I believe that we are doing this in the Catholic community by implementing the Council’s mandate (Nostra Aetate, n. 4). Pope John Paul II is leading us in this effort. I would like to single out just a couple of points that are expressed very clearly in his teaching: "No dialogue between Christians and Jews can overlook the painful and terrible experience of the Shoah;"26 "The days of the Shoah marked a true night of history, with unimaginable crimes against God and humanity;"27 "We Christians approach with immense respect the terrifying experience of the extermination, the Shoah, suffered by the Jews during World War II;"28 "Joint collaboration and studies by Catholics and Jews on the Shoah should be continued."29
Furthermore, in his address to the new ambassador of Germany to the Holy See, he said, "It was really the Second World War which [ . . . ] made many people aware of what fate and guilt mean to all peoples and individuals. We think of the millions of people, most of them totally innocent, who died in the war [ . . . ]. In this context we should also mentioned the tragedy of the Jews. For Christians the heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the Jewish people must be an enduring call to repentance; thereby we can overcome every form of anti-Semitism and establish a new relationship with our kindred nation of the Old Covenant. The Church [ . . . ] ‘deplores the hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source’ [Second Vatican Council, Declaration Nostra Aetate n. 4]. Guilt should not oppress and lead to self-agonizing thoughts, but must always be the point of departure for conversion."30
This reminds us of what Rabbi Awraham Soetenendorp, a survivor of the Shoah, told us at the Eisenach Conference of the International Council of Christians and Jews in 1995. He then said: "The real meaning of repentance (teshuvah) is not to be burdened with guilt but to learn from experiences and to turn the mistakes and the transgressions of the past into a passion for a new future."31 Rabbis Jack Bemporad and Michael Shevach are telling us the same thing: "No one should be so obsessed with the past that they prevent themselves from moving into the future. No one should live in the past," they affirm in their book that I have already mentioned. Yet, they rightly point out, "the past is not just something you should toss away and forget." "Quite to the contrary, it must be remembered, heeded, learned from, so that it will never repeat itself."32 That is why the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews has recently published We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, a document which is addressed to the Catholic faithful throughout the world, not only in Europe where the Shoah took place, and where several Catholic Bishops’ Conferences have courageously and responsibly taken their stand in this regard (in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary, France, Italy, and Slovakia).
The numerous reactions to this document are mixed of course, since an evaluation, a perception, very much depends on the expectations one has. I think that the reaction which we received from the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York, written by Judith Banki, who is the Program Director, sums it up well: "This long-awaited document does not break new ground," the reaction states, "it incorporated much that has been said before. However, augmented by a historical overview and molded into a single statement addressing the most traumatic and painful events in Jewish history, it adds the Church’s moral authority to the need to understand what gave rise to the greatest crime of the twentieth century, and to remember it - ‘for there is no future without memory’ [ . . . ]. When Nostra Aetate [ . . . ] was promulgated in 1965, it was immediately criticized by Jewish leaders as a compromise, an insufficient and over-cautious document. Later Vatican documents, including the catechetical Notes of 1985, were similarly criticized. Yet these very documents laid the groundwork for a new relationship between the Church and the Jewish people. Key elements are now routinely invoked by Catholic and Jewish leaders alike. Implementation made the difference. The Church’s expression of human solidarity should guide our footsteps as we seek to implement the teaching and preaching opportunities inherent in this document, which lays out a challenging agenda for the future."
