National Jewish Scholars Project

Blindness or Insight? The Jewish Denial of Jesus Christ

Michael A. Signer
Department of Theology
University of Notre Dame

From Disputation to Dialogue:
Past the Stumbling Block

In 1863 Abraham Geiger, the leading rabbi of liberal Judaism in Germany, described the liberating role of scholarly study in the area of religious studies: "The deepest contents of all the spiritual movements is scholarship. Where scholarship turns with its power it brings light to whatever was in chaos. The study of Judaism can proceed hand in hand to build a supportive circle with Christian theologians." From our present per-spective we can look back after almost one hundred and fifty years with profound sadness and some hope. The "supportive circle" of Jewish scholars and Christian theologians never emerged during Geiger’s day or in subsequent decades. Generations of Christian scholars turned away from the efforts made by liberal Jewish theologians to open collaborative investigations of the history of early Christianity or later periods. The night-mare of the Shoah extinguished the institutions and many of the scholars of European Jewry who might have participated.

However, during the last fifty years there are signs that Geiger’s hope for scholarship to "turn with its power" and bring light could be realized. Churches have made sig-nificant statements such as Nostra Aetate (1965) that support a more positive attitude toward Judaism and the Jewish people. Many of these statements have been brought to life in the on-going activities of Pope John Paul II to move toward reconciliation. His efforts toward reconciliation between Christians and Jews are grounded in his deep theological conviction and have expressed themselves in his actions during his visit to Jerusalem in March 2000. Statements by ecclesiastical groups that encourage individual Christians to ameliorate their rela-tionship to Judaism have been matched by intensified contacts between theologians and scholars -- many of them here at this conference.

We look back wistfully and conjecture what discussions about Christianity and Judaism might have been very different if theologians like Leo Baeck and Franz Rosenzweig would have read Pelikan or Lindbeck instead of Harnack. We know that in the field of New Testament has also witnessed significant changes as Christian scholars incorporate the writings of Montefiore, Klausner, Sandmel, Neusner and Boyarin into their own studies. John Meier recently claimed that what distinguishes the scholarly literature of the "third quest for the historical Jesus" from previous efforts has been the intense dis-cussion between Jewish and Christian scholars.

In the Jewish community we find the partnership be-tween ecclesial bodies and scholarship to be a most significant component of moving forward. Whatever misgivings scholars may have with their churches or synagogues, we have discovered that without serious dialogue with those who serve directly in the pulpits, there is little hope that our hard-won scholarly gains will be heard by the people in the pews who need them the most. As scholars -- historians or theologians -- we have come to realize our obligations to our communities of faith and to include them in our deliberations. We realize that religious life occurs not in the pages of learned journals but in the homilies delivered during liturgies, and in the rituals and rites of celebration of our sacred calendars. We want to be bold and see broader horizons than previous generations, and we hope that we can be guides to those who doubt and those who are so certain that they are afraid to doubt.

What motivates me to answer question of our confer-ence -- answering the dominical inquiry, "Who is it that you say I am?" -- is born out of the praxis of my teaching in a Catholic University and as a rabbi with responsibility to Reform Judaism in North America. I hear a paraphrase of "Who do you say I am?" in my classes at the University of Notre Dame. It usually occurs after the first month of lectures. The topic of the course makes very little difference. One bold soul inquires, "Rabbi, what do the Jewish people think about Jesus?" or "Who is it that you and the Jewish people say he is?" My answer to their question usually evokes some disap-pointment. They cannot grasp how it is possible that Jesus Christ -- so central to their lives and community   -- could be so marginal in my own. Their inquiry resonated with a more positive and hopeful assertion by a theology student at the University of Augsburg. He spoke with great enthusiasm and argued that Jesus Christ was the bridge between Jews and Christians -- between Judaism and Christianity -- because only Jesus Christ was simultaneously a Jew and a Christian. When I indicated to this well-meaning student that I hardly thought that the historical life of Jesus would be suf-ficient to sustain the Christian community, he sadly agreed. He conceded that ultimately the question of who Jesus was would not be an adequate response to who Jesus is.

