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The InterVIEW

Dialogue teaches Catholics, Jews about themselves

A regular feature of The Catholic New World, The InterVIEW is an in-depth conversation with a person whose words, actions or ideas affect today's Catholic. It may be affirming of faith or confrontational. But it will always be stimulating.

Dialogue teaches Catholics, Jews about themselves Eugene J. Fisher, for 30 years the associate director for Catholic-Jewish relations in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, offered the annual Cardinal Joseph Bernardin Jerusalem Lecture at the Spertus Institute Feb. 26. He talked about his topic, “Jewish- Catholic Relations: Past, Present and Future” with assistant editor Michelle Martin in a telephone interview from his home in Virginia.

Fisher, who retired from the USCCB in June 2007, explained that he became involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue after finishing a degree in Hebrew studies at New York University in 1971.

Catholic New World: What do Catholics have to learn from dialogue with the Jews?

Eugene J. Fisher: We have much to learn, first of all about ourselves. To understand Christianity in general, you have to realize that we are essentially a Jewish movement gone global. If you attend Mass, you’re going to essentially a Jewish service. The first half of the Mass, the liturgy of the Word, is a short version of what the Jews do in the synagogue. You have readings from Scripture, you have psalms being prayed, you have prayers, you have interpretation of the Scripture in the homily. That’s where we get that from, because the founders of Christianity were of course, Jewish, and they prayed the way their ancestors prayed.

The second half of the Mass is, in essence, a shortened seder service and the Sabbath service. You’ve got the blessings over the bread and wine, then you have the telling of the founding drama.If you want to understand how we pray the way we pray and why, once one connects it back with Judaism, it is incredibly enriched in terms of understanding why we do what we do every Sunday in church.

CNW: What about in other areas?

Fisher: We can learn a lot in the area of Scripture ... a lot of our Scriptures are the Jewish Scriptures. And the New Testament was mostly written by Jews, for Jews, about Jews, arguing with other Jews about Judaism and it’s best understood as that. To understand Christianity, it is crucial to understand and be in dialogue with Jews. When we don’t, we wander off into all sorts of weird strange things.

CNW: What do Jews have to learn from Christians?

Fisher: Jews have a great belief that the better we understand them, the less likely we are to do things like forced conversions or nasty stuff. If we teach our children accurately what Judaism is, they think, those children will have a more positive attitude toward Jews, and they’re right.

The other thing they have to gain, I think, is that modern Judaism is framed quite a bit by its experience with this sibling, Christianity. Both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are to a great extent a product of trying to answer the question, what does it mean to be the People of God without a temple, without the temple sacrifice? Rabbinic Judaism is pretty much as far from biblical Judaism as we are, and as connected to it as we are.

CNW: What are the challenges?

Fisher: Things have never been easy. When the pope came in 1987 and was to have his first meeting with representatives of the world’s largest Jewish community in Miami, the Vatican secretary of state had the great wisdom of inviting the president of Austria to come and visit. This was Kurt Waldheim (who was found to have be complicit in Nazi war crimes). This was not well-timed to say the least.

These kinds of controversies — many of them around the Holocaust and Christian treatment of the Jews over the centuries — will continue for a while. We’re doing much better, but we’re not going to hit every note exactly correctly for a while. Jews know we’re trying.

CNW: How does that relate to the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews?

Fisher: It’s the whole issue of forced conversions. Tens of thousands of Jews died rather than convert to Christianity. When a Christian says the word conversion to a Jew, the Jew looks the other way and starts packing a bag. (For more on the prayer, see story on Page 5)

What I said in Chicago was that the prayer has two sentences. The first prays for the Jews to be enlightened and accept Jesus. It doesn’t say when or how. The second sentence is a paraphrase of Romans 11, where Paul, after wrangling about the issue of God’s relations with the Jews, says when the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, all Israel will be saved. That is definitely eschatological. We are not praying for the Jews to convert necessarily immediately now. When the end times happen, the church will be irrelevant. That which it exists to prepare for — the kingdom of God — will be here. It’s a whole new order.

What we need is a clarification from Rome that this is indeed the proper interpretation of this prayer. Liturgy requires catechesis defining it. Right now, we’ve got this new prayer with no catechesis. It is the obligation of the folks in Rome to issue instructions on how it is to be understood. Otherwise, it’s confusing, and that’s no way for the church to go.

CNW: Where do we go from here?

Fisher: We will continue to have more in common, we Catholics and Jews in the United States, than around the world. We will continue to have much more in common than would cause us to compete with one another. We will continue to learn more about ourselves, and they will continue to learn more about what it means to be a Jew, because we will have asked them questions about being Jewish that they wouldn’t have thought of. Dialogue does that. You learn a lot about yourself, and it’s an incredible amount of fun.