## Faith in the Future, Part II; Living Together, Chapter 12; The Interfaith Imperative

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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***The Interfaith Imperative***¹

footnotes:
¹ Lecture to the Annual General Meeting of the Council of Christians and Jews, 1989.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Many years ago I had the privilege of meeting one of the great religious leaders of the Jewish world. He was a Hassidic Rebbe, head of a large group of Jewish mystics. I was inspired by his teachings and impressed by the spirituality of his followers. But I had a question about the way of life he advocated. It seemed exclusive. In its intense and segregated piety it shut out the rest of the world. Was there not – I asked him – beauty and value outside the narrow walls in which he lived? He answered me with a parable.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Imagine, he said, two people who spend their lives transporting stones. One carries bags of diamonds. The other hauls sacks of rocks. Each is now asked to take a consignment of rubies. Which of the two understands what he is now to carry? The man who is used to diamonds knows that stones can be precious, even those that are not diamonds. But the man who has carried only rocks thinks of stones as a mere burden. They have weight but not worth. Rubies are beyond his comprehension.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
So it is, he said, with faith. If we cherish our own, then we know the value of others. We may regard ours as a diamond and another faith as a ruby, but we know that both are precious stones. But if faith is a mere burden, not only will we not value ours. Neither will we value the faith of someone else. We will see both as equally useless. True tolerance, he implied, comes not from the absence of faith but from its living presence. His words rang true. My own experience had taught me likewise.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
I grew up in Finchley, and my parents sent their children to the schools closest to hand. Both were Christian establishments, and I have often reflected on how my brothers and I, members of an Orthodox Jewish family, reacted to a religious environment so different from what we knew from the synagogue and home. The answer is simple. We encountered teachers who valued their religion, and as a result we learned to value our own. We were conscious of our difference, but the difference was respected. Interacting with our teachers and friends we learned that those who are at home in their own faith, who are confident in their beliefs and assured of their own religious heritage, are not threatened by another faith. On the contrary, they are capable of valuing and being enlarged by it.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
So, at an early age, I learned how the encounter between Christians and Jews can benefit both traditions by teaching us pride in our own heritage, and humility in the face of another. That is the great truth on which the Council of Christians and Jews is predicated. But – and this is the crucial question – how many people still share that vision?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Twenty or thirty years ago, the answer would have been: a great many. There was a time – it reached its high point in the 1960s – when the word “interfaith” was on many people’s lips. It seemed then as if dialogue would bring about a momentous transformation in the relationship between the great world religions. It was as if we were about to enter a new era in inter-religious understanding. There was a widespread sense that we had been estranged for too long.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For centuries, even millennia, religions had seen themselves as possessors of exclusive truths and of unique paths to salvation. Each in affirming its own faith, denied the integrity of others. Above all, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity had been fraught with tragedy. As centuries of suspicion, even hostility, reached their shattering climax in the Holocaust, men and women of faith knew in their hearts that some other understanding had now to emerge. So, in a historic gesture of reconciliation, Christians and Jews alike began to reach out to one another, determined to turn a history of alienation into a legacy of love.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It was, and in retrospect will be seen to be, a heroic undertaking. But the world has moved on, and in some respects not for the better. Today we stand between the beginning of two new decades, the 5750s in the Jewish calendar, the 1990s in the Christian calendar. And from both perspectives, the future seems more sombre than it did twenty or thirty years ago. In Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other world faiths the voice of tolerance and moderation has become muted, even unsure of itself. Those who claim to represent religious authenticity have been those who, by and large, reject dialogue, accommodation and pluralism, and speak instead of authority, exclusivity and the uncompromising fundamentals of faith. As a result, religion in the contemporary world has become again a scene of conflict rather than reconciliation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Specifically in terms of the Jewish-Christian encounter there have been tensions on both sides. For Jews there has been a sense of unease. They ask the following questions. Have the Churches fully come to terms with the centrality of the State of Israel in Jewish consciousness? Have they understood what its security means to a people who came face to face with the angel of death at Auschwitz, and had no inch of the planet Earth that was their refuge and their home? Have they reflected fully on the pain caused by the convent at Auschwitz, a pain whose dimensions are too deep for me to analyse here? Do the Churches understand the particular assault on Jewish sensibilities caused by missionary activities targeted on lonely or vulnerable Jews? More deeply: Has Christian theology yet fully come to terms with the contemporary vitality of Jewish existence, with the miracle of Jewish religious and national rebirth after the Holocaust, with the fact that *Am Yisrael Chai,* the people of the covenant lives?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
