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SIDIC 1972 - 1979: It is not your duty to complete the work (SIDIC's great director)
Renzo Fabris

A Portrait

With strongly marked features, two deeply furrowed cheeks — his face seemed carved in wood. The eyes beneath the high forehead could gaze steadily and the pipe could stay motionless for a long time between the thin lips. His was the face of a man of the sea or of the mountains, that is, some-one who has learnt to fight patiently and courageously against natural adversities and who knows what it is to be alone. You felt that this Dutchman belonged to a people accustomed for generations to winning back the land from the sea; a man who knows what it is to live in a fragile land where the resoluteness of the individual man counts.

If his features revealed deep seriousness, persistent like a tragic destiny, his smile, showing a row of small teeth, disclosed a good dose of irony that restrained and even eliminated good-humoredly with a joke the rigorous workings of a lively, penetrating mind.

Now that Cornelis Rijk is no longer with us, this very gift of irony — that left no doubt as to the awareness of the distance there was in him, as in every man, between the role he would liked to have played in life and the one that, in fact, fell to his lot: the distance between the complexity of the problems he wanted to face and the partial solutions that were humanly to be found — makes it impossible for me to express my sorrow by commemorating him even in a few words. On the other hand, even wanting to remember him mainly as he was and appeared as Director of SIDIC, as I who was fortunate enough to have been President of the SIDIC Association beside him knew him, it is not easy to speak of what Cornelis Rijk kept to himself through innate modesty or convinced tolerance towards others, or again from an old echo of the solitude of his people. It was not easy for us to meet since we lived far from each other. However, a friendship which was full of esteem, trust and sincerity that on his part extended to my wife and children, helped us to keep up a sharing of thoughts and intentions.

He was an attentive and meticulous Director when he drew up plans for the Association, tenacious and confident when it came to carrying them out. With a northerner's conviction he believed in organized structures, but in case of necessity he knew that what really counted was only men giving one another a hand in a friendly spirit.

The SIDIC Association

To get over the many difficulties that arose when the SIDIC Association was to become an "ente morale" (legal entity) he fought steadily and with conviction. He considered it important that SIDIC should have a recognized juridical status and that the status should be the basis for an international outlook; that SIDIC should have lay collaborators together with the religious and priests and that it should move towards financial autonomy. Besides this, he believed firmly that the Association should be founded on a network of friendships, ideal and practical solidarity and reciprocal trust, in spite of inevitable weaknesses or defects.

He was acutely aware that the Association needed, besides its organizational body, a communitarian spirit, so that at times, this spirit could be sensed through a priestly interpreter, a minister called to make of the Association a community of life founded and guaranteed by the Eucharist.

I am sure that no-one will forget the intensity of the Eucharists that were celebrated after work sessions in SIDIC, Rome. It then became evident for those present that the Association undertaking was for him transmitted vocation, not so much by mystical insertion, but by an inward intensity capable of becoming the center of many wide friendships and initiatives.

He took to heart with the same seriousness persons and organizational problems. Above all, towards the end, he suffered from the resistances that came up in his difficult work, but he never dramatized them and preferred fighting with that ironic smile that he alone knew how to give at the right moment. Through this smile of his he managed to break his own and other people's tensions good-humoredly in order to get a balanced view of things again.

Influence of Judaism

When I talk about Cornelis Rijk's approach to things, I think of the way he met Judaism. Others more competent than I will speak in this memorial issue of his knowledge and his theological preparation for relationships with Judaism and the Jewish world. What I want to stress here is that the realism that I noticed so often in his activities as Director of SIDIC was sustained by a deep root that drew strength from his knowledge of Judaism and of the Word that etymologically for Jews, as we know, is also a thing, a happening (davar). It was the kind of realism that one could not mistake for that practical empiricism of an organizational bureaucratic man, and still less the type of indulgent attitude of a man who lives according to the rules of diplomacy and politics. For him, in brief, realism meant respect for reality, the conviction that reality brings to the man of faith who counts on an Incarnate God for a practical message as to how to interpret the Word in any place and circumstance. It is certainly derived from an intellectual attitude which is the result of a deep biblical education, placing him existentially near Judaism and re-inforcing his choices and his convictions on the fraternity between Christian and Jew. In his valuable notes on a Christian Theology of Judaism he underlines the realistic and historical character of divine revelation and the need for a Christian to find a new opening to reality (see SIDIC Bulletin, Vol. V, No. 1, 1972, pp. 10, 15).

At the same time, with his friends, his realism was a way of living the social reality of life in its various daily events; it was also the way he expressed a kind of compassion for men's weaknesses that his irony made acceptable even to those concerned.

I think it was not difficult to see that this realism was closely related to the keen feeling that Cornelis ijk had for being and for nature. Life for him meant simplicity of contacts, fulness of feeling for man and things, and enjoyment of these in their fulness. At times, watching this severe man who was hard on himself without there being anything sad about him, I came to think that Cornelis Rijk had taken for himself the talmudic teaching by which a man must give an account in the hereafter of all the licit pleasures from which he has abstained (T.J. Kiddushim 4, 12). The last time I saw him on the bed where his terrible illness had confined him, he explained as he embraced me, that life was the warmth of friendship, the beauty of plants and the birds perched on their branches. He told me that he read the Bible as a respite from his physical pain, and certainly his love for life found comfort in the God of all creation who spoke to him through the Book of his living Word.

Spiritual Traits

Realism, a keen sense of being, reserve, tenacity: these are the spiritual traits I remember of the Director of SIDIC. He never tired of saying that the work of the Association was vast and only at its beginning. In the above-mentioned notes on the theology of Judaism, the idea occurs more than once of the great effort demanded of those who want to work in the field of the renewal of relations between Christians and Jews.

Many difficulties must still be faced; difficulties arising from some "traditional" views, from a certain resistance and lack of theological flexibility and from the deep reality of Jewish-Christian relations themselves.(Ibid, p. 16)

Cornelis Rijk invites us, though, to be optimistic: "Renewed trust in the Lord, Here and now I will do a new thing: this moment it will break from the bud. Can you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:19) can help and stimulate us." (SIDIC Vol. 1, No. 3, 1968).

Cornelis Rijk, Director of SIDIC, Kees the friend, took the invitation of Rabbi Tarfon to heart:
It is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. (Avot 2:21).
The Lord has shown him his Face and now those of us who were, and remain his friends in the communion of saints, must have some of his realism and optimism to go on with the work.