Rabbi Charles Arian, our Jewish Staff Scholar from August 2001 through June 2005, left the Institute this spring to return to the full-time pulpit rabbinate. We will greatly miss Charles and his wonderful wife Keleigh, both of whom added thoughtfulness, care, and good humor to our work and to our community. We are delighted that they have found a new home at Beth Jacob Synagogue in Norwich, Connecticut.
   As he completed his four years of work and study with us, Charles shared his reflections on what he learned and what he views will be the greatest challenges facing the ICJS and the Christian-Jewish encounter.

The ICJS and Its Setting

Although there are more than twenty members of the "Council of Centers for Christian-Jewish Relations," the ICJS is very dif-ferent than most of them.

Almost all of the affiliated centers are part of a college, university, or seminary. The ICJS is freestanding. Most of the affiliated centers focus on Catholic-Jewish relations with little or no Protestant participation. More significantly, most of the affiliated centers are really community relations agencies. They focus on and are often called centers of "Christian-Jewish understanding."

Understanding is important and the world could use more of it. Of course, the ICJS is interested in disarming religious hatred and helping Jews and Christians learn about each other. But the ICJS as it has developed over the last decade or so is dedicated to a more radical proposition: Not only do Jews and Christians need to learn about each other, they can also learn from each other. Furthermore, this learning from each other can serve to strengthen both communities. This proposition is not always self-evident, and it is clear to me that many of those who participate in our programs don't always understand it.

The Scholarly Agenda and the Jewish Community

The ICJS originated as an outgrowth of the local steering committee of the National Workshop on Jewish-Christian Rela-tions. The focus of these workshops was improving Christian-Jewish relations through addressing the legacy of Christian anti-Judaism and supersessionism. ICJS adopted the work-shops' focus in a much more sustained manner. Later, with the formation of the National Jewish Scholars' Group on Christian-Jewish Relations, as well as the Genesis Project, a mutual inquiry between Christians and Jews became an integral part of the mission.

The earlier level of dialogue, designed to reduce prejudice, had and has almost universal support in the Jewish community. In-deed, for many Jewish participants and supporters of the ICJS, that is what we do. One Orthodox rabbi in Baltimore who sup-ports our work told me why he does so despite the widespread belief in the Orthodox community that the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik banned theological dialogue: "When a hand is stretched out to us in friendship, we should take it."

But a deeper dialogue will become increasingly difficult and controversial when more hot-button issues are pressed. What then are some of the tough issues on the Jewish-Christian theological agenda?

Abrahamic vs. Noahide Covenant: Rabbinic Judaism has al-ways stated that it is possible for non-Jews to validly serve God and achieve the "world to come" through observance of the Noahide covenant. But Christians do not see themselves merely as heirs of Noah; they see themselves as heirs of Abra-ham as well. Can Jews move away from Noahide language and towards Abrahamic language when talking about Christianity? Can Jews agree with Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg that Chris-tians can be seen as part of the Abrahamic covenant?

One Covenant or Two?: What is the nature of the Christian covenant with God? Rabbi Greenberg sees Jews and Christians as two branches of the one people Israel. Are Jews and Christians indeed two parts of one overall covenant, or are they two distinct covenants? Non-supersessionist Christians have tended to say the former, where Jews have tended to say the latter.

Primacy: Assuming Christianity and Judaism are two parts of one overall covenant, is the Christian covenant with God derivative of the Jewish one? Is Christianity merely "dumbed-down Judaism for the Gentiles?"

Conversion: While most rabbis would say that Christians have no need to convert to Judaism, they would welcome Christians who said they felt they could serve God better as a Jew. Many, perhaps most, would view such a move as a "step up the ladder." But the same rabbis would not endorse Jews feel-ing that they could serve God better as Christians. But what is the difference? Is it inevitable that Jews should feel that Judaism is indeed a "better" or "preferred" way of serving God? Perhaps a resolution of this dilemma will hinge on the fact that one is not actually born a Christian in the way in which one is born a Jew. Perhaps it will remain an area where Jews and Christians will simply continue to disagree.

