222 - Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification

Jewish-Christian Dialogue:
A Jewish Justification
By David Novak
New York, Oxford University Press, 1989. 194 pp. $24.95.

This book, something of a first, contains just what its title promises: a theological argument by a Jew who is learned and committed to the Jewish tradition (he taught Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary), and also philosophically sophisticated (now Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the University of Virginia) for why Jews should enter into and take seriously a theological conversation with Christians. Jews will find one who knows and loves the rabbinic tradition well enough to have learned from the rabbis their freedom to play with their sources for the good of the community. Christians who are theologically committed to the dialogue will find it both fascinating and instructive.

Novak begins, as he must, by meeting Jewish arguments against the dialogue (only make those contacts with a dominant majority that are necessary to survival; Christianity is fundamentally anti-Judaic; Jewish singularity will be threatened if matters of faith are up for discussion). Situating the present dialogue in its powerfully secular context, he

224 - Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification

defines it as a conversation in which each is able to see itself in the way it is characterized by the other; if both triumphalism and reldtivism are to be avoided, each community will have to explore its sources to find grounds for affirming the commitments of both to a transcendent revelation. If it is to be authentic, neither side can step outside of its particular commitment to Torah and Christ. Brotherhood breakfasts is not what this book is about.

Novak handles a wide range of Jewish sources with learning, care, and subtlety to show that there is no halakhic prohibition to the dialogue and then to begin building a Jewish case for it. Starting with the Noachide Laws, the foundation for Jewish views of the non-Jew, he traces their truly complex development and the changing interpretation of them up into the Middle Ages. In analyzing the shifting medieval Jewish attitudes to Christianity, he makes an interesting case for the influence of Kabbalistic thought in enabling some Jewish thinkers to exempt trinitarian worship from the category of idolatry. With that step, it became possible to conceive that what appears to mediate God in the other community is not necessarily an idol, and although Maimonides saw Christianity (and Islam) as a dilution rather than a correction of Jewish monotheism, his late writings contain grounds for seeing a common biblical basis for dialogue. The rapprochement between liberal Judaism and liberal Protestantism around a new "historical Jesus," however, was built on a mutual betrayal of both traditions, finding a common ground for which a transcendent God was quite unnecessary. On the other hand, Buber's denial of a constituent role for law in the Jewish as well as in the Christian relationship to God, he argues, entailed a denial of both community and history, whereas Rosenzweig's theory of the relationship was built on an inadequate characterization of both Judaism (removed from history) and Christianity (triumphant in history).

In the last chapter, Novak develops, out of a Maimonidean distinction, his proposal for a more adequate framework for engaging in the Jewish-Christian dialogue: Each community should be able to see the other "as lying within the realm of possibility for the emergence of one's own faith community," because they share a common border of "theonomous morality," a shared biblical ethic, to which they are committed respectively as the law of Torah and the law of Christ. The richness of the preceding chapters led this reviewer to expect more, but in spite of its insufficiently developed conclusion, the book is to be highly recommended for its fascinating and liberating analysis of Jewish sources for a commitment to the dialogue.

Paul M. Van Buren
Boston, Massachusetts