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PARSHA COMMENTARY

Parashat Ki Tetze
By: Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff
Relating to Non-Jews

This week's Torah reading includes several verses that define what the Israelites' relationship should be to several other nations:

No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord; none of their descendants, even in the tenth generation, shall ever be admitted into the congregation of the Lord because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey after you left Egypt and because they hired Balaam son of Beor ... to curse you....You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your kinsman. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land. Children born to them may be admitted into the congregation of the Lord in the third generation. (Deuteronomy 23:4-9)

The Torah was, of course, speaking only of some of the foreign nations with which the Israelites had had contact to that point. Later books of the Bible, and, even more, rabbinic texts over the last two thousand years speak in the context of Jews living in a widespread diaspora. They thus reflect the fact that Jews have interacted with non-Jews of many different religions - various sorts of pagans, Zoroastrians, Muslims, and Christians - who have related to Jews through many different political, economic, and religious arrangements. One does not have to adopt what Salo Baron termed "the lachrymose theory of Jewish history" to recognize that in most, but not all, times and places, Jews were treated badly. The position of Jews in Enlightenment countries, and especially modern America, is truly unprecedented, and it raises major questions of how to respond to both the blessings and curses of assimilation. The verses cited above already anticipate that our policies with regard to some other nations must be different from our policies with regard to others and that the differences center, at least in part, on our relationships with them and what they have done to or for us historically, but they could not have anticipated the Holocaust and all the ramifications of that horrible experience.

One significant community - indeed numbering a quarter to a third of the world's population - that has sought to come to terms with what it has done to us historically and to change that is the Catholic Church. This year marks the 45th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's document on the Church's relationships with other groups, including section 4 on its relationships to Judaism and the Jewish people. The relevant sections make four primary points:

1) The Covenant of God with the Jewish People remains in force:

As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation,(9) nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading.(10) Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle.(11) In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" (Soph. 3:9).(12)

This completely negates the long history of Christian supercessionism, in which the Church claimed that the coming of Christ invalidated the Old Covenant, which was now superseded by the New Covenant. In subsequent official documents of the Vatican and in statements of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, this has meant that the Church has renounced missionizing Jews, the exact opposite of what it did for centuries, sometimes through the Crusades and the Inquisition, and what evangelical Christians proudly are trying to do to this day. In fact, it is precisely this policy of the Catholic Church that brought an abrupt end to the Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had tried to initiate in the early 2000's.

2. Jews are not to be seen as Christ-killers:

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today

My father, who was born in Poland and who experienced this charge and its often violent aftermath first-hand, could not believe that the Church had taken this stance. He thought that either the newspaper must have reported it incorrectly or that we were entering Messianic times (mashiahzeit). Truthfully, this is nothing short of a Copernican revolution in the underlying foundations of Catholic-Jewish relations.

3. Anti-Semitism is not to be encouraged or even tolerated:

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

Later Pope John Paul II was actually to call anti-Semitism a "sin."

4. The Church must work toward greater understanding and cooperation:

Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.

These paragraphs come from a Councilar document; there is no higher authority in the Catholic Church. What, though, shall we make of all this 45 years later? As Jews, we are wary of lip service and want to see what people who proclaim noble ideals actually have done to realize them.

Not surprisingly for such a major change of close to 2,000 years of thought and practice, the record is mixed. Pope John Paul II recognized the State of Israel politically, visited Israel and publicly asked for forgiveness at the Western Wall, and visited the synagogue in Rome as a guest seeking good relations. The Vatican has issued several official documents since 1965 that spell out how these principles are to be carried out in the Church's liturgical and educational publications. In some dioceses, cardinals have made these statements the center of considerable time and energy. In Los Angeles, the largest diocese in the United States, Cardinal Manning initiated the Priest-Rabbi Dialogue in cooperation with the Board of Rabbis of Southern California in 1973 and a parallel dialogue of lay leaders, and his successor, Cardinal Mahony, has, if anything, intensified these efforts in the schools and the seminary of the archdiocese during the last 25 years. On the other hand, when I taught a group of seminarians in Crackow, Poland - the native city of Pope John Paul II, who did so much to act on improving relationships with the Jewish community - the very first question I was asked when I opened the floor to any question they had on their minds was "Why did the Jews kill Christ?" I was frankly glad this young man had asked me the question because I knew that many others in that group of 50 young seminarians wanted to ask the same thing. After all, the Good Friday liturgy that he had heard since childhood repeats the Gospel story in which "the Jews" tell Pontius Pilate to kill Jesus. The fact that Cardinal Marshasky had invited me to speak with his seminarians is testimony to his intention to carry out the mandate of the Council, but the seminarian's question indicates how far the Catholic Church has to go to get this message across in the wide diaspora that is Catholic Christianity.

In the early 1990s, the priests on the Priest-Rabbi Dialogue in Los Angeles asked us rabbis what it would take for the Jewish community to forgive Catholics for what the Church did and failed to do during the Holocaust. We soon realized that because all the priests and rabbis around the table were either born after 1945 or were young children then, the priests did not have the moral standing to ask for forgiveness for what they themselves had not done, and the rabbis did not have the standing to grant it, even if we wanted to do so. We instead began to talk about what reconciliation would mean - and what the Catholic Church would need to do to warrant that. I discuss this at some length in my book To Do the Right and the Good: A Jewish Approach to Modern Social Ethics in the chapter entitled "Communal Forgiveness," in which I distinguish among forgiveness, reconciliation, and pardon; develop a new, communal model for forgiveness; and discuss the grounds that would warrant communal forgiveness. One then, of course, has to determine whether the Catholic Church - or any other group - has done what is necessary to warrant forgiveness - or whether we have done so when we Jews have harmed other groups.

This week's Torah reading asks us seriously to consider our relationships with non-Jewish groups of people and to develop policies that befit both our history with each of them and the present realities of our relationships with each of them. In this month of Elul, when we focus on our individual sins, ask forgiveness from those we have offended, and seek to improve in the coming year, we must also consider how we carry out this process on a communal level. May we do so with the intellectual, emotional, and religious rigor that is modeled for us in its earliest stages in this week's Torah reading, and may we learn when and how to forgive in our personal and communal lives.

Shabbat Shalom.

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Last Updated:
August 20, 2010, 2010, 03:00 p.m.