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God's chosen people: a Christian response to rabbi Leon Klenicki
Eugene J. Fisher
GOD'S CHOSEN PEOPLE: A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO RABBI LEON KLENICKI
1. Christian Teshuvah
One of the seven middoth or rules of halakhic interpretation adduced by the Pharisee, Hillel, in the century before Jesus of Nazareth (and often utilized by the latter in his teaching) is the principle of gal vahomer, the argument from lesser to greater. For example, if God cares for the nourishment of each tiny bird and not one of them is forgotten, "how much more must be the divine concern and love for the human person?
Rabbi Klenicki ends his reflections on chosenness with a moving call for Teshuvah on the part of the Jewish people, "a reexamination of our way to God," a concept which includes repentance, but goes beyond it. If this is true of the Jewish people, I would respond, how much more so it is true of we Christians, among whose ranks have been numbered so many of the persecutors and oppressors of God's first Chosen, the People Israel?
One can discern such an honest reckoning of the soul, (heshbon hanefesh) I believe, implicitly in the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate and more or less explicitly in statements from national conferences of bishops around the world 1, the present Pope 2, and in official statements of the Holy See 3. Perhaps of equal significance are events on the diocesan and local parish-synagogue levels, such as the joint Service of Reconciliation which took place at the Cathedral of the Diocese of Albany, New York, on Palm Sunday a few years ago.
Teshuvah, while going beyond, must begin with repentance, the acknowledgment of sin and the conscious "turning" away from the sinful path toward the path of God. Repentance, as Cardinal Etchegaray reminded the Bishops' Synod in Rome on the subject, is the necessary pre-condition for Reconciliation, both between the people of God and God, and between the people of God, Jews and Christians. Only to the extent that we are reconciled one to the other as people of God, I fully believe, can we hope for full Reconciliation with God who calls us both into being as God's people.
2. The Church on Israel's Chosenness
What the Catholic Church says officially about the Jewish people as God's people can be stated quite succinctly, if at the same time one is reminded that the succinctness of the Church's official declarations ought not to be allowed to mask the fact that, in its various theological implications, the Church's "Yes" to the Jewish people's self-claim to chosenness is anything but simple. Nor is there a consensus as yet within the Church with regard to these implications.
I said that the Church's response can be stated as a simple affirmative. Where are the sources for this affirmation? First, of course, Sacred Scripture in which the essential chosenness of Israel from Abraham through all the covenant renewals is unequivocal and unconditional. The people may be punished for straying from their "Way', but the covenant itself is permanent and, indeed, "eternal".
Nevertheless, according to the Apostle the Jews still remain most dear to God,
for God does not repent of gifts made nor of calls issued.
(Nostra Aetate, No.4)
Pope John Paul II, in Mainz, Germany on November 17,1980, thus spoke of a dialogue "within our Church, so to speak," that is, between the Church as people of God of the New Covenant and the Jewish people as "the people of God of the Ancient Covenant, never revoked by God" (referring to the same verse, Romans 11:28-29, cited by Nostra Aetate). Subsequently, the Pope has on several occasions, most notably during his visit to the Rome Synagogue in which he refered also to Lumen Gentium, No. 16 (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), emphasized that "the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling" (John Paul II, April 13, 1986).
While it is not, of course, for the Church to define for the Jewish people the content of their distinctive vocation as am segulah, as Rabbi Klenicki puts it in his section "Teshuvah After Auschwitz", it is of interest that the way in which official Catholic teaching since the Council has framed the question very much opens the way for acknowledging a specific contemporary vocation of the Jewish people. This continuing Jewish vocation in God's plan flows, not merely from the ancient biblical history (though of course in direct continuity with that history, which we Christians also see as gus "pre history") but from contemporary events of Jewish history, such as the Shoah and the rebirth of a Jewish State in Eretz Israel.
Pope John Paul 11 first opened this potentially very rich line of spiritual enquiry in a spontaneous address to the tiny Jewish community of Warsaw: "Today this nation of Israel has become a loud warning voice for all humanity. More than anyone else, it is precisely you who have become this saving warning. In this sense you continue your particular vocation showing yourselves to be still the heirs of that election to which God is faithful. This is to be your mission in the contemporary world...and in this Church, peoples and nations feel united to you in this mission" (June 14, 1987).
