T. Belman. I have never been a proponent of inter-faith dialogue.
Non-Orthodox rabbis embrace the progressive ideals of their Christian counterparts, using modern terms for an ancient hatred.
By Matthew M. Hausman, JD, INN Aug 25, 2022,
In an outrageous display of moral vacancy, the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently labelled Israel an apartheid state – despite an abundance of evidence and legal precedent to the contrary. Though mainline protestant churches have grown increasingly hostile toward Israel based on false claims of human rights abuses and a disregard for Jewish history, their condemnations are simply modern iterations of the same doctrinal prejudice used to demean Jews and Judaism for two millennia. Their anti-Israel bias is vile but historically consistent, and it raises the issue of how progressive rabbis can sit with liberal activist clergy who promote hoary antisemitic myths wrapped in the language of human rights advocacy.
The International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute of 2002 defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” This definition does not fit Israel, where ethnic and religious minorities have equal rights under the law. But it does describe totalitarian states that liberal protestant clergy are reluctant to criticize, including communist dictatorships like China and repressive Islamist regimes like Iran. It could also describe the terrorist organizations many of them legitimize, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which openly call for jihad, genocide, and death to Israel.
Their collective hypocrisy was perhaps best exemplified in 2020 by the “Faith Statement on Escalating Violence with Iran,” which condemned “the United States’ dangerous aggression towards Iran…,” despite that nation’s malevolent record of exporting terrorism, persecuting minorities, and seeking to annihilate the Jewish People.
The Presbyterians’ false claim of Israeli apartheid should hardly be surprising given Christendom’s inveterate record of denigrating and persecuting Jews since before the days of Constantine, its complicity in the Holocaust, and its ambivalence regarding the Jewish State since 1948. In fact, the Catholic Church would not establish full diplomatic relations with Israel until after the ill-conceived 1993 Oslo Accords, nearly thirty years after Nostra Aetate (“Vatican II”) in 1965 – despite the Jews’ irrefutable historical claims and indigeneity in their homeland.
Jewish sovereignty poses a theological dilemma for those who believe the Jews were exiled for refusing to accept Christian doctrines, including belief in the trinity, vicarious atonement, the apotheosis of a man, and the eucharist – all of which contravene Torah law and seem pagan to Jewish sensibilities. Not surprisingly, Christian scripture significantly alters the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and contains numerous anti-Jewish passages that have fueled oppression, blood libels, and massacres for centuries.
The Book of John, for example, associates Jews with darkness and evil (e.g., John 8:37-39), and specifically states: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44.)
Similarly, the book of Matthew says, “you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets…You snakes, you brood of vipers. How can you escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matthew 23:31-33.) Matthew also accuses Jews of deicide and bloodguilt exclaiming, “his blood be on us and on our children.” (Matthew 27:25.) The accusation of bloodguilt, a common theme repeated elsewhere (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 2:15), was instrumental in reinforcing the anti-Jewish tropes that suffused European culture.
These stereotypes were used to dehumanize Jews and paved the way for mechanized genocide in the twentieth century. Considering this deplorable past, liberal protestant excoriation of Israel should be seen for what it is; ancient doctrinal antisemitism dressed up as progressive political virtue. What makes it worse is the legitimacy conferred by progressive rabbis who sit as colleagues with liberal pastors on clergy boards and interfaith councils and who likewise besmirch Israel in the name of social justice.
Though progressive clergy of all faiths embrace social justice activism as a religious mandate, nontraditional rabbis who partner with liberal Christian counterparts on select human rights issues must demonstrate the same self-abnegation and cognitive dissonance demanded by classical interfaith dialogue. Therefore, analyzing the deficiencies of such discourse provides context and insight.
The problem with traditional interfaith dialogue is threefold.
- First, it restrains Jews from being assertive when doing so could be viewed as chauvinistic by gentile interlocutors.
- Second, it holds that Christians and Jews share responsibility for their strained history and can resolve their differences by accentuating their similarities.
- Third, it presumes an “I’m okay, you’re okay” discussional framework that requires Jews to concede the validity of doctrines that frankly violate Torah law.
Another problem with traditional interfaith discourse is that it deflects blame for a two-thousand-year doctrinal war against the Jews. Christian antisemitism resulted in ghettos, public disputations, crusades, pogroms, forced baptisms, inquisitions, expulsions, and genocide. This persecution was driven exclusively by Christians, their churches, and governments, motivated by theological and eschatological doctrines that contravene Torah and are fundamentally antisemitic.
Jews never engaged in similar conduct because they had neither the religious imperative nor power to do so. The existence of Christianity is irrelevant to Jewish belief and poses no threat to its continuing vitality.