Somehow the Pope anticipated this when he told Jewish leaders in Budapest in 1991: "Today, after the period of darkness when it seemed as though the Jews would be completely exterminated, you are here once more and making a significant contribution to Magyar national life. I rejoice at your active presence, which reveals the new vitality of your people. But, at the same time, I recall each and every one of the Jews - women and children, old men and young - who, though they lost their lives, kept their faith in the Lord’s promises [ . . . ]. Our gaze now turns from the past to a future of reconciliation in justice. Once again, I deplore and condemn, together with you, the wickedness which made you suffer and which brought about the death of so many others. Of course, we must try to ‘purge the evil from our midst’ (cf. Deut. 17:7), but what concerns us now is not desire for revenge on the wicked, since it is fitting to leave the supreme judgment to God, but a commitment to ensure that never again can selfishness and hatred sow suffering and death [ . . . ]. The hard quest for justice, love, and peace must begin with ourselves [ . . . ]. Therefore, with God’s powerful help, true liberation from evil is a continuous crossing of the Red Sea, and involves a patient struggle, through which we have to progress by means of a daily conversion of heart, or teshuva. In repentance, fasting, works of mercy [ . . . ]. Knowing our weakness, and trusting in the strength of God who works in us and delivers us from evil, let us have recourse to the Lord who sets us free."33
Such is the Holy Father’s vision, totally realistic and totally anchored in faith. His vision meets the vision of the person of faith with whom I started my story, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who wrote in The Tablet: "There are two quite distinct challenges to religious leadership as this century and this millennium draw to their close. One challenge is very simple. We have to restate for a new generation a compelling sense of the sheer beauty and majesty of the Judeo-Christian ethic. And we can do it. We have to repeat again for children who have not heard it and need to hear it, our belief in the sanctity of human life as bearing God’s image and his likeness [ . . . ]. And there is the second challenge that we must as religious people face fairly and honestly. For the real secular challenge to religion does not come from any scientific would view. It comes from the voice of conscience itself, from the claim that religion has sometimes made us passive in the face of human suffering, has even itself contributed, God forbid, to human suffering. Until religions can live at peace with one another, they will not command the respect of our young people. They will be seen as part of the problem, and not as part of the solution. Those are the two great challenges. Let me here and now pay tribute in both regards to the work over these last few decades of the Catholic Church itself, which in recent years has been both an extraordinarily powerful moral voice, reminding us of those eternal truths that we have been in such great danger of forgetting, and which has shown, especially in the field of Catholic-Jewish relationships, that religions can learn to live at peace with one another, that we can begin to heal the pain of centuries and meet in understanding and mutual respect. It is not easy to be a person of faith. But let us realize that every single word of faith that you or I speak touches and strengthens the faith of other people [ . . . ]and that it is by sharing our faith, even where our faiths differ, that we recreate a world of faith for our children."34
6.
In our age it is not easy to be a person of faith indeed. Neither is it easy for us, Christians and Jews, in this post-Holocaust period to let our encounter be truthfully an interfaith encounter. Yet our relations not only involve (and I am borrowing the words from Rabbi Leon Klenicki) "persons of flesh and blood, but also continents of faith." "God is our common ground and sense," Klenicki says in an article on the need for a theological discussion in the interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews; "our faith commitments are areas of sacredness" which can meet in the sacredness of God’s Presence.35
It is in this sacred space that the past ought to be remembered, that memory can be healed, and that present challenges that both faith commitments are faced with in today’s world should be discussed.36 It is in this space that we should ask our questions beyond contempt, triumphalism, or self-righteousness. Where else can Christians overcome the triumphalism of power and Jews the triumphalism of pain?37 Where else can we believe, trust, and be changed? Where else can we repent, forgive, and be forgiven? In the words of Jonathan Sacks, where else can Jacob meet his brother without aggression or deception or fear? It took them many years. It took a deep inner struggle. After it Jacob limped. But after it Jacob became Israel.
The Pope sees the basis of our encounter not merely in reciprocal respect, but in our faith in the one, true God.38 Or, as he put it in addressing the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith on 22 March 1984, "the respect we speak of is based on the mysterious link which brings us close together, in Abraham, and through Abraham, in God who chose Israel and brought forth the Church from Israel [ . . . ]. All of us, Jews and Christians, pray frequently to Him with the same prayers, taken from the Book which we both consider to be the word of God. It is for Him to give to both religious communities, so near to each other, that reconciliation and effective love which are at the same time His command and His gift (Cf. Lv 19:18; Mk 12:30)."39 "In spite of this [nearness], our respective religious identities have divided us, at times grievously, through the centuries," he told the Jewish community in Sao Paolo, Brazil, on 3 July 1980. But "this should not be an obstacle to our now respecting this same identity, wanting to emphasize our common heritage and in this way to cooperate, in light of this same heritage, for the solution of problems which affect contemporary society, a society needing faith in God, obedience to His holy laws, active hope in the coming of His kingdom." In other words, the Pope does not think of Catholic-Jewish relations in merely secular terms, but in religious terms, in terms of faith.