In reflecting upon my answers to both the American and German students, the words of Paul came to mind: "I preach Christ crucified, folly to the Greeks and a stum-bling block to the Jews." This skandalum also calls to mind the commandment of Leviticus 19 not to put a stumbling block before the blind. Yet it is precisely the image of partial blindness that Paul ascribes to the Jews and which later came to be incorporated into the iconography of the medieval church in the west as "synagoga." Is it possible for Jews to speak with Chris-tians about Jesus Christ and utilize the stumbling block in as a more positive image -- as a boundary marker perhaps?

Over the past thirty years Christians and Jews have come to understand each other in their own integrity -- within the wholeness of their assembled communities and traditions. In the course of those discussions many negative images of Judaism have been removed. Can this new effort be sustained in a discussion about how Chris-tians approach the ineffable? Is it possible to examine the negation of Jesus Christ in the Jewish tradition as insight rather than blindness?

In the discussion that follows I would first like to reframe the question, "Who do you say that I am?" and suggest a framework for Jewish discussions with Christians about Jesus Christ. Second, I will survey some of the most significant responses of the Jewish tradition with respect to Jesus Christ and demonstrate a remarkable continuity from antiquity to modernity. Finally, I will set out an agenda that outlines what stake the Jewish community has in future Christian theological deliberations about Christology.

From Silence to Speech:
The Two Horizons of the Christological Discussion

Let us begin with the Christological question before us and search for a framework where a Jewish response might contribute to a deeper conversation. The question "Who is it that you say I am?" has a particular resonance for the Jewish reader. The final linguistic unit, "I am," recalls the ineffable name that God imparts to Moses in the book of Exodus. While the question in Exodus is a divine response to a human question, the inquiry by Jesus here demands a human response to a divine query. In either case the Jewish reluctance to utilize the nomina sacra immediately sets the boundary of what might be said. In the late biblical period and into the rabbinic literature the Jewish tradition discovered euphe-misms for the use of the divine name. Nouns such as "the heavens," "the place," "the Holy One," replaced the tetragrammaton YHWH and Elohim.

Rabbinic literature referred to Jesus, the inquirer, as "oto ha-ish" (that man). The name of Jesus Christ, as we will we see further on, was removed from many rabbinic texts as an act of self-censorship. However, if we inquire why self-censorship was important to these earlier generations, two distinct answers are plausible. The first answer would be that once Christianity became the majority religion in the West, it began to diminish the status of Judaism. Possessed of knowledge that Jews "cursed" Christ, Christians began to narrow the legal boundaries of acceptable Jewish behaviors. In order to avoid further danger the Jewish community encoded references to Jesus by the derisive term " that man."

An alternative answer to the development of the use of oto ha-ish or "that man" would follow this line of rea-soning: The Jewish tradition holds a great reverence for words and particularly for names. This reverence is clear with respect to the nomina sacra, the divine names, where there has been a reticence among Jews even to pronounce them. Therefore, to utter the name "Jesus Christ" would have been a validation of belief in him. Lest we think that this reticence to utter the name Jesus Christ is relegated to the past, there are many Jews who asserted their youthful religious identity by joining their public school classmates in singing Christmas carols but remaining silent when the lyrics required them to say Jesus or Christ.

The rabbinic proverb "Silence is appropriate for wisdom" has been at the heart of the popular Jewish reaction -- from antiquity to modernity -- to preserve Jewish identity. But silence can also lead to further misunder-standing. As we shall see later in this paper, Jewish negation of Jesus as Christ went well beyond silence. However, I would like to propose two horizons for future discussions of Christology. In one horizon, I believe that we Jews have little to say; on the other horizon, I be-lieve there can be productive discussions between us.