Land and Incarnation: The sanctity of the Land of Israel and the Incarnation are in some sense parallel ideas that one com-munity has seen as central to its identity and that the other has seen as idolatrous or, at best, unintelligible. Can Christians agree with, or at least suspend judgment on, the Jewish assertion that the Land of Israel has special sanctity and is central to Jewish identity? Similarly, is the Incarnation totally alien to Jewish thought and sensibility? How did such a seem-ingly un-Jewish idea arise in such a Jewish milieu?

The Institutional Challenge of Mutuality

One of the principles of the ICJS is mutuality. As Chris Leigh-ton aptly puts it, the ICJS is about more than "Jews helping Christians clean up their own mess." This mutuality, in princi-ple, is expressed on several levels:

• We recognize that while anti-Judaism and superses-sionism have been and continue to be problems within Christianity, there is a strong thread of xenophobia and, specifically, anti-Christianity in the Jewish tradition as well.
• The central idea in the ICJS mission is that Jews and Christians can learn from each other. It is not only the case that Judaism has insights that may benefit Chris-tians. Christianity also has insights that may benefit Jews.
• The ICJS board has roughly equal Jewish and Christian representation. Unlike many other centers that are funded almost entirely by Jews, the ICJS has been successful in raising funds from both communities.
• The ICJS has moved away from conducting programs that are directed only at Christians or only at Jews. I cannot recall a single program in the last three years that was directed only at members of one group or the other.

However, maintaining mutuality is, and will continue to be, a challenge for several reasons:

• Jewish anti-Christianity has not been as deadly as Christian anti-Judaism. Thus, the moral obligation to address it is not as obvious to most people.
• Many Jews fear that Jewish acknowledgement of Christianity as a legitimate way to worship the God of Israel poses an existential threat to Jewish well-being.
• There are simply fewer Jewish congregants, rabbis, and religious educators in Baltimore than there are Christian counterparts. If we are striving to have relatively equal numbers of Jews and Christians participating in our programs, recruitment becomes an ever more difficult challenge.

Some Final Thoughts

David Hartman and Yitz Greenberg are close disciples of the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik who have been intimately in-volved in Jewish-Christian theological dialogue. They have done so despite the widespread perception that Rabbi Solo-veitchik, in his seminal essay Confrontation, issued a formal legal ruling (psak) forbidding such dialogue.

Hartman and Greenberg have both written that Soloveitchik did not intend to forbid dialogue, but rather to set parameters and to warn of certain dangers. I am not in a position to evaluate whether or not the Hartman/Greenberg reading of Confrontation is correct, but the larger question of the prospects and parameters for Christian-Jewish dialogue is, of course, tremendously important.

In the spring of 2002 I had the opportunity to discuss this question privately with Rabbi Hartman at some length. He said then that Confrontation was intended to issue two warnings. The first concerns the tendency for participants in the dialogue to want to please their Christian interlocutors by minimizing differences -- always a temptation when the "real world" balance of power is so unequal, or to use Soloveitchik's language, when the "community of the few" is dealing with "the community of the many." The second is that certain religious insights are not really communicable across the boundaries of religious communities. Indeed, for Soloveitchik certain basic religious experiences are not communicable even to one's friends, one's spouse, one's own religious community  -- all the more so to someone of a totally different orientation.

It seems to me that Hartman's reading of Confrontation is right on target. Christian-Jewish dialogue can flourish in the United States precisely because of the democratic nature of Ameri-can society.

At the same time, there needs to be recognition that there are aspects of another individual's or another community's faith that simply cannot be communicated. Christianity is not as "alien" nor as "other" as many Jews imagine. It is Judaism's closest relative. But my relative is not me, and there are aspects of my relative that I still cannot truly understand, let alone affirm. Jews and Christians should go further than they have in suspending judgments about the other's beliefs, but they should not be expected to affirm the other's beliefs.

Although there are limits to any dialogue, the dialogue is nevertheless of great value. The counterintuitive insight of the ICJS is, as a rule, validated by the experience of those who participate in our programs. Jews do become strengthened as Jews, and Christians strengthened as Christians. The insights of the other are sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected, but are almost always found to be enriching. It is not necessary to denigrate or invalidate the other in order for me to find my own self-worth.