Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2001-2002
Session #1

Scripture Forum
Session #1
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
November 30, 2001

Introductory remarks by Chris Leighton:
Description of the stages in the National Jewish Scholars Project, beginning with the publication of Dabru Emet, which was not created to be a closed document but was intended to open up dialogue between Christians and Jews. The statement has generated much reaction and commentary.

The next step involved Jewish scholars in the study of certain concepts in the Christian tradition. At the end of the process of study, the scholars took the insights they had gained and evaluated them in the light of their own tradition. This led to the creation of Christianity in Jewish Terms, in which two Jewish scholars write on each concept (two scholars rather than one because Judaism is not monolithic), and a Christian scholar responds.

The third stage in the project involved putting to Jewish and Christian educators fundamental questions that tend to generate misunderstanding about the Jewish and Christian traditions. These educators were asked to look at texts that would illuminate the questions put to them. The results of their work have been published in Irreconcilable Differences?.

The current stage in the process is intended to take the conversation into the community, to rub the singularities of the Jewish and Christian traditions against each other in the hope of generating light as well as heat.

The nature and purpose of the study project proposed for the Scripture Forum:

• Jewish and Christian facilitators will pick out classical texts that will sharpen the issues around a particular topic of study for the purposes of teaching and in order to provide commentary to crack open the problematics of the issue under discussion.
• Participants in the Scripture Forum will generate questions and concerns for the purpose of formu-lating some other venture for clergy in which participants and other scholars might lead the conversation.

Topic for discussion: Sin and Repentance
Those present carried out a study of Mishna Yoma 8:9 (a well-known text, it is reprinted in prayer books for meditation on Yom Kippur) and a reading of Maimonides, Laws of Repentance, Chapter 2 (Mishneh Torah).

Notes on the discussion of the Mishna Yoma text:

Concerning the language of the text:

• "he is not permitted to repent": "they do not make it possible for him to repent" (Who are "they"? The heavenly court?)
• "For transgressions between man and man":
  ". . . between a person and his fellow"

Concerning the content of the text:

• This is a legal text; its imagery is of God as a judge. The point of the text is that a mecha-nistic/ritualistic approach to repentance doesn't work. A person can do what he wants to do, but
  it doesn't work from a legal point of view; that is, the person is not considered to be repentant. His repentance is not efficacious.
• This text is not about expectation but intention.
• The second sentence restates the first (the point of both is the same): "One who says, I will sin and repent, and sin and repent, he is not permitted [enabled] to repent. I will sin and Yom HaKippurim will atone, Yom HaKippurim does not atone."
• Sentences three and four are parallel, but the fourth sentence is not a restatement of the third: "For transgressions between a person and God, Yom HaKippurim atones. For transgressions between man and man, Yom HaKippurim does not atone until he has appeased his fellow."
• The last sentence is a recognition in halakhah that you cannot ask God to forgive a sin against another person without going to the person to make it right. Repentance is returning to oneness with God, and a person cannot be one with God until he is one with others.
• Sins against another person are also sins against God.
• Sins against God affect other people but do not wrong them. An example of a sin against God that is not a sin against another person is eating pork.
• This text follows seven chapters of sacrificial laws concerning the Temple. Since the sacrificial sys-tem was automatic in the sense that when a sacrifice was carried out, by definition, it "worked," this text that says that repentance is not automatic is a real "zinger." Nevertheless, it demonstrates continuity with the tradition in the time after the Temple was gone.
• Yom Kippur has a certain power and significance that is equivalent to a sacrifice: Yom Kippur is automatic, so this text is linked to what comes before it in Yoma. When you do what the law says, you've done it and it works. So this text is not about how, but about who and what.
• The "Calvinist reading of Mishna Yoma" explored the notion of the "boundedness" of sin; that is, one is bounded by sin insofar as one is unable to repent without the gift of grace. One is unable to repent because one is unaware of one's sin.
• The question was also raised of finding in liberal Protestantism, which collapses religion and morality, something that is an offense against God that would not be an offense against another person.

Brief notes on the Maimonides text:

• This text was written in an Islamic context about 1,000 years after the Mishna Yoma text.
• The text broadens the Mishnah by talking about what we do in our mind and heart.

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