On the afternoon of November 21, 1991, Rabbi Irving Green-berg, president and co-founder of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), and Bishop Krister Sten-dahl, Distinguished Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, former Dean of Harvard Divinity School, and former Bishop of Sweden, stepped onto the stage of the Baltimore Convention Center at the invitation of the ICJS. When two internationally recognized theologians are placed on the same platform, the audience generally fastens its seat-belts and prepares for an ascent into the academic stratosphere. A flight propelled by logical abstractions seldom offers a com-fortable seat. Without the gravitational pull of everyday reality to keep us grounded, most of us find ourselves lost in space.

On this occasion the audience was treated to a conversation that was anchored in personal experience. Both men delivered autobiographical sketches of experiences that led them out of their own communities into dialogue with each other's tradi-tions. Rabbi Greenberg grew up in an insular Orthodox community that was highly suspicious of the Christian mission-ary agenda. Bishop Stendahl was raised within a Swedish Lutheran family and spent his early years without ever meeting a Jew. Each traced the bumpy road that shook him off the familiar path and brought him face to face with the other. They insisted that their personal encounters have a crucial bearing on our respective communities, for the health of a democratic society depends upon people who can learn to examine themselves and their traditions in the light of the other.

Rabbi Greenberg maintained that Jewish life and practice does not require a negative protrait of the outsider. He asserted that Jews should no longer establish their religious identities in reaction to the threat of Christianity. In order to survive, Jews need not depend on contempt for Christianity. In an open society, the interfaith encounter "can liberate us to become Jews of choice." Greenberg underscored significant differences between Christianity and Judaism, but he noted that respect-ful dialogue also demonstrates that neither religion "can exhaust the possibilities of divine love."

Greenberg claimed that the frontier for all humanity, not just the Jewish people, is "how to be an absolutist in faith and a pluralist in understanding of that faith." The challenge is to remain committed to one's own faith while participating fully in a pluralistic society. "This dialogue is one of the things that train us for handling ourselves as distinctive people, within rather than against American life or American society."

Bishop Stendahl echoed many of Rabbi Greenberg's concerns. Stendahl

Judaism has a secret which Christianity needs badly.

described the experience of "holy envy" wherein one finds "something in the other which is beautiful, but is not yours." He spoke of lessons that Christians could learn from Jews. "Judaism has a secret which Christianity needs badly. Christianity lived so long with the power of the majority status that it needs to learn the art of living among other faiths." He elaborated, "Judaism has the original biblical model of a witness in a plural world, a witness in which one is faithful but has no preconceived ideas of one's truth being the only truth."

Stendahl also suggested that Christians should not view Jews as a suffering people because "to look at anyone as a victim, to have one's identity defined by being victimized, is danger-ous." Rather we need to find new ways to affirm the other's humanity, since "under God we are all minorities, even though it might not appear so at various times in history."

Rabbi Greenberg responded, "Suffering is not the will of God. When humans suffer, God shares in that suffering." It is the responsibility of human beings to transform the suffering in the world into love. "The Jewish people took the Holocaust, the ultimate example of suffering, and turned it into an outburst of life in Israel. We are committed to the triumph of life. To be a Jew is to choose life."

Greenberg concluded with the hope that Christian-Jewish dialogue will lead to a better world for everyone. "Our task in this generation is to overcome death, to cure diseases, to overcome oppression and war and degradation as never be-fore. This is what the dialogue makes possible: that we not only stop feeding hatred against each other, but we cooperate to perfect the world. It is not upon us to finish the task, but it certainly is ours to begin . . . to create joy, to overwhelm the world with the affirmation of life. We are the proof that life can overcome death. The is the glory and the mission of this generation."