Ambassador Shmuel Hadas, the first ambassador of Israel to the Holy See, was well aware of this when he addressed the Pope on the occasion of the presentation of his credentials on 29 September 1994. "Your Holiness," he said, "‘The Holy See and the State of Israel, mindful of the unique character and universal importance of the Holy Land and aware of the unique nature of the relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people, and of the historic process of reconciliation and growth in mutual understanding and friendship between Catholics and Jews . . .’ These eloquent and meaningful words introduced the preamble of the Fundamental Agreement between the holy See and the State of Israel, which on last December 30 paved the way to the normalization of relations between the Holy See and Israel, overcoming an obstacle to progress in Jewish-Catholic rapprochement. Obviously," he said, "this is not the conventional language of international diplomacy. It could not be otherwise . . ."
7.
I would like to conclude my paper with two paragraphs. One is from an address which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave at a conference held in Jerusalem in 1994, a few weeks after the signing of the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel. The other one was written in December 1987 by Judith Banki, who was then Associate National Director for Interreligious Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, in a paper entitled, "Catholics and Jews Confronting the Holocaust Together."
Cardinal Ratzinger: "After Auschwitz, the mission of reconciliation and acceptance permits no deferral [ . . . ]. Jews and Christians should accept each other in profound inner reconciliation, neither in disregard of their faith nor in its denial, but out of the depth of faith itself. In their mutual reconciliation they should become a force for peace in and for the world . . ."
Judith Banki: "Let us resolve to pursue [our efforts] toward the goal of understanding and combating the pathology of group hatred and persecution, in an atmosphere free of polemics. We are not responsible for the prejudices of the world into which we were born, but we are responsible for fighting them. We are not accountable for past events over which we had no control, but we are accountable for the future. We are jointly responsible for facing history and for forging new traditions of human and spiritual solidarity - for the sake of our children, our world, and the sanctification of the One who is Holy to all of us."
To this I say: Amen!
Notes
1. Cf. The Perspective of Faith. Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age, London, 1991, p. 3.
2. Cf. Leon Klenicki, "The Need For A Theological Discussion In the Interfaith Dialogue: A Proposal" in Atonement, March/April 1994, p. 1.
3. A.J. Heschel, "No Religion is an Island" in Union Theological Seminary Quarterly, 21:2,1 (January 1996).
4. Pope John Paul II, Address given on the occasion of a concert held in the Vatican on 7 April 1994 to commemorate the Shoah.
5. 9 June 1991.
6. Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy at the ICCJ Conference cited above.
7. Pope John Paul II, Address to the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, 26 March 1998. Cf. my paper "Catholic-Jewish Relations After World War II - A Catholic Assessment," delivered at the Symposium on The Fundamental Agreement Between the Holy See and the State of Israel, the Catholic University of America/Columbus School of Law, Washington DC, 8-9 April 1997.
8. Cf. Institute of the World Jewish Congress, An Unfinished Agenda, Policy Dispatch n. 23, November 1997.
9. Eric J. Greenberg, in The Jewish Week, 23 May 1997.
10. Cf. Institute of the World Jewish Congress, An Unfinished Agenda, Policy Dispatch n. 23, November 1997.
11. Cf. The Jewish Standard (New Jersey), 10 October 1997.
12. Cf. Institute of the World Jewish Congress, An Unfinished Agenda, Policy Dispatch n. 23, November 1997]. Pol Castel ["Looking for the Way Together in Jewish-Christian Dialogue," in America, 17 December 1994, p. 20] cites Irving Greenberg, "an Orthodox Rabbi who opened new vistas on the world waiting at the end of the road that is built and rebuilt out of creative encounter," about what he, Irving Greenberg, thinks is the unfinished agenda: "The unfinished agenda of the Jewish-Christian dialogue is the recognition of the profound interrelationship between both." That is why Jews and Christians, "fellow travelers in the divine plan of redemption" [Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, cited by Pol Castel], are called to stand together in facing and responding to a common agenda which, from the Jewish point of view, Rabbi Irving Greenberg describes as follows: "Judaism as a religion of redemption believes that in ages of great destruction, one must summon up an even greater response of life and re-creation. Nothing less than a messianic moment could possibly begin to correct the balance of the world after Auschwitz. This is a generation called to an overwhelming renewal of life, a renewal built on such love and such power that it would truly restore the image of God to every human being in the world."
13. Cf. Eric Greenberg’s article in The Jewish Week, cited above.
14. E.g., "Jewish leaders are increasing their pressure on the Vatican;" "documents released under pressure . . ."
15. Marshall Berger, a Jewish lecturer at the Law School of the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.) in Moment, December 1997, p. 24.
