Abstract
Of course it takes two to have a psychopathological relationship. We Jews for too long reveled in the moral righteousness granted us by our victimhood. Any hint of talk about Jewish complicity in the nightmare of our history, any sense that Christian exclusivism, for example, had been inherited from our claims of unique chosenness as God's only people, was dismissed as a cruel way of "blaming the victim." But our collective re-entry into the world of power politics and our often powerful voice as citizens in democratic countries no longer allow us the luxury of this dismissal. As we ask that Christians go further than is comfortable in examining their history and attitudes in relation to us, we have some serious questions to ask of ourselves as well. The limiting of noble Biblical ethical proclamations to one's fellow-Jew rather than extending them to all humanity, as found in not a few rabbinic commentaries, is unacceptable. The relative tolerance of halachic authorities in the past for taking economic advantage of non-Jews, including governments, has to be re-examined and repudiated. The daily blessing that thanks God "for not having made me a gentile" is fully as worthy of rejection as the one in which we men are to thank God "for not having made me a woman," all apologetics not withstanding. The rabbis' demonization of Esau, the supposed ancestor of Christendom, and of Balaam, the prophet of the non-Jews, speak ill of our tradition. I could go on, but this is not the place. For 2000 years we Jews were without worldly power, especially on the political stage. Yes, the Catholic Church has at times been drunk with power, and the call for Vatican III to step back from that place is appropriate. We who are new to power and insecure about how much we really have should learn the lesson well. Carroll's call for the Church to embrace democracy in an unambiguous way is also an important one. Here we Jews would seem to be in much better shape. Acceptance of democracy and its values scores high on any survey of Jews, especially in North America. But what is the relationship between our Judaism and the widespread identification Jews feel with democracy? We Jews justly take collective pride in the memory of Jewish individuals who contributed to the cause of civil rights in this country as well as in South Africa, even though most of these were quite alienated from Judaism and (especially in South Africa) some were Jewish communists. We should take less pride is Israel's one-time close association with Apartheid South Africa as an ally and arms customer. We should take less pride in the fear of most Jewish leaders to speak out against the Vietnam war because vocal Jewish protest might lead to anti-Semitism, or to speak out today against violations of human rights in the occupied territories, lest we be seen as divided in our support for Israel. In Israel the relationship between Jewish values and those of democracy is being put to a much more serious test, and the results so far are not entirely encouraging. With regard to exclusivity of claim, I strongly believe that our repentance has to take place together. This is not, I should emphasize, because the situation requires mutuality in change, nor does Carroll in any way call for it. To do so would be inappropriate. The sins of Christendom against the Jewish people are what they are, and it is the churches, all of them, that need to repent. I am not claiming that we share the blame for anti-Semitism over the ages. It is only the depth of Carroll's longing for change that calls forth in me a response that says: "Yes, and we too will have to change." We do need the Church to repudiate the exclusivity of its claim as a means to salvation. Our world had gotten too small and we are both too aware of other religions, including those that have their roots outside the biblical tradition, to speak the language of exclusiveness. But we Jews also need to go back to the midrashic readings of Sinai, cutting through our own exclusivist language, exposing to the light of critical reappraisal even the text that says the mountain is called Sinai because that sounds like the word sin'ah, hatred, referring to the hatred God presumably feels (or perhaps that we are to feel) for the "nations of the world" who did not accept God's Torah.