We come from families that have checkered histories. Most of us do not have to dig deep or travel far to find a character disorder. I can remember the abrupt transition from delight to dismay upon discovering the truth about my great-great grandfather. He had attended Princeton Theological Seminary and subsequently taken the plunge into the Presbyterian min-istry. I assumed that the merits of my family pedigree would elevate my own admissions application. Whatever privilege I had hoped to derive from his legacy was offset by my mother's sobering genealogical research. It turned out that my illus-trious forefather was thrown out in the course of his second year. Evidently he objected to some of the Seminary's policies and mounted a protest by driving a team of mules up the steps of Nassau Hall, where the creatures made their presence unmistakably known.

At the very outset of my ministry I learned to keep a shovel on hand. If your situation teeters as close to the edge of dysfunction as mine, perhaps you too have realized that it is hard enough to clean up after yourself. The work of picking up after your family and your community means the job has no end.

My own Presbyterian community has recently deposited a significant mess in the public square, and Herculean efforts are required to mop up the spillage. The saga is worth recounting because two critical decisions made by the Presbyterian Church at the 216th General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia this past July reveal how well-intentioned people can trans-mute theological conviction into disastrous policy -- all because these actions were taken without engaging and con-sulting the Jewish people, on whom these Presbyterian policies continue to redound.

The first General Assembly overture revolved around the fund-ing of "messianic Jewish" congregations under the rubric of New Church Development. This initiative broke onto the public scene with the funding of a congregation known as Avodat Yisrael within the Presbytery of Philadelphia. Financial support for this controversial initiative extended from the local Presby-tery of Philadelphia ($145,000) to the Pennsylvania Synod ($75,000) on up to the highest governing body, the General Assembly ($125,000). The congregation defines itself as a spiritual home where the differences between Jews and Chris-tians are bridged. Its outreach is directed to families of mixed marriages and to unaffiliated Jews. Champions of this mission maintain that a congregation wherein Jews and Gentiles over-come ethnic divides and discover an underlying unity can achieve a measure of universality utterly lacking in most Pres-byterian churches.

This enterprise has garnered the enthusiastic support of many of the more evangelical and conservative members of my Pres-byterian community, who believe that there is no way to live in covenantal solidarity with God apart from Jesus Christ. The incoherence of this policy with respect to the Presbyterian heritage and the offensiveness of this evangelical outreach to the Jewish community did not dawn on the General Assembly this past July when it decided to continue its support of this "messianic Jewish" outreach. Presbyterian representatives failed to recognize that Judaism cannot be reduced to an ethnicity; nor can Christians expropriate Jewish symbols, rituals, and practices without assaulting the integrity of both traditions.

While Avodat Yisrael and other messianic Jewish congregations are not coercive, the Jewish community consistently reports incidents of manipulation and deception. When an ordained Presbyterian minister presents himself as a rabbi, the stage is set for a breakdown in trust. When the signage in front of the congregation makes no mention of its alignment with the Presbyterian Church, there is a failure to state the truth publicly. When the worship does not connect with the con-fessional claims of the Presbyterian tradition and follows the liturgical rhythms of Judaism, disaffected Jews and interfaith families may feel more at ease. The cost of this comfort is purchased at the expense of ethical decency.

The second overture at the 216th General Assembly to strain Jewish-Presbyterian relations called for a process of phased, selective divestment in companies doing business with Israel, specifically targeting corporations that are profiting from the oppression of Palestinians. The Assembly's decision to endorse this proposal signals a denominational commitment to translate words into action and to apply pressure that will influence Israeli political policies. This initiative has attracted the sup-port of the more liberal and progressive segments of the Presbyterian Church. While this intervention was intended to exhort all parties involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, including the United States, to overcome an intransigence that has repeatedly undermined any significant movement toward a lasting peace, the burden of responsibility was placed dispro-portionately on the backs of those in the current Israeli government. In its tone and in its content, this overture has provoked rancorous debate within the Presbyterian community and has generated a rift in Presbyterian-Jewish relations that may presage a serious breakdown in trust.

Even before the birth of Israel in 1948, the Palestinians found themselves caught in the middle and torn between conflicting political agendas. Israelis and Palestinians have both chroni-cled the events in great detail, and the results are two irreconcilable narratives of intransigence and betrayal. Pales-tinians recount a saga of eviction and land confiscation, brutal military domination, economic exploitation, political paralysis, chronic violations of human rights, and imperialist appropriation of natural resources on the part of Israelis. In this rendering, Israelis exercise almost total control over the destiny of Pales-tinians, who have been reduced to desperate victims of injustice.