16. New City Press, New York, 1996, p. 10.
17. Cf. Celestine Bohen, "The Pope’s in a Confessional And the Jews Are Listening," in The New York Times of 30 November 1997, p. 12.
18. "Love, Hate, and Identity," in First Things, n. 77, November 1997, p. 27.
19. Ibid.
20. At the Van LeerInstitute, 10-11 February 1997. The Symposium was co-sponsored by the Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum Foundation, FAITH, ICCI, IJCIR.
21. My italics.
22. Rabbi Henry Siegman, "Ten Years of Catholic-Jewish Relations: A Reassessment," in Fifteen Years of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, 1970-1985 published by the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, Rome, 1988, pp. 27-45: "Taking full advantage of the prerequisite of the injured party, Jews have successfully managed the dialogue so that it has focused entirely on what we consider to be Christian failings; we have not been compelled to examine ourselves and the problematic of our own theology and traditions - at least not within the context of dialogue. I suppose that Christian forbearance with this one-sided situation is compounded of a sense of guilt and of noblesse oblige. However, it is a situation which cannot persist for long [ . . . ] because our Christian partners are not likely to continue the dialogue on these terms [ . . . ]. We have been forthright in calling Christianity to account, but we have been somewhat less than daring in initiating a process of self-examination." "I have come to the conclusion that there is something particularly distortive of the relationship, and misleading of its genuine character and depth in the frenetic efforts in which we engage with such monotonous regularity to extract public statements from Christian officials at every turn in Jewish affairs. Indeed, it seems to have become a major industry of American Jewish life, whose major beneficiaries, insofar as I can tell, are the advertising agencies and metropolitan newspapers. Of course, Jewish existence continues to be fragile and vulnerable, and we need understanding friendship and public support as desperately as we ever did. But if these are to have any meaning and particular consequence, then they must be spontaneous expressions rather than ritualistic responses to heavy-handed pressure exerted by Jewish organizations, including my own."
23. In The Holocaust Now - Contemporary Christian and Jewish Thought, edited by Rabbi Steven L. Jacobs, East Rockaway, N.Y., 1996, p. 237.
24. Ibid., pp. 238-239.
25. Ibid., p. 241.
26. Pope John Paul II, Address to the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, 6 December 1990.
27. Idem, Sunday prayer of the Regina Coeli, 18 April 1993.
28. Idem, Letter to Archbishop John L. May, then President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the USA, 8 August 1987.
29. Idem, Address to Jewish Leaders in Miami, 11 September 1987.
30. 8 November 1990. My italics.
31. Cf. "Towards a Europe of Compassion," in Common Ground (the Journal of the Council of Christians and Jews in Great Britain), n. 11, 1995, p. 24.
32. Op. Cit., p. 64.
33. 18 August 1991.
34. "From slavery to freedom: the journey of faith," in The Tablet, 10 June 1995, pp. 734-735.
35. In Atonement, March/April 1994, p. 1
36. Pope John Paul II, Message to the Jews from around the world gathered in Poland in April 1993 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, 6 April 1993: "We remember, and we need to remember, but we need to remember with renewed trust in God and in his all-healing blessings." "As Christians and Jews, following the example of the faith of Abraham, we are called to be a blessing for the world (Cf. Gen.12:2 ff.). This is the common task awaiting us. It is therefore necessary for us, Christians and Jews, to be first a blessing to one another. This will effectively occur if we are united in the face of the evils which are still threatening indifference and prejudice, as well as displays of anti-Semitism."
37. Cf. Leon Klenicki, op. cit., p. 2. See also Henry Siegman, op. Cit., who already in 1976 outlined his perception of what was then happening in Jewish-Catholic relations: "It seems reasonably clear that the process is an irreversible one. The capacity to hurt one another is still there, and - more likely than not - will not remain unexercised. The areas of misunderstanding still remain vast. But the notions of an earlier Christian triumphalism of the Jewish people as role-players in someone else’s Passion play is a thing of the past, and that is a far-reaching change indeed. It also frees the Jewish people to shed its own particular kind of triumphalism, the definite triumphalism of the persecuted and the abused, and to relate in a more open and creative way to the world about it." I hope so.
38. Pope John Paul II, Address to Jewish leaders in Brasilia, 15 October 1991.
39. Idem, Address to Representatives of Jewish Organizations, 12 March 1979.