Rabbi Greenberg, Ladies and gentlemen,
The first and the last time that I met dr.Greenberg was in April 1983 in New York, when I made with Mrs.Christine Pilon of Nes Ammim, Israel, a lecture tour in the United States, on the invitation of the American Jewish Committee. With a terrible jet lag we arrived in Kennedy Airport and were immediately driven to a welcome dinner, with some officials and with dr.Greenberg. In New York it was 8 p.m., for us it was 4 a.m. in the morning. During the meal there was an ongoing wonderful, exciting conversation, on the same subject as this afternoon. That is all what I remember. But this afternoon I heard it at last.
At that time I had read your thorough lecture 'Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire', published in 1977, and it gave me a lot of inspiration for my work in Nes Ammim, where we tried to turn a new leaf in the sad book of Jewish-Christian relations. Your well-reflected in this essay were more or less the unformulated questions of our daily existence as Christians living in Israel. Confronted with the frightening facts of our past we asked ourselves: Could we call ourselves still Christians after all what happened in the name of Christianity? I quote Rabbi Greenberg from his lecture of 1974: "Has the wager of faith in Jesus been lost?..The hope is that the good outweighs the evil. But the throwing into the scales of so massive a weight of evil and guilt raises the question whether the balance might now be broken, whether one must not decide that it were better that Jesus had not come, rather that such scenes be enacted six millions times over - and more". At such a statement - silence can be the only response, and not any Christian apology or pious testimony.
Rabbi Greenberg, you speak in your publications about 'moment faiths' after the Shoah. Time is over for massive, well-assured dogmatic faith. But there are 'moment faiths', you say, moments when visions of redemption are present. Reading your lectured and publications menat such a 'momet faith' to me. I had the same experience when I went in 1987 with Jewish survivors to Poland, to the memorial places of the former concentration camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka and
Sobibor. Terrible memories came back, but there were also such 'moment faiths' in the encounters with survivors who still kept hope in human beings, who were still fighting for a better world, who continued to live the sanctity of life (qiddusj ha-chaim) with their children and grandchildren.
But I must also confess, and now I relate soon to your present lecture, many of your statements sound too optimistic to me. Can we ever call such an event of darkness like Auschwitz a revelatory moment, as you did in your writings? If that would be true, must we not admit (fifty years after) that humanity has not heard and understood the revelation and has not taken up the challenge? Rabbi Greenberg wrote in 1984: "Nothing less than a messianic moment could possibly begin to correct the balance of the world after Auschwitz". Your present lecture sounds even more optimistic than your earlier writings. Perhaps we can only respond with: Let us hope so! But is this hope not destroyed? Humanity did not choose life after Auschwitz. We could point to Bosnia and Czechnia, but in particular to the terrible genocide in Rwanda. Perhaps we must time and again repeat the question of the German theologian Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt in the title of his three-volume eschatology: "Was dürfen wir hoffen, wenn wir hoffen dürften?" (What should we hope, if we still should hope?)
And: Is there any reason for optimism as regards the attitude of the churches? I tell you about an article of a friend of mine in Jerusalem, an Israeli journalist, Yossi Klein Halevi (he is a kind of convert because he belonged to the Rabbi Kahane Kach-movement and is now more leftist in his political views). In May 1995 we had long discussions in Jerusalem on the changes in the churches vis-à-vis Judaism. He collected material for an article. It resulted in an article in the magazine Jerusalem Report, a cover-story under the heading 'The Church repents'. The main point of his lecture was: Now the church has left anti-Judaism and has given up triumphalism, where is the proper response from the Jewish side? I think his article (which found even its way to the daily paper Trouw in Holland) was too optimistic. There are certainly here and there in the churches some signs of sincere repentance, some official statements which give hope, but the majority of the Christian churches is still on the old track - triumphalistic and anti-Judaic. And there are on the Jewish side not only closed doors but also open gestures, open attitudes, like the approach of Rabbi Greenberg today.