The Jews’ continued existence however,’ was problematic for Christendom because, despite suffering horrendous abuse, they clung to their ancestral faith and Scriptures as written, not as altered to fit church doctrines that had more in common with Greco-Roman philosophy and culture and Gnostic dualism. The interfaith model is faulty because it (a) neglects to assign blame for this negative fixation and (b) presumes a shared “Judeo-Christian” heritage despite irreconcilable differences between fundamental
Jewish and Christian beliefs.
The term “Judeo-Christian” is usually employed by Christians to imply spiritual kinship and common values. Few educated Jews hold likewise, however, because they understand from their knowledge of Tanakh, Hebrew, and rabbinic literature that many central tenets of Judaism and Christianity are incongruous.
Whereas many mainline churches have adopted social justice activism as a core religious principle – claiming it is a true reflection of Christian values – they have retained the anti-Jewish conventions canonized by the early church fathers. In maligning Israel, these denominations are merely expressing age-old hostility using the language of contemporary propaganda. It matters little that non-Orthodox rabbis embrace the same progressive ideals and causes as their liberal Christian counterparts.
Those who falsely accuse Israel of apartheid are clearly using modern terminology to convey ancient dogmatic hatred.
But just as Jewish belief and tradition are incompatible with Christian theology, so too are they inconsistent with the conflation of secular politics and Torah values. Unfortunately, not all Jews understand their own heritage, and many have been deluded by interfaith and/or political indoctrination to believe that tolerance requires them to validate beliefs and ideologies that contradict their own traditions and scripture. The inherent limitations of interfaith dialogue are illustrated in the faith-based politics of liberal protestants who falsely brand the Jewish state “racist” in the name of skewed progressive ideology.
The problem is that many Jews don’t know enough about their own culture and history to confront such mistruths, whether expressed in religious or political terms, as open hostility, or even as declarations of friendship by those with covert missionary agendas (e.g., many evangelicals). Perhaps worse, though, are those who do know, but refuse to stand up to their critics for fear of offending them as dialogue partners or alienating them as partisan allies – or because they also reject Israel and Jewish tradition.
Whether using scriptural or political language, Christian detractors of Jews, Judaism, and Israel ultimately claim to be guided by faith, irrespective of fact. However, by using faith (doctrinal or political) as a shield to circumvent intellectual engagement, they avoid having to confront moral inconsistencies in the stereotypes they promote. And when endorsing politics as religious virtue, they eschew any moral responsibility for determining whether their worldview comports with history or original, unaltered scripture.
The template for today’s protestant denunciations of Israel can be found in the history of Christian antisemitism. Though Jews today are no longer required to submit to physical or ecclesiastical abuse as they did in the days of the ghetto, many are reluctant to defend Jewish integrity for fear of offending their cultural critics or political bedfellows.
And this won’t change unless they come to understand their own heritage and the historical nuances and ideological limitations of interfaith dialogue.
Matthew M. Hausman is a trial attorney and writer who lives and works in Connecticut. A former journalist, Mr. Hausman continues to write on a variety of topics, including science, health and medicine, Jewish issues and foreign affairs, and has been a legal affairs columnist for a number of publications.
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Chloe Valdary Christian Zionist leader on Hadassah and JBS
https://youtu.be/9UmAHfY9Duk
https://youtu.be/UHqTbisE4c0
Reader,
I did not disagree with your statements. History is filled with the acts of Christians trying to take authority form those Hashem commissioned to spread his light to the world. Abraham and his descendants were chosen to do a job. They have not completed that job.
Regardless of what you think of my logic and yes it could be faulty, never forget that hashem is in control of everything that happens. Do we have a choice in how we as individuals act? Yes! but regardless, Hashem will rule this world in the end and Jacob and Esau will be reunited in brotherly love along with all the tribes of Israel.
Christianity has its problems but one day they will come to the place where they come to understand they have inherited lies” and they will come to understand who God is, who his agent is and what his NAME is. One day HaShem will no longer hide his face.
Shalom, Brother
https://aish.com/78624517/
@Tanna
No “interfaith dialogue” between Christians and Jews is possible because their concepts of God are vastly different and irreconcilable.
Christianity is a sworn enemy of Jews and Judaism, it is not just a question of some minor details and disagreements “on both sides” that need to be worked out.
So don’t try to comfort yourself that
In the meanwhile, can you just leave us, Jews, alone while you peacefully enjoy your indescribably illogical and contradictory beliefs?
When truth from history is spoken it sometimes / most of the time is hard to listen to. From my perspective the interfaith dialogue problem is just as described here in the many comments. Both parties must come to the table with an attitude to learn from each other, with a humbleness of mind, knowing and understanding they do not know the mind of God and the who, what and why in all he is doing or has done and therefore they should not come to the table of dialogue to convert the other to his way of thinking.
