Talking to the Other: Jewish Interfaith Dialogue with Christians and Muslims
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Talking to the Other Jacob said to Esau: I have seen your face as if seeing the face of God and you have received me favourably. (Genesis 33:10) Talking to the Other Jewish Interfaith Dialogue with Christians and Muslims Jonathan Magonet The publication of this book was made possible through a subsidy from the Stone Ashdown Trust Published in 2003 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Jonathan Magonet, 2003 The right of Jonathan Magonet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1 86064 905 X A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset in Caslon by Dexter Haven Associates, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin Contents Foreword, by Prince Hassan bin Tallal vii Preface xiii 1 Interfaith Dialogue – A Personal Introduction 1 From Theory to Practice 2 The Challenge to Judaism of Interfaith Dialogue 11 3 Chances and Limits of Multicultural Society 23 4 Reflections on the Jewish Immigrant Experience 34 5Controversy for the Sake of Heaven 48 6 Between Controversy and Conflict 62 7 The Ten Commandments and the Quest for Universal Values 73 8Risk-taking in Religious Dialogue 90 9Teaching the Teachers 107 Addressing Christians 10 Jewish Perceptions of Jesus 122 11 When I See What Christians Make of the ‘Hebrew’ Bible 134 Addressing Muslims 12 Jewish Perceptions of Muhammad 147 13 The Challenges Facing the Muslim Community 161 Addressing Jews 14 Towards a Jewish–Muslim Dialogue 169 Interfaith Dialogue and the Middle East: A Documentation 15 Haman’s New Victims 179 16 An Evening of Mourning for the Victims of the Massacre at the Hebron Mosque 183 17 Prayers for Peace in the Middle East 188 18 From a Narrow Place: A New Year Sermon 192 19 The Journey to Dialogue 199 Afterword, by Karen Armstrong 204 Appendix I: What is JCM? 208 Appendix II: A Prayer for Interfaith Meetings 214 Notes on the Text 215 References 221 Index 223 Foreword by Prince Hassan bin Tallal Do you not see that God sends down water from the sky, by which We bring forth fruits of different colours? – and in the mountains, too, there are white and red tracks of different shades, as well as black? And of human beings, beasts and cattle, there are also various colours. Holy Qur’an (35:27–8) In 1965, Abraham Heschel – the great rabbi, spiritual teacher and professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York – asked the question: on what basis do people of different religious commitments meet each other? He immediately answered himself by speaking of the identical traits that humans share: a voice, a face, fear, hope, the capacity to trust. But then the rabbi answered his question again by speaking of the differences through which religion is revealed: ‘Revelation is always an accommodation to the capacity of man. No two minds are alike, just as no two faces are alike. The voice of God reaches the spirit of man in a variety of ways, in a multiplicity of languages. One truth comes to expression in many ways of understanding.’ It is more than three decades now since I had the pleasure of first discussing ideas about interfaith dialogue with Professor Rabbi Magonet, the author of this book. We agreed then, as now, on the importance of mutual understanding between adherents of the sibling faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At that time, merely for such conversations to take place anywhere in the world was unusual and – to some – even shocking, in a way which can hardly be imagined today. Rabbi Magonet undertook a project for interfaith dialogue which developed into the well-known meetings at Bendorf, now part of a Standing Conference of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe. Meanwhile I promoted interfaith dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims in a series of encounters in Windsor and Amman. At our early meetings, we could not imagine what phases of fear and acceptance we would pass through over the course of 25 years to produce a single page vii viii — TALKING TO THE OTHER of principles for Abrahamic dialogue: begin with commonality; emphasise the association between theology and practicality; recognise the political and economic dimensions of interfaith dialogue; take into account the Enlightenment tradition; embrace the principle of no coercion; uphold the right to proclaim one’s own religion; reconsider the content of education; ensure a free flow of information; be courageous in looking afresh at, first, our own, and, secondly, each other’s texts, heritage and history; accept responsibility for words and actions at all levels; develop a civilised frame- work for disagreement. Professor Rabbi Magonet has taken a parallel approach with the essays below: his introduction voices a personal and humane urge to strengthen our commonalities, followed by an opening section dealing with the question of how to put theory into practice. Specific perceptions of each other’s characteristics by members of the three monotheistic faiths precede a documentation of interfaith in the Middle Eastern context – where the political and economic dimensions, philosophical traditions and issues of coercion, rights, education, freedom, courage, responsibility and the capacity to disagree peacefully are certainly extremely relevant. The great religions together recognise today that, if globalisation is to succeed and civilisation benefit all people, shared human imperatives must outweigh economic and political expediencies. The question is how to evoke or instill the common values in the broader community. As a race, we seem to suffer a lack of political and economic will at the same time as thinking that all solutions must be political and economic. Politics and economics provide means for material security, but people cannot live with each other without some security of identity, a sense of dignity and respect for others which is the ‘soft security’ of self; such security is not innate but learned and experienced. According to Islam, many values can be invoked in encouraging active altruism: ukhowwah – brotherhood promoting the bonds of human frat- ernity, adl – enforcing a system of individual and social obligations, and ihsan – beneficence, which supplements ukhowwah and adl with charitable acts. There are also the more institutionalised systems of waqf and zakat, which pool financial donations for disbursement to the poor and for the common good. FOREWORD — ix In the chapter entitled ‘The Challenges Facing the Muslim Community’, Professor Magonet outlines a number of similarities and differences between Jewish and Muslim historical experiences and religious thought. As he comments, ‘We share the conviction that love, compassion, friendship, mercy and pity for a suffering world are at the heart of everything our two faiths stand for, despite the ways in which both of our traditions have been slandered over the centuries as lacking in such values’. Jewish and Muslim thinkers today continue to emphasise the possibility – or, indeed, inevitability – of peaceful co-existence. As the Jewish scholar Professor Shimon Shamir recently commented during a documentation of such thinking, ‘In the life of a movement, sometimes trend is more important than volume…Paradoxically, interest in theories and methods of mutual acceptance grows precisely when extremism looms large.’ Parallels between the Holy Qur’an, the Torah and the Old and New Testaments indicate that an ethic of human solidarity, a sense of respon- sibility and an impulse towards altruism are supposed to accompany the material charity which is a common theme in our three faiths. If everybody who professed monotheism obeyed the Ten Commandments, universal values would be well within reach. Spiritual altruism – the reaching out to acknowledge, understand and respect each other’s dignity and humanity – is the necessary counterpart if altruism is not to degenerate into mere patronage. The spirit of this altruistic love is perhaps not described so well by ‘charity’ in its modern sense as by the Latin biblical term caritas. It is powerfully illustrated in a number of places in the New Testament. One might recall Jesus’s words to the crowd who would stone the adultress, ‘Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone’ ( John 8:3–9); and the famous parable of the Good Samaritan, who set aside the ideo- logical divide between himself and the victim of a robbery in order to help him (Luke 10:25–37). When we neglect the spirit of human solidarity in our faiths, we abandon the middle ground – which is our shared heritage and should be our most sacred space – to be occupied by hatred, division, exclusion, political infighting and isolationism. Well might Rabbi Tony Bayfield bitterly have lamented the neglect of that common ground, which he described as ‘the failure of Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders alike to denounce x — TALKING TO THE OTHER fundamentalism and to stand together in affirmation of shared values, in particular values relating to the sanctity of life and the central role of religion to challenge power, not to seize it for coercive purposes’. As Professor Magonet himself knows well, and as he discusses in the chapter titled ‘Risk-taking in Religious Dialogue’, the desire to find common ground and common solutions between faiths means taking risks and crossing boundaries.