I speak as a Jew. But a Christian would surely set forth another perspective and testify to pain on the other side of the relationship as well. In Christian eyes it must at times seem that the State of Israel is a dilemma, not just an achievement. How can Jewish and Palestinian claims co-exist and be resolved? How, in Israel, can military and religious values live alongside one another? Can there be a religious ethic, not of powerlessness, but of power? Must our hearts not go out to the Palestinians as they once went out to the Jews? And as for the Holocaust, have we not moved beyond the time of remembering to a time of forgiving? Is there not a certain unforgiving relentlessness about bringing aged war criminals to trial forty years after the event? As a Jew, I must hear that voice and that pain and know that they express sincere Christian concerns.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These tensions do not exist in isolation. They are part of a much deeper shift in religious consciousness. One image brings this vividly to mind. Two years ago a great hurricane swept across southern England. As Jews, we remember the date because it took place on the night of one of the great festivals of the Jewish year, *Simhat Torah,* the day of “Rejoicing in the Law.” Our family was in the West End of London at the time, because my synagogue is next to Hyde Park. Just before dawn broke I went out to see what had happened. I came upon a scene of devastation. There was silence. No one else was yet about, and the wind had died. But everywhere, great trees had been uprooted and branches hurled across roads. The order of the park had been reduced to chaos. As the sun rose over that ravaged landscape it seemed for a moment like the end of the world.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
A fearful thought then occurred to me. It was in just such moments that our ancestors saw God. Didn’t the Psalm – the very Psalm which rabbinic tradition associated with the giving of the Torah – declare: “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars, the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon…. The voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare” (Psalms 29:5, 9)? God was not only in the still small voice that spoke to Elijah. He was also in the mighty east wind that divided the Red Sea. He was in the earthquake that swallowed Korach. He was in the volcanic upheaval that swept away Sodom and the cities of the plain. He was in the tempest that threatened to sweep away Jonah’s ship.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
That moment came back to me when the Salman Rushdie affair first began. I spoke about it on the radio. I said that for the past two centuries in the West we had seen God in the order of the garden and not in the mighty wind that wrecks the garden. We had seen Him in quiet faith, not in the fire and the thunder and the hurricane. The Rushdie affair took us by surprise because we had edited out of our image of religion a whole range of passion that submits to neither moderation nor tolerance. We remembered that God spoke to Elijah in a still small voice. We forgot that He spoke to Job out of the heart of the whirlwind.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
And there lies the problem. The great conversation between faiths, which reached its heights in the 1960s, was predicated on a series of assumptions that had their roots in the Enlightenment. We were gradually moving from a world of tradition to a society built on rationality. We were passing, slowly but inexorably, from the particular identities of particular faiths to a more universal conception of humanity. Society was becoming, as the sociologists said, secularised. Religious belief was still strong, but it was becoming marginal to our public decisions. Passion and prejudice were gradually dying, and in their place reason and moderation would hold sway. On that scenario, the bitter religious conflicts of the past looked very much like things of the past. It was a time for reconciliation.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But it didn’t happen that way. Almost immediately, a new kind of religiosity began to emerge, or re-emerge, in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other world faiths. It transpired that secularisation had failed to provide us with our most basic human needs: the need for meaning and personal identity. And the way to meaning and identity lay in highly particular religious traditions. So we began to see, and have become increasingly aware of, religious revivals built on intense hostility to the assumptions of the modern world. Critics call it Fundamentalism, a word I do not like because it groups together many different phenomena under a single name. But several things followed, and have become more and more noticeable over the passing years.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Firstly, religion, far from being a force for reconciliation, has become the battleground of some of the fiercest and most intractable conflicts in the contemporary world, from Northern Ireland to Lebanon and beyond. Secondly, the kind of religion that has real power over the lives of its followers is increasingly exclusive and confrontational. Thirdly, the theology that speaks of tolerance and openness and dialogue with the modern world is seen, by many believers in search of the truth, as a compromise that lacks content and authenticity. The result is that the most passionate religious believers today, in many faiths, are more concerned with their own destiny than with our collective destiny in this tense and troubled world.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
**Restating the Interfaith Imperative**
So, as we face a new decade, we must begin to restate the inter-religious imperative in more forceful terms. We must see it not simply as a gesture of goodwill undertaken by men and women of exceptional liberalism and vision, but as a set of religious axioms that must be confronted by all believers, even those who do not as yet see the need for meeting and reconciliation. We must focus our search not on the modern world and its values, for these are precisely what many religious believers reject. Instead we must take our stand on the classic texts and principles of our great religious traditions. What, as a Jew, impels me to enter into conversation with men and women of other faiths?


