When baffled by the challenges of the Jewish-Christian encounter, I am often drawn to distant memories of my grand-father's workshop. Pop-Pop, as he was affectionately known to his grandchildren, was a firm believer in the doctrine that anything worth having is worth taking apart. The dogma that he managed to maintain from the twenties to the thirties and well into the forties stretched heart and mind to the breaking point by the mid-point of the twentieth century. As techno-logical innovations made inroads into the local hardware store, my grandfather's shop became increasingly cluttered with fractured gadgetry. One day the crisis of faith posed by "scientific progress" finally erupted and brought the house to a standstill.

I remember him precariously perched on his reconditioned swivel chair, deeply absorbed in a delicate operation. Sur-rounded by wires and tiny screws, soldering iron in hand, he sat transfixed, balancing unseen forces. Then it happened, amidst the pungent aroma of burnt eggs and a flickering fire: a loud pop, followed by the tinkling collapse of broken glass. My grandfather turned his soft-boiled eyes to me and issued the following lament: "Never take anything apart that cannot be put back together again." Our family heard a gasp of defeat in his words, but what we understood as the death of a tinkerer was no more than the articulation of a philosophical ideal to be sought if rarely actualized.

So my grandfather lived out the rest of his life under the weight of an impossible creed, and I sometimes suspect that my line of work leads me to follow him into a similar predica-ment. Any faith worth holding evokes questions, and the questions compel us to put our loyalties on the table, to pry open our beliefs, and to take a good hard look. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is demanded of us? How do we balance the demands of family with the claims of the particular faith community to which we belong? How do these communities respond to the cries of the larger world? The pulse of a religious tradition is heard in its questions, and its health is maintained by practitioners who refuse to plug themselves or God into any single system of answers. A tradition that resists a probing examination of its unspoken assumptions as well as its explicit affirmations may generate blind obedience, but this century makes painfully clear the consequences of unquestioning submission to "higher authorities."

This past year the ICJS has continued to excavate the questions that lie behind the words and deeds, the affirma-tions and the negations that define what it means to be a Christian or a Jew. Christian and Jewish clergy have struggled together to recover the doubts and fears as well as the hopes and dreams that underlie the Ten Commandments. They have pondered the obligations to God and neighbor embedded in their sacred codes, noting the distinctive ways in which each interprets and then strives to embody the ethical expectations of the Decalogue.

To unravel the tangled connections of our multiple allegiances -- to God and country, to family and self, to community, and indeed to the Creation -- we need to unbolt assumptions about what and who really matter, disassemble loyalties that pull us in different directions, examine our competing attach-ments, and discern the ways in which our priorities are wired. The ICJS advanced a variety of educational programs to develop an aptitude for reverent and rigorous self-examination, and this newsletter is designed to profile some of these ventures. The imperative of this work was most powerfully underscored by Dr. Michael Sells, Chairman of the Religion Department at Haverford College and author of the award-winning The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. The ICJS recently brought him to Baltimore for the Mark Steiner Show on WJHU and a meeting with writers from The Baltimore Sun.

During the course of his visit, Sells struggled to account for the breakdown of a society where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side for centuries. He traced the ways in which political opportunists such as Slobodan Milosevic fused religious symbols and stories with a militant nationalism, igniting passions strong enough to transform neighbors into enemies. The genocidal eruptions were made possible, Sells claims, because neighbors never learned to value the beauty of one another's traditions. They never learned to take their own traditions apart, to examine the underlying assumptions, and to assess critically the ways in which our loyalties to God and country can be corrupted.

The lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo will take time and rigorous study to understand fully. Yet the implications of this tragedy pose an immediate and obvious challenge on the local, national, and international scenes. None of us can afford to live in ignorance of our neighbors, and the encounter with peoples of other traditions compels us to scrutinize our own religious beliefs and practices. There is no way around the dilemma. We pull apart our tacit assumptions, and we face moments of panic, wondering how to put the pieces back together again. The ICJS remains animated by the conviction that our traditions are resilient enough to withstand method-ical examination. Indeed, we insist that the Jewish and Christian traditions demand our critical gaze, our insistent poking and prodding. This educational enterprise is animated by the hope and the faith that what is reassembled will work better because of the interplay of colleagues and neighbors. It will work better because it is in accord with the deepest aspirations of our traditions and deeper still, with the longings of the divine. We are grateful that you recognize this impera-tive and that you continue to support the new and surprising discoveries that emerge from the interplay of religious tradi-tions. While our endowment is growing big enough to sustain a more ambitious and comprehensive organization, it is the annual bequest of your time, monetary contributions, and participation that together underwrite the educational out-reach of the ICJS. We count on you to help us disassemble the distortions and to put the best of our traditions back together. It is hard to imagine a higher priority.