To Rabbi Klenicki's spiritually pregnant question, "Am I chosen?", the Church, no less than Judaism answers simply: "Yes, of course you are. It is the teaching of Sacred Scripture and Church tradition that the Jews are God's Chosen People, with whose mission the Church in its own unique calling is "united". Again, this "Yes" may not be so simple in its implications as it is in its initial utterance. But, I would argue, that it is precisely the point of our dialogues, formal and informal, to probe these f urther mysteries. We should remember that the initiative in these matters is not our own, but God's.
3. Jewish Universalism and Christian Particularism: The Noahide Laws and
Christian-Jewish Relations
The Christian "Yes" to Rabbi Klenicki's self-claim to chosenness is particular to his Jewishness. But Rabbi Klenicki's response, admirable and open as it is to the Church's sense of chosenness is, in some ways, more generic than particular. Much of what he says could be written of almost any non-Jewish religious group. Likewise, his statement, "I believe that all people who live a religious life, who have chosen God, are in turn God's people", does not really require a religious community but only individual good will.
The biblical basis for Rabbi Klenicki's openness is given as the universal covenant with all humanity through Noah of Genesis 9. The seven laws of which he speaks represent, in turn, a rabbinic adumbration of the biblical prohibition against eating meat with blood in it. The developed rabbinic concept of a Noahide covenant represents, in my experience, the usual response of Jewish representatives in dialogue to the question, "What does or can Judaism say about Christianity positively?" It is a positive response, of course, but again, it is a response without a whole lot of specific substance. It is really a sort of an inversion of the irritating 18th century Napoleonic dictim about Jews: "To Christians as generalized human beings, everything; to the Church as a specific religious community with a specific claim on spiritual kinship with the Jewish people, nothing". The Noahide covenant response is universal and individual, while ignoring the specific historical and communal aspects of Christian self-identity.
To its credit, the traditional rabbinic notion of a universal Noahide covenant with all humanity did represent in its time a real, indeed a qualitative advance beyond the narrow, exclusivist understanding of extra ecclesiam nullus salus so often articulated by Christian leaders. It did allow for God's freedom in covenanting beyond the boundaries of Israel, permitting Judaism a more open and tolerant theological stance vis-a-vis Christianity than the Church in practice had toward Judaism until the Second Vatican Council.
Likewise, the evidence of Acts 15, in which the apostles themselves, under the prodding of St. Paul, appear to settle for a shortened listing of the seven Noahide laws as sufficient for gentile inclusion in the Church (i.e. from their point of view, in the Chosen People through Christ), gives evidence that appeal to the Noahide covenant is indeed responsive to gentile Christian self-claims.
I would argue, however, that from a Christian point of view it is precisely our claim to be no longer gentiles (goyim) but, once baptised, to be "adopted heirs" of Abraham, not replacing, certainly, but at least alongside the Jewish people. It is this self-claim, this very particular self-view with which the concept of the Noahide covenant fails to grapple.
Rabbi Klenicki is to be commended for asking these questions of his tradition: "Do we Jews recognize Christianity as a co-participant in God's design? Can Jews accept Jesus as a covenantal messenger of God with a specific mission to the world not already committed to a covenant with God?...Shouldn't we start considering double covenantal obligations as part of the people of God?"
These are, I believe, the types of questions that Jews need to ask themselves, just as we Christians have had to re-evaluate so many of our theological presumptions concerning Judaism. Judaism has never had a "teaching of contempt" comparable to the Christian polemic against Judaism. But, perhaps because of Christian persecution of Jews, Judaism has also never had to deal directly with the reality of the Church's self-view as God's People spiritually bonded with God's People, Israel. In helping to frame the questions properly from the Jewish side of the dialogue, Rabbi Klenicki has made a significant and, I may say, gracious and even courageous contribution to the longed-for Reconciliation between our peoples.
* Dr. Eugene J. Fisher is the Executive Secretary of the Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, U.S.A.
1 See H. Groner, ed. Stepping Stones to Further Christian-Jewish Relations (2 vols.; New York: Stimulus Foundation and Paulist Press, 1977 and 1985).
2 E. Fisher and L. Klenicki, eds., John Paul lion Jews and Judaism (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1987) and E.Fisher, John Paul II on the Holocaust (1988).
3 The chief texts are contained in Fifteen Years of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, 1970-1985 (Liberia Vaticana/Lateranense, 1988) 289-325. Most recently, see the statement of the Pontifical Council lustitia et Pax, The Church and Racism: Toward a More Fraternal Society.