Israelis inhabit a very different collection of memories. They recount the Palestinian refusal to accept the United Nations proposal of two states, and the subsequent attack by Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq on May 15, 1948. Israelis point to the political recognition given to the Arabs who remained in Israel during and after the War of Independence; and they note that it was the surrounding Arab nations who refused to assimilate their Palestinian populations, using them as pawns in a cynical propaganda campaign against Israel. They remember that the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 were initiated by Arab neighbors who went into battle with the dream of eliminating the State of Israel, a goal explicitly championed in the charter declaration of the PLO. The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was construed as defen-sive, and the recurrent intrusions into the Gaza and West Bank are profiled as either preventive measures or acts of retaliation designed to counter Palestinian extremists. Attempts to com-pare Israeli military action that is directed against a terrorist infrastructure with the suicide bombings by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and other Islamic fundamentalists registers in the minds of Israel and her supporters as an obscene distor-tion. The neat juxtaposition of Israeli military conduct and the murderous assaults by Palestinian extremists against Israel's civilian population generates the impression of moral equiva-lency, and this conflation engenders justifiable outrage within the Jewish community.

Presbyterians maintain that their approach to this political quagmire has been balanced and constructive. They insist that they have consistently upheld the right of Israel to exist within safe and secure borders, while speaking out on behalf of the desperate and largely powerless Palestinians. However, Presbyterian claims about their even-handed treatment of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict turn out on closer inspection to be grossly exaggerated, and a consistent alignment with the Palestinian narrative is etched into the official documents of the Presbyterian Church. I have profiled a pattern of historical inaccuracy and ideological bias elsewhere, but the severity of this anti-Israel penchant is amply displayed in the "Resolution on Israel and Palestine: End the Occupation Now," which was presented and approved at the 215th meeting of the General Assembly in 2003.

The divestiture overture flows from a failure to hold both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives in creative tension. The re-sults of this lopsided alignment are translated into a profoundly misguided recommendation. Lamentably, this course of action is now under consideration by a number of Christian denom-inations, as well as the World Council of Churches. To demonstrate the political, economic, and theological incoher-ence of this policy requires more time and ink than may be afforded in this newsletter. There is little or no evidence that Presbyterians truly understand what is at stake for the Jewish people in political, sociological, cultural, and religious terms. The policy once again highlights the practice of holding Israel to an ethical norm that is not applied to other nations. The refusal to work with the American Jewish community in bringing shared concerns about the plight of the Palestinian people to the table not only diminishes the Church's efficacy, but calls into question the seriousness of its commitment to broker a balanced settlement. It appears that the Church is more interested in the maintenance of its own righteousness and high-minded purity than it is in the pursuit of untidy compro-mises necessary for peace in this world. Suffice it to say, the two overtures taken together implicate the full spectrum of Presbyterians -- signaling a massive betrayal of the Jewish people and a disturbing departure from previous dialogue and cooperation.

Most Presbyterians are unaware that their Church is currently undermining the foundations of trust with the Jewish commu-nity. Those who do know that trouble is brewing remain oblivious to the stakes. I have heard Jewish colleagues moan with renewed conviction that Christianity is incapable of re-forming its anti-Jewish dispositions, just as they suspected all along. All too many Presbyterians and Jews are shrugging their shoulders and retreating to their separate enclaves. They will continue to do business with a blind eye turned to the other.

In another time and in another place, this withdrawal might register as an unfortunate development but hardly a tragedy of biblical proportions. In our time and in our circumstances, isolationism is a great deal more expensive. If these two religious communities do not learn how to engage one another, to discuss and argue and clarify their differences, then they will not only find that they have little to offer each other, but also little to offer the larger democratic society that would greatly benefit from the wisdom of their interplay. The chal-lenge is to mobilize Jews and Christians, Presbyterians in particular, to resist the drift into polarized factions and to forge new understandings in the heat of disagreement and uncertainty. There are fewer and fewer contexts in which this work is being done, and the drift of the dominant culture provides feeble encouragement. Small wonder that the ICJS pushes harder than ever against the tides of indifference and frustration by offering an enlarged range of educational proj-ects. Your generous support emboldens us to redouble our efforts, to once again pick up the shovels, and to continue the clean-up here and now.