The first horizon of Christological discussion is what I call the ontological horizon. The assertions by Jesus in the Gospel of John that "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," and "everyone who lives and believes in me will never die," indicate that the ontological status of the believer has changed. The speech by Peter in the initial commissioning of the disciples in Acts also indicates that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ a change has come about in the way God offers salvation to those who believe. In the Pauline writings there are constant references to the power of salvation that occurs when the individual becomes part of the community of believers. This change happens within the spirit of the believer, and subsequent generations of Christian authors have attempted in both via positiva and via negativa to assert the ineffable change that occurs in the heart, mind and soul of those who believe. The ontological horizon is the deep private experience of a faith community. It requires the commitment of faith in order to comprehend its language. As a Jew I may read the meditations of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross or Thomas Merton, but when the attempt to describe the depths of the change that Jesus as Christ makes in their lives, I can only listen. When I attend Christian worship and watch the faces of those who go up to take the Eucharist, I can observe the change in their demeanor and the glimpse traces of their inner experience. The private nature of these experiences creates a language of belief that can at best be appreciated by non-believers but can never engage us fully beyond appre-ciating how they function in the life of the faith community. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s 1964 essay "Confrontation" argues for a strict boundary between faith communities with respect to theological claims. He asserts that the language of faith is a "private language" in the Wittgensteinian mode that can only be understood by those who share common faith commitments.

From my perspective Christological discussions have a second horizon that I would call temporal/eschatological. My study of the Christian tradition has taught me that Jesus Christ enters the economy of salvation and trans-forms history. Jesus Christ, the eschaton or end, enters at the mid-point, pointing the way for humanity to the ultimate end when God will be "all in all." St. Augustine’s sermon or treatise on the Jews focuses in this very theme of how the reading of God’s revelation in Hebrew Scriptures is changed by Jesus Christ. From the Christian perspective Jesus lived in history and demonstrates the way beyond history. In this temporal/eschatological horizon Jews and Christians may have very fruitful discussions. It forms the main point of convergence and divergence between us. Christians and Jews share the prophetic visions of divine judgment and mercy "in the end of days" and the apocalyptic literature that promises justification for current suffering in the eschaton. What they have not and still do not share is that Jesus Christ entered human history as God’s incarnation. Debates from antiquity to modernity indicate that it is precisely the temporal/eschatological horizon that has been the platform for disputation between our communities. Of course, in the Christian community the ontological and temporal horizons are fused -- it is because Jesus is the Christ that he brings triumph over death and a vision of Christian community in love until the eschaton. The Jew-ish negation of Jesus as Christ, as we shall now discern, begins with the temporal/eschatological horizon assert-ing that there was a man named Jesus, but he was not "the Christ." It would therefore follow that the ontologi-cal horizon of Christology would hold no meaning.

"That Man": Jesus as fully human

There is a remarkable consistency in the responses by Jewish writers from antiquity to modernity about Jesus. He is portrayed as an historical figure who was a member of the Jewish people. Jews knew the details of life of Jesus as they are narrated in the Gospels despite the fact that these documents never held canonical status. Since the fourth century Jews lived in a cultures where Jesus was the savior of the majority community. Until the late twentieth century the Jewish community was -- and for some Christian groups remains -- a target for proselytization. Therefore, the Jewish negation of Jesus Christ was not only a denial of the truth of Christianity. It was an assertion of the continuing validity of God’s revelation and commandments that would accompany the Jewish people until their Messiah arrived to deliver them from exile and the "yoke of the gentiles." For these reasons the Jewish negation of Jesus was couched in an angry, assertive and almost scandalous rhetoric.

We turn now, in this section of the paper, to two docu-ments from the early medieval period: the Toledot Yeshu [narrative of Jesus] and Sefer Nestor HaKomer. They each represent a different genre. Toledot Yeshu is a narrative of negation. It retells the life of Jesus in some detail in order to demonstrate that Jesus is not the Christ or Messiah. Sefer Nestor HaKomer is written as a philosophical dialogue and demonstrates that Christian arguments do not withstand the scrutiny of logical reasoning. Nestor HaKomer is the ancestor of many compositions that would be written under the pressure of evangelization by the mendicants in the high middle ages.

