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Editorial

As Jews and Christians grow in knowledge of each other's traditions, their common heritage and common hope inspire trust, friendship and joint action. Their primary concern is that God's holy name be sanctified, God's kingdom come on earth and God's will be done. Prayer - the awareness of God's presence - is the natural environment in which their shared vocation is nourished and grows. Without prayer the dialogue can disintegrate into a mere tactic of "coexistence" or into an exercise in "tea and sympathy". Only Prayer provides the perspective from which to overcome injustice and self-interest.
Prayer has many dimensions. In a beautiful article Rabbi Abraham Heschel declares that prayer is the home of every man and woman and where God also finds a home in a world that has become alien. Concern and compassion are born out of personal prayer, a service of the heart, and this must dominate the life of the believing Jew and Christian.
But when people gather for prayer together, as both Jewish tradition and Gospel testify, God is in their midst. When Jews and Christians meet they often remember this presence in silence or in the words of a biblical psalm. But it is understandable that the desire exists to pray together in other formulae, using the hallowed words of one tradition or the other, or in contemporary words. There are however a number of weighty obstacles. Joseph Sievers describes them thus:
The rabbis call God's presence Shekhinah, a circumlocution that affirms his nearness without denying his otherness. The Christian recognizes this. presence in (and through) Jesus. Can one compare these two expressions without sounding blasphemous to the Jew and watered-down to the Christian? Can Jews and Christians meet 'for the sake of Heaven". in the name of God and in his presence?... Ultimately, especially for the Jews, the question is not only theological, but also historical. How can nineteen hundred years of separation, conflict, persecution and indifference be overcome? Can Jews and Christians truly be together again?"

It is this question that SIDIC takes up in this issue. Marie Helene Fournier describes the relationship between Jewish and Christian prayer, the sensitivity required in expressing this in Christian prayer and when praying in the presence of the other. The biblical attitude to the Prayer of the foreigner is explored by Lawrence Frizzell. The recognition of the true prayer of Gentiles and the yearning for the nations to know and worship the God of Israel has a clear bearing on our contemporary effort to pray together. Some examples of the different ways of responding to the desire and to overcome the obstacles are recounted. May the God of Abraham, Sarah and Jesus, the God of Jew, of Christian, of Humanity, bless these efforts and may Jews and Christians continue to strive for new ways to be truly together in the Name of the Holy One of Israel.