For me, reading the publications of Rabbi Greenberg and hearing his lecture, means a spark of hope. It is for me also (I really donot want to exaggerate) a moment of grace, when a Jewish scholar can speak in such a way about Christianity. I realize that his reflections are - in the light of history - from a Jewish point of view risky. Who can proof to him and to the Jewish community that Christians will react in the right way, that they will not abuse his views? Therefore, I can understand totally different approaches from Jews toward Christianity, like the opinion of Rabbi Raph Evers of Amsterdam in his last book, where he maintains that Christianity is not monotheism but polytheism. I quote him: "Salvation in Christianity means submission to an almighty authority that sets a Christian free from his loneliness but robs him also from his personal responsibility". For me this is not a right picture of my faith, but in the light of history I can understand this angry position. Rabbi Greenberg reaches out in another, for Jews perhaps risky, way. It is the challenge of hope. I want to thank him for this challenge and for this moment of hope.
But I would like also to put some more questions:
1. How far can you go in the dialogue to affirm the faith-claim of the other and still claim yourself to be an Orthodox Jew? Is it not a better way to emphasize the distinctiveness of both religions, Judaism and Christianity, than to search for commonalities and overlaps? Rabbi Greenberg tried for example to interpret Christian faith-claims like the Incarnation and Resurrection from his Hebrew background, a promising and worthwhile endeavour, but on the other hand he applauds the for him brave theological attempts of Roy and Alice Eckardt, who as Christians theologians totally reject the Christian faith in the resurrection of Jesus, because they regard this faith as triumphalistic and dangerous for Jews (in: Long Night's Journey into Day, Detroit 1982). Would it not be better not to mix into internal Jewish or Christian debates but rather to emphasize the distinctiveness of the other and give the other room to celebrate the particularity of his/her faith? (so David Hartman). Why should Jews applaud Christian theological concepts, which other Christains regard as the selling out of the heart of their faith? Should we not limit ourselves to the lessons for the future, when we turn away in our respective religions from the dangerous and dark sides of our faith-claims ? I mean 'dangerous' in the sense of dangerous for the life of other human beings and creatures. It is for Christians still a long night's journey into day.
2. If Christians realize that they have not in the church taken over the New Covenant from the Old Covenant of Israel, then they get sooner or later into an identity -crisis and ask the question: Who are we? Can we still see ourselves as partners in the covenant of God or is this the prerogative of the Jewish People? Some Christians are knocking on the door - to say so - of the covenant of the Jewish People and are begging: Please, let us in. And then there are a few wellmeaning and nice Jewish scholars like Rabbi Greenberg who say: Please, come in the room of the covenant, there is plenty of room, but take your own seats with you and donot take our seats ( in the sense of the old Christian replacement theology). This is, of course, a gracious attitude. But I believe that in the asymmetry of the dialogical relationship between Jews and Christians, Christians must do their own theological homework and find their own entrance into the covenantal relationship with God. This brings them always also in relation to the Jewish People. I like the approach of the already mentioned German theologian Marquardt, more than the liberal concept of a covenantal pluralism, which term sounds to me as if God has taken over the American way. I quote Marquardt: "As representatives of the Gojiem churches may hope to become partners in the covenantal community with Israel, if they are ready to bear the burden of Israel in the sanctification of the Name (Qiddush HaShem) and if they will be involved in the effort to restore the world (Tikkun Olam) and if they are willing to join Israel on its way to the New Covenant which is still ahead of us in the future".
3. Is it not a kind of supersessionism to state, like Greenberg does, that the Jewish People after 1948 is in the third stage of the process of growing to more responsibility in the covenant, while the church is now coming slowly from the first stage of biblical faith into the second stage and will perhaps in the future follow the Jewish People to the third stage? Is the biblical form of faith necessarily a lower stage of relationship between humankind and God? The Orthodox Jewish scholar Michael Wyschogrod writes for example that he rediscovered in Jewish-Christian dialogue the biblical basis of his Jewish faith.
4. It is a remarkable view of Rabbi Greenberg that he does not look at Jesus as a false Messiah, which is more or less the normal view among Jews, but as a failed Messiah. I think - with all understanding and even admiration - that it is not possible for Christians to take over that view. But I want to learn from this approach. I regard it as a challenge to leave in our Christology all traces of triumphalism and supersessionism. Should we not - and now I address myself exclusively to Christians - give up totally the traditional fulfilment-language of Christology and learn to speak the language of hope? Should we not stress much more the eschatological aspects of our faith? Should we not speak about Jesus as the would-be-Messiah or the Messiah-in-spe, not because we like to please the Jews (they are not pleased with any kind of Christology) but as a sincere and authentic expression of our own faith? In short: Jewish questions give Christians a lot to reflect upon. We have as Christians only made a small start with our new homework.
Simon Schoon