A Future with Memory
by John Levi
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 61
Winter 1998

Introduction

Is the Vatican document a declaration of friendship?

John Levi
John Levi is Regional Director of the Australian, Asian and New Zealand Union for Progressive Judaism. He is Vice President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a President of the Council of Christians and Jews in Victoria and is Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Beth Israel.

IT IS EARLY JANUARY 1998 and I am fortunate enough to be on holiday in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Theatre is the home of an annual Festival of Liturgical Music and I join an Israeli audience to hear the Monteverdi Choir of Hamburg and the Halle Philharmonic Orchestra of Germany perform Felix Mendelssohn's Oratorio "Paulus". As I sit there listening to the superb music I begin to wonder how many people on stage and in the auditorium share with me an uncomfortable, if not overwhelming, sense of dissonance.

The place is Israel. The audience speaks Hebrew. The choir is singing in German. The 19th century composer was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the famous German Jewish philosopher and theologian. For some reason his grandson Felix decided to weave his oratorio's music around some of the most bitterly anti-Jewish texts in the New Testament. The choir, taking the role of the Jewish crowds in Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, sternly sing "Steiniget ihn . . . und wer Gott laestert, der soll sterben." "Stone him and he that blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death." With many other members of the audience, I found it impossible to applaud at the end of the concert.

Many ghosts haunt the relationships between Jews and Christians, and emerge with frightening regularity. The ghosts are infectious. They now pop up in secular and nationalistic manifestations. They will not go away.

All this is by way of an introduction to a remarkable document. On 16 March 1998, the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews published a call to the faithful "to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices" and to shape "a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible". The Pope introduces the statement with a prayer, "May the Lord of history guide the efforts of Catholics and Jews and all men and women of good will as they work together for a world of true respect for the life and dignity of every human being."

The Vatican document is a powerful response to history and by using Hebrew terms to deal with untranslatable words indicates a degree of intimacy with Jewish experience.

The Hebrew word Shoah is far more powerful than Holocaust. A holocaust was an ancient offering made by fire to the Lord. Shoah implies extinction and has nothing to do with the service of God. The Hebrew word Torah is used. Torah means tradition, inspiration and teaching, but for two thousand years it was taken to mean Law, thus misrepresenting Judaism as the religion of Law in contrast to the religion of Love. With notable theological courage, the Vatican Document concedes, by implication, that this is a sad polemical misrepresentation of the truth and allows the Hebrew word Torah to stand on its own. Teshuvah (repentance) is the third Hebrew word used in the statement which again suggests there is a helpful and living religious theological context in which to deal with history. As Pope John Paul II said, "there is no future without memory".

Is the cup of understanding and repentance half full or half empty? I believe it is more than half full. No six page document can be expected to do justice to two thousand years of history. But it is a huge step forward. It seems incredible that only 150 years ago the unfortunate president of Rome's Jewish community had to kneel before the reigning Pope during the annual Mardi Gras Carnival and receive a papal kick on the backside. Nevertheless, the Vatican Library is still the repository of many priceless Hebrew manuscripts seized by the Holy Office's ecclesiastical censors, never to be returned to their Jewish owners.

To: Part 2