An Interfaith Alliance of the Willing

By Allen Menkin, MD Project Manager CAMERA’s Naples Partnership of Christians and Jews

The war in Gaza has frayed longstanding interfaith relationships, as some progressive Christian churches and clergy appear quick to condemn Israel’s response to the Simchat Torah Massacres and judgmental of those who disagree.

When the Lutheran Church of America joined the growing list of mainstream Protestant denominations calling for “U.S. leaders to recognize and act to end the genocide against Palestinians, halt military aid to Israel used in Gaza, and support Palestinian statehood and U.N. membership,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union of Reform Judaism, expressed sorrow but understanding, and a hope that “my clergy colleagues, particularly my Jewish leader colleagues, realize that you don’t have to agree with a community on every point to work with them and to find ways to be in community with them.” Setting aside the questions of what “in community with them” means and why we should engage with groups for whom our survival is debatable, Rabbi Jacobs alludes to an enduring question.

How does a particularist, minority immerse itself in a majority “melting pot” without becoming so diluted that it loses its distinct identity and role in history, and what does it do when the pot becomes a witch’s cauldron? Eighty years after the Holocaust and sixty years after Nostra Aetate, is “Judeo-Christian tradition” a reality or a social construction, and do shared genealogy and moral codes outweigh gaping theological and eschatological differences, a bloody history, and radically different threat assessments? For very different reasons and representing vastly different constituencies, Jacobs and conservative Jewish commentator Josh Hammer agree that we must set aside those differences and create interfaith linkages.

Their opinions are substantially at odds with traditional Jewish thinking, clearly expressed by modern rabbinic giants, Rav Josef Soloveichik and The Rebbe, Menachem Shneerson (z”l). Their warnings that interfaith dialogue, in any theological sense, represents a threat to Jewish observance and identity are reflected in the reticence of many Jews to engage in any such activity. We respectfully disagree.

The shared threat to Jews and Christians, in Israel and around the globe, can only be met by a firm alliance between the two great repositories of our biblical inheritance. There is no alternative.

With that in mind, CAMERA is running a series of informal discussions titled “How do You Know What You Don’t Know About Jewish Christian Relations?” For information contact tricia@camera.org.