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Hebrew Bible contains the great command, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), and this has often been taken as the basis of biblical morality. But it is not: it is only part of it. The Jewish sages noted that on only one occasion does the Hebrew Bible command us to love our neighbour, but in thirty-seven places it commands us to love the stranger. Our neighbour is one we love because he is like ourselves. The stranger is one we are taught to love precisely because he is *not* like ourselves.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Time and again the Hebrew Bible emphasises that we are judged by how we act to those who are unlike us, and who may even call into question everything we stand for. Rabbinic tradition held that Abraham was a greater man than Noah. Why so? Noah, the Torah says, was “a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time” (Genesis 6:9). Nonetheless, said the rabbis, when the world was drowning, Noah saved only his own family, whereas Abraham fought a war and later prayed for the inhabitants of Sodom and the cities of the plain. The Jewish mystics once asked: Why is the *hassidah,* the stork, an unclean animal? Its name means “the compassionate one.” How can a bird called “compassion” be unclean? They answered: the *hassidah* has compassion only for its own kind. Compassion only for your own is not compassion.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Just before the story of Abraham and the covenantal people begins, the Bible relates the episode of the tower of Babel. In broad outlines, the moral of the story is clear. People gathered together to build a tower that would reach to heaven, but the proper place of man is on earth. They were guilty of hubris and they were punished by nemesis. The story is a satire of the pretensions of Babylonian civilisation and of the thought that because man has technological mastery, he can become like God. But this does not explain the story’s central message, that after Babel the world is split into many languages, and that until the end of days there is no single universal language.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Babel is the essential preface to the history of Abraham. Without it, we might have thought that the covenant with Abraham was universal like the covenant with Noah, that it applied to all humanity and that it expressed a universal religious truth. It did not. Just as after Babel there is no single universal language, so there is no single universal culture and no single universal faith. The faith of Abraham left room for other ways of serving God, just as the English language leaves room for French and Spanish and Italian.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Faiths are like languages. There are many of them, and they are not reducible to one another. In order to express myself at all, I must acquire a mastery of my own language. If I have no language, I will still have feelings but I will be utterly inarticulate in communicating them. The language into which I am born, which I learn from my parents and my immediate environment, is where I learn self-expression. It is a crucial, perhaps even an essential, part of who I am. But as I venture out into the world I discover that there are other people who have different languages which I must learn if we are to communicate across borders.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
A faith is like a language. I am at home in my own language as I am at home in my own faith. True conversions are rare. But I am not compromised by the existence of other languages. To the contrary, the more languages I can speak, the more I can communicate with others and the more I am enriched by their experience. To believe that our faith is the only religious reality there is, is rather like the old-fashioned British tourist who believed that you could communicate with the Spanish by speaking English very slowly and very loudly. After Babel, the religious reality, like the linguistic reality, is inescapably plural.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In recent years we have become conscious of global ecology. Environmental thinking has made us aware of the inter-connectedness of our actions. The destruction of a rain-forest in one part of the world can affect the climate in another. So it is with our social ecology. Once, religions and cultures could live for the most part at a safe remove from one another, as if each was an island entire of itself. Today there is no safe remove. Walk down a modern city street, and you will pass people of a dozen different cultures and languages. Our economy and politics are affected by the actions of a hundred different countries. Our very survival depends on the decisions of several powers not to use nuclear or chemical weapons. International terrorism may suddenly involve us in someone else’s argument thousands of miles away. Our inter-connectedness has become tangible. Modernity has cast the wholly other directly into our lives.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Judaism long ago recognised the significance of social ecology. It formulated the idea of *darkhei shalom,* “the ways of peace.” It took this not as a pious sentiment, but as a significant factor in Jewish law. *Dar-khei shalom* asserts that the basic duties that I owe to the members of my faith community, I owe to those outside it as well – not because we share a faith but because we share an environment, a society, and we must be able to live together if we are to be able to live at all. Faith sometimes demands radical and uncompromising action. But *darkhei shalom* tells me that I must exercise restraint and moderation if I am not to destroy the social environment in which I live along with those who have a different faith. *Darkhei shalom* is an ecological principle that tells us that we live in a world of complex interdependencies, and we must exercise self-restraint in order to preserve that world.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These ideas are undergirded by the most fundamental proposition of all. Before there were religions, even before there were human beings, God pronounced the still awesome truth of the human situation: “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). On this, the sages of the Mishnah delivered the following commentary: When human beings make things in a single image, they are all alike. God makes humanity in a single image, yet each of us is unique.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
A faith built on the Hebrew Bible must come to terms with the stunning implications of that remark. We have great difficulty in recognising the integrity – indeed the sanctity – of those who are not in our image, whose faith and traditions and culture and language are not like ours. Nonetheless we are told, and must struggle to see, that the wholly other, he or she who is not in our image, is yet in God’s image.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
I have tried to show in this chapter how a Jew, through his or her commitment to Judaism, is led outward to the realities of a multifaith world. My argument rests on no hidden liberal or modernist premises that could be rejected by a religious extremist. Christian theology will find its own way at arriving at these conclusions. But arrive at them we must. For if we are to co-exist in a world of rising religious intolerance, we shall have to find an interfaith imperative that speaks not only with a still small voice, but also out of the heart of the whirlwind.