We begin with Toledot Yeshu. This book seems to have been composed in ninth- or tenth-century Europe, most likely Italy. Though it existed in many manuscripts and several versions it was never printed by any Jewish press. There is some evidence that the ninth-century bishop Agobard of Lyons knew of its existence. Johann Christoph Wagenseil in his Tela Ignea Satanae printed it in order to demonstrate what calumnies Jews committed against the name of Jesus. Samuel Kraus produced the first modern edition of the variant manuscript traditions.

TY is indeed a parody and biting satire on the life of Jesus. It draws upon passages in the Talmud and from apocryphal gospels that portray Jesus in an unfavorable light. However, if TY is read in light of its rhetorical purpose -- to persuade a Jew who might be wavering toward baptism -- then we can discern the lines of argument that a minority community makes in order to preserve its identity.

Following upon the pattern of the Gospels, TY begins with an infancy narrative. Mary was betrothed to a scion of the house of David who was also a great Torah scholar and a student of Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach. However, during Johanan’s absence Mary was raped. In order to preserve her honor and Johanan’s, it was ar-ranged for them to marry. The oscillation between the Davidic lineage of Jesus and his connection to rabbinic circles is preserved. However, the supernatural concep-tion of Jesus is turned into the calumny of rape.

TY portrays the young Jesus as a student of Torah and very clever. Difficulties arise when Jesus fails to display appropriate respect for the authority of his teachers. He violated the custom of humility, and TY raises the question "Who is the teacher and who is the student?" From this altercation, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth are also revealed. The Rabbis then sentenced Jesus to death for being one who leads others astray. Yet the TY consistently portrays Jesus as a brilliant interpreter of Scripture. He depicts himself as the object of prophecies in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The Rabbis offer counter-interpretations.

Jesus is therefore expelled from rabbinic circles and seeks his own group of disciples. He gathers these dis-ciples through his miracles. TY offers an explanation for these miracles. Jesus entered the holy of holies and read the divine name. He wrote it down, cut a slit in his arm where he placed the parchment with the divine name. Afterwards he used the divine name to perform miracles. Once again, TY places the activities of Jesus within a natural realm of explanation. The use of the divine name for magical purposes was known amongst rabbinic Jews. Jesus was simply part of this tradition and his miracles were not a demonstration of divine favor. In the concluding part of TY the Rabbis send Judas Iscariot into the holy of holies to retrieve the divine name and engage in a contest with Jesus before the Roman ruler.

In the TY there is an exchange between Jesus and the rabbinical sages about his name that speaks directly to the question of his identity. Jesus is asked, "What is your name?"

He responds, "My name is Mattai" [When]. The Rabbis ask what is the basis in Scripture for this name. Jesus responds, "When shall I come and see the face of God?" (Ps. 42:3). The sages responded, "When will he die and lose his name?" (Ps. 41:6). Again the sages ask his name and Jesus answers, "My name is Naqi" [Clean]. When asked the scriptural basis for this name, Jesus responds, "[I am of] clean hands and a pure heart" (Ps. 24:4). The sages counter with "God will not remit all punishment" (Ex. 34:7). Once again the sages ask for the name and its scriptural proof, and Jesus responds that his name is "Beni" [my son], and the scriptural proof is Ex. 4:22: "Israel, my first born". The response of the sages is, "I will kill your first born" (Ex. 4:23). The final exchange about the name is when Jesus asserts that his name is "Netzer" ("sprout"), and the scriptural proof is Isa. 11:1: "He shall grow out of the stump of Jesse." To this name the Rabbis responded with Isa. 14:9, "Then you were sent from your grave like a hated sprout."

TY thus presents its audience a disputation over the biblical proof of Jesus’ identity. The names begin with the wisdom literature or psalms. Jesus is not the subject of "when" he will come to see the face of God, but the very opposite: He will lose his name. He is not of clean hands and pure heart, but the one whom God will not hold guiltless despite his mercy to thousandth generation. The center of the exchange that takes place within the book of Exodus is over whether or not Jesus can assert that he is "beni," "my son." Here the TY places two succeeding verses against one another. Jesus asserts that he is Israel