all faiths are brothers in facing social problems, while theologically they are strangers: “The great encounter between God and man,” he says, “is a wholly personal affair incomprehensible to the outsider.”
Leo Baeck says that all religions face similar questions, but phrase the questions, and answers, differently. Christianity is a “romantic” religion in a world of feelings where “rules are suspended.” Judaism is a “classical” religion which focuses on “reality with its commandment, and the profound seriousness of the tasks of our life.” Buber says Christianity freezes God in one position. Our task is not to diminish or damn the other, but to allow them to be themselves, so that “each of the partners, even when standing in opposition to the other, heeds, affirms and confirms the opponent as an existing other.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel says the issue is not what happens when I die, but what I do while I am alive. When asked, “What about the salvation of your soul?” he did not understand. For him the issue was not his soul, but his task: “What mitzvah can I do next?” We Jews have all been told, “You’ll end up in hell!” Our answer never varied: “We Jews have been to hell – on earth – and have come back. Our stress is this world: the next one is God’s concern.”
Claiming there was a Judeo-Christian tradition did not save religion or the world. The Holocaust brought civilization to its knees. Franz Grillparzer said, “Man moved from humanism to nationalism, from nationalism to barbarism.”
Man no longer had enough faith in God to overcome the forces of evil. The supposed believers rang the sanctuary bells in the interests of self-preservation, hoping to keep the fiends from shattering the church windows as they had done to the synagogues. They said the Jews deserved their punishment. Did anyone think that their Jesus was himself a Jew, and in destroying his people they were destroying their own Christianity? Could religion of a higher and nobler kind have saved the situation? It might at least have saved its own soul.
Today’s religion is fierce and fanatic, facing you down if you mildly beg to differ. It is aggressive, triumphant, bullying, bent on world domination. It’s not Christianity, which is in a post-Christian phase of disintegration. Nor is it Judaism: these days Judaism tends to look inward and rarely looks at global problems. Christianity half-heartedly mounts its missions but does not expect much success. Judaism is suspicious of Christians after so much persecution and is often uncomfortable in the marketplace of ideas. Both faiths are ill at ease in relation to Islam, and Islam reciprocates: all three feel under siege.
In the West, formal adherence to religious institutions is declining. Few have genuine piety and spirituality, hearts and minds more than bells and smells. The brave people who try to combine piety and worldly engagement are too limited in scope, too lacking in spiritual muscle, too polite and genteel to make a difference. They have chats and drink tea together, but if religion hits the news it is neither sweet nor loving, but a strident voice with a contorted face. Religions do not speak reasonably but shout at each other.
Religions all claim to be owners of truth, but if each one has the truth, then none can give way. When former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks said in his book, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations, that there is truth in all religions, some rabbis accused him of heresy, insisting that it is Judaism which is truth. A new edition softened the language and spoke of wisdom in other religions. This reduced the heat, but it did not solve the problem. Either my religion is true or there is no reason to adhere to it.
If my truth is not consonant with yours, we have deadlock. If all religions are equally true, we are speaking illogicalities. If black is blue and blue is black, then color makes no sense. If apples are oranges and oranges are apples, then fruit needs to be redefined. There is a Jewish tradition and there is a Christian tradition. The question is not whether they can combine but whether they can work together.
The author is emeritus rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Thanks for your elucidation.
nix almost.
Of course, the same could be said of reform and other liberal Jews.
Never forget, we have to put out the welcome mat for Islamist eliminationist anti-semites and fight to keep illegal aliens with violent criminal records from being deported because we were strangers in Egypt!
It’s also a moot point now because most of the Israel haters I have met have told me they have no use for the bible, Jewish or Christian, don’t believe a word of it, and think it promotes stone-age values. Most of them have no use for America either, except when somebody like Obama is in office undermining America in its name.
Though it’s true, the Christians I have spoken with, friendly or not, interpret every eword and every concept radically differently, to the point where there’s almost no point in trying to have a discussion.
“Judeo-Christian” is a euphemism for American. The American proponents of the Enlightenment were, unlike some of their European counterparts like Voltaire who was a rabid anti-semite, ardent Hebraists who ranged from the Puritans, who wanted to build “The New Jerusalem” to Jefferson, whose bible left out all the parts that conflicted with the modern, American, Enlightenment distillation embraced generally by Jews, Christians, and all others who embrace the American way that has spread to much of the world. It has been suggested that the Islamist attacks are blowback for US military adventures abroad. I would beg to differ. They are rather blowback for failure to effectively conquer our enemies who are even more upset at the peaceful spread of our values, often through entertainment, fashion, music, literature, or other cultural media. Now, they are, in turn, trying to do the same here with infiltration of the schools, media and universities.
This is a war. Jews, Christians, Hindus, Zorastrians, Buddhists, Animists, indigenous religious traditions from African, Latin America, etc., for the most part, have reformed to be in line with the tolerant and egalitarian pluralism of the American Enlightenment.
There doesn’t have to be internal agreement. Toleration is enough. It’s what our enemies won’t tolerate. And it’s why we can’t afford to tolerate them, either.