International Council of Christians and Jews

This is all more than fine and good. But if we are really sincere concerning this fifth of these Twelve Calls, the first to be addressed to Jews and Jewish communities there is an important question to be asked: Why have only a minority of Jews – individually as well as collectively in their various communities and organizations – seriously engaged recent Christian reforms?  This question also challenges national and international Jewish bodies and entities – political, religious, cultural – including, significantly in the State of Israel. We invite Jewish readers of this guide to consider this question, to interrogate, explore it – as individuals and in their associations of various kinds; and likewise for those who are involved in the variety of available contexts where efforts at Jewish-Christian dialogue are taking place.

The reasons are more or less obvious; yet without explicitly opening up discussion concerning them – both among Jews themselves and in their meetings with Christians – the quality of understanding between the two 'communities of faith' – between the two civilizations – cannot significantly be advanced.

That the dramatic extent of teshuvah among so many Christians in their relation to Judaism and the Jewish people is coming so late in its two millennial history of vilification and persecution ---

The first and foremost reason that many, if not most, Jews are not aware of the dramatic change has occurred among so many Christians since the Holocaust and especially since the Second Vatican Council (under the leadership of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and subsequently under the guidance of Pope John Paul II) is that it has come only relatively recently in the life of the Church's two millennia of existence. It has to be said that this late belatedness has come about only after 'The Destruction of European Jewry', in Raul Hilberg's telling phrase. Most certainly it was a destruction driven by an ideology that was in key ways antithetical to leading tenets of Christianity. But equally certain is the fact that without the outrageous depths of Christian antisemitism through most of its two millennial presence on this earth the Nazi war against the Jews could not have 'achieved' the destruction of such genocidal success that it did.

It is also a welcome but also a potentially hard fact that the dramatic teshuvah enacted by much of post-Holocaust Christianity would not have achieved so much without the influence of modern secular humanist values; a perspective on universal human rights and dignity which was not infrequently attacked by key Christian institutions, movements and leaders. Yet it also must be acknowledged that critical teachings of Christianity constitute another essential source in the development of the increasing recognition of these same principles of universal human value. It also should be admitted that the extent of this movement of teshuvah among so many Christian individuals, communities and branches of the Christian tradition is very moving in the depths of its ethical and religious sincerity and in the reach of its intellectual, emotional and behavioral expressions and repercussions in the life of both the Church and the Jewish people. So that despite its belatedness in coming, the recent Christian reform calls for increasing awareness and appreciation by the Jewish people. It still is certainly a welcome turning that bodes well for the coming millennia of Christianity's continued development among us.  Even more welcome because of the ecological threats, and the continuing threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, that menace all of humanity.  We must engage in serious acts of cooperative international teshuvah toward these planetary threats. A project that Christians and Jews – as well as Moslems and adherents of all other human faith traditions at their best – must find the way to engage in together.

Another reason for Jewish hesitancy to consider recent Christian reforms may be the central role played in the Christian experience by claims for the supernatural or literally miraculous, most especially, the divine-human character of Jesus. 

This potential obstacle in becoming more open to understanding Christianity for some, if not indeed for many, Jews might be addressed by engaging the fact that literalism versus metaphoric/figurative understandings of apparently supernatural and miraculous religious language is a key question in classical Judaism.

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