After 35 + years or so of Interfaith dialogue, I can tell you it is hard, and you will wrestle with it every day just as Jacob did with the angel. If you come from a Christian home and background, it will take your whole life to move away from what you learned by the age of 15., and then you still will not be able to get all the misinformation and misunderstanding out of your mind and soul when it comes to learn the real story of the bible and what transpire in the first century. One’s early childhood will always cloud and color there thinking.
If you were raised in a Jewish home and you were to try to lean and convert to Christianity, the same would apply to you also. One moves into a place where your neither fish nor fowl. The images, thoughts, viewpoints from one’s past can never be totally erased form one’s mind, they will always come to bare on one’s understanding and interpolation / interpretation of a point of fact or opinion.
But should Jew’s and Christian’s never dialogue? NO! By all means they should try to build on the common and stand firm on those things they can’t agree on just like Jacob and Esau where brothers one DNA……… just a different side of the same coin. With this understanding you will come to see both sides locked in a wrestling match and will be forever joined as one blood.
As Egar said about the Moshiach he doesn’t believe in. It will only happen when he appears and as the direct agent of the Almighty Creator (YHVH). Both sides of the equation are wrong, some more and some less. Both sides have had their text changed. Both sides have changed their interpretation and understanding of text in the last 2100 years. Both sides, I believe have been flat out wrong on somethings both in the past and in the present. Time will tell and, in the future, when Messiah gets this mess of rebellious stiff neck people straighten out, we will all go up to / look to Zion and Jerusalem to learn the ways of HaShem.
Just one more thing…… The Sages of ancient History taught a very important point / concept.
Regardless of where they learned this: at the mouth of the creator or just by observation from thousands of years of living it still holds true. The middle path is the one to strive for trying to live a life of balance between the extremes. (Paraphrase mine)
This one is about Jewish and Hindu political solidarity.
https://jweekly.com/2022/08/12/adl-event-on-california-hate-bill-affirms-hindu-jewish-solidarity-on-swastikas/
That all depends. This was a positive, constructive encounter.
“What I learned about Judaism from the Dalai Lama
by Rodger Kamenetz on Jun 18, 2011 in Interfaith Dialogue
Rodger Kamenetz describes his experience in the Jewish-Buddhist dialogue that took place in Dharamsala, India in October, 1990, and his encounter with the Dalai Lama…”
https://thubtenchodron.org/2011/06/jew-dalai-lama/
@ Reader-
Your post is pretty good and covers even more that I would have said, and all true and historically factual….. Kol Hakovod
Michael, it’s neither “dialog(ue”, not hate speech. It’s a statement of facts. S stop your speciosity.
Michael, it’s neither “dialog (ue0”, nor hate speech. It’s a statement of facts. So stop your nonsense.
@Raphael-
I assumed that you know them, and of course I did not want to get into a religious haggle, Which is what I said I was tired. A convinced person can not be changed until maybe a Moshiach (in which I do not believe) may do the trick. I just stated my case. in miniatire and retired.
Thank you for your kind words.
This isn’t dialog — it’s hate speech. As anyone could have predicted, it’s a waste of time.
@Raphael
The author explained what he meant but I would add that the Christians purposely mistranslated the Tanakh to suit their views (Edgar gave one example), and when the printing press was invented and Jews wanted to print the Talmud, it had to go through a Christian censor who made “suitable” changes (there is a list).
As far as “the same old sin of painting all Christians the same” – Christianity is based on Jew-hatred to the extent that if you remove the story it is based on (Crucifixion, etc.), Christianity would cease to exist.
Christianity is also the most murderous religion in the world.
If you take into account all the wars, attacks, crusades and genocides committed by the professing Christians, it would total at least 100 million people.
Any people among whom Christianity spreads will be taught to hate and despise Jews as a necessary part of their faith.
They are also allowed to deceive in order to convert.
@Edgar G
@Michael’s right we should all go to bed. But, anyway…
Thank you for taking the time to make those points. I was already aware of them. There are rebuttals, but religious debate is not what I come to Ted’s site to do. You either, I would assume.
Thanks again. I always value your views.
@MICHAEL-
No I didn’t mean that. I’m normally reading up to about 3.30 a.m regularly.
I just meant I didn’t want to get further into a useless discussion where the facts are so clear.
With you it’s different, I always enjoy your earnest and sometimes passionate discourse. But when it got too “hot”, you and I agreed to differ..without rancour (more-or less). I just couldn’t resist this time, after such a specious affirmation.
Not worthy of you.
It reminded me of a Jackie Mason quip. ” Do you know that the crime of eating chometz on Pesach is as serious as that of committing adultery’… ???
Weell…I’ve tried them both , and just can’t see the comparison,….!!”
And thank you, Good night to you also, sleep well.
Edgar, I thought you were going to lay down. Good night!
@MICHAEL-
Please stop talking nonsense. To say that “Matthew” did not ascribe bloodguilt to anyone is gilding the lily in spades. He was acting as a “reporter” who actually heard this farrago of tripe and merely wrote it down…according to you. I wonder if he used Pitman’s Shorthand.
He should have applied for a job at CNN, They could use someone like him who can produce a barefaced lie out of thin air. Of course apart from Torah dictums, there were no laws against libel then. And the “reporter” was not even in Israel to be the “eye witness” you say.
(In fact, with your “outlook”..YOU would be welcome at CNN, also).
It reminds me of the man with such big ears that “he could hear things afore they was spoke” (a quote from “The Broad Highway” by Jeffery Farnol)
Experts (except Christian apologists) say that none of the Gospels was written in Israel. and are erratically dated in the order as follows,…Mark…circa 70-77…Matthew…70- 110…Luke…circa 95-170…. John circa 100-125 It has been remarked that Matthew (and the others) seemed to know nothing about Israel’s topography. Also that the last few verses of John, indicating early appearance, are forgeries, added much later……euphemistically termed “interpolations”…
I ask you Michael, in truth, do you not fins it strange that there is no mention of the WAR, nor the destruction of the Temple etc…by the “reporter”. No mention of Masada……
Perhaps Raphael has heard the term “Synoptic Gospels”.
@RAPHAEL-
There is a NT verse which says that “he went to live in Nazareth so that he could fulfill the prophesy of being a Nazarene’.
No Torah prophet said that, and the early Christians didn’t know that a “Nazarene” has a totally different meaning from a “Nazaretite” (which I would assume to be a resident of Nazareth).
side-note: Ancient Nazareth was over 2 miles further up the hill from the Nazareth they were talking about.
And The “Virgin” birth..? They twisted the meaning of “Ha Almah from “THAT young WOMAN” is with child and will shortly bear a son”… .to “a virgin shall conceive etc.
“Bethula” is the Torah word for virgin, or chaste young girl,
.
The prophet was Isaiah, who spent all his time at Court, as he was a close relative of the Royal House. Any objective scholar would say that he was referring to a PARTICULAR pregnant woman a few feet away. The Very beginning of the next chapter has the queen giving birth to a son.
Another prophesy of Isaiah “a voice cries; In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our G-d”. This verse is mistranslated to say that “a voice cries out in the wilderness”. Which is NOT so. Also it interprets the “way” to be made (for the Lord, to be for Rebecca and her children.
Paul twists the meaning of the Laws given to Abraham, and the Torah given to Moses are different, that is was a “new” covenant, which Paul grabs at to assert that the “new covenant” is for Christians, and that the “old” covenant is abrogated. In real fact The Torah uses “Laws” and Torah” interchangeably. The same way that Zion and Jerusalem refer to the same place..
I’m tired………!! …….Sorry….!!
Hi, Raphael. You said,
You are correct. For example, Hausmann says,
It is ENTIRELY disingenuous, to accuse Matthew of the actions of later generations. Matthew did not ascribe bloodguilt to anyone. He reported, as a purported eyewitness, that certain Jews of his generation called bloodguilt down upon themselves.
If Matthew were alive today, he would be entitled to sue his accusers for defamation.
As you pointed out, however, interfaith dialog on matters such as this is (according also to Ted) unproductive — because there is generally no goodwill among those participating in it.
In response to Ted, I will say that the persecution of Christians in China is personally more important to me than arguments among Jews and Presbyterians
@Edgar
The author says that “Christian scripture significantly alters the Tanakh”. I don’t think so. I’d be interested to know where. As for the NT verses that he uses for examples… they were taken out of context. It makes a difference. I will grant, however, that such verses have long been used (improperly) by so-called Christians as justification to persecute Jews. Shameful.
He did NOT misrepresent Christian scripture.
Interfaith dialogue? There is no point in (Jews) dialoguing with people who hate them, lie about them, and support those who want to annihilate them.
On the other hand, this author commits the same old sin of painting all Christians the same, and of failing to mention (the many) Christians who are genuine supporters of Israel and of the Jewish people. He also mis-represents Christian scripture.
Better understanding and relations can only be achieved through good will and honest dialogue.
@Michael
That’s an unfair swipe.
The reason I am against it is because it changes nothing.
Neither have the Chinese:
Hausman’s critique of Jewish-Christian interfaith dialog holds doubly true for Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialog.
Non-Orthodox interfaith is an oxymoron.