Richard Shenfeld is a Jewish educator. He teaches at the Florence Melton Adult Minischool at Chizuk Amuno Congrega-tion and practices Bibliodrama in the Baltimore-Washington area. Rich has been an active participant in the Scripture Forums over the past five years and offers the following reflection on his participation in this year's program.

Interfaith dialogue often stalls in safe places where there is no controversy, no strongly held but different beliefs. At its best, however, interfaith dialogue moves to the heart of our belief systems, where it causes us to pause, to take stock of what we believe and how we think, and to understand how our beliefs are perceived by and affect our dialogue partner. Such moments always give us pause; sometimes they are disturbing to the point of danger.

I recall one moment early in my involvement in interfaith dialogue. A speaker mentioned a seminar paper he had heard titled The Shema as a Christian Text. It was a novel thought to me, that what I had taken as the quintessential Jewish text could be understood as Christian. But of course it made sense: this is also Christian scripture. At another time I reminded a Christian partner that I did not know New Testament literature very well. Another member of the group, a minister, later told me that was a revelation to her, for this was material with which she had grown up: it had never occurred to her that it was not universally known. These are "ah, yes" moments -- safe, revealing, and thought-provoking. Other moments are more intense.

In this year's ICJS Scripture Forum, an in-depth look at the first five of the ten commandments, two moments stand out. One was an "ah, yes" moment; the second took us to more uncomfortable places.

The session on iconography brought us the "ah, yes" moment. Rabbi Gila Ruskin explored the ways in which icons work in Judaism. The prohibition against graven images has had a deep effect on Jewish religious art. Yet, Rabbi Ruskin explained, our Sepher Torah, the scroll on which the Pentateuch is hand-written, functions in an icon-like way in Jewish ceremony. For Jews, the scroll is a profoundly holy object. We stand when the ark in which it is kept is open and while the scroll is being carried. We dress the scroll in sometimes-elaborate garments and silver ornaments whose names are taken from the High Priests' wardrobe: me'il, choshen, and keter. As part of her presentation, she brought us into the synagogue, opened the Ark, and took out one of the scrolls, which we opened to the Decalogue. The "ah, yes" moment for me was in the effect the scroll had on the Christian participants. This was the first time many had seen a Sepher Torah. Yet these are people with whom I have been engaged in serious interfaith dialogue for many years! How little, I thought, do we really know of one another; how hard it is to see through the eyes of the other, to realize that what is most familiar to us cannot be taken for granted by the other. Ah, yes: the same revelation as my colleague had had about the New Testament.

The second moment took place during our discussion of using God's name. Dr. Rosann Catalano prompted a discussion that took us to the periphery of some of our central beliefs. Do Jews and Christians worship the same God? To whom do Christians refer by the name "Christ"? Is it possible to refer to God in ways that are disturbing to our dialogue partners? Can our normal and religiously-felt references to God be offensive to our dialogue partners? If they are, what does that say about the possibility of dialogue or about our deepest-held view of the other?

This was no "ah, yes" moment, but a discussion of great intensity. It was the kind of conversation from which we naturally recoil, afraid that we might be led to places where we cannot speak. It was the kind of conversation that we must continue, the kind that makes interfaith dialogue worth-while, and why I participate in the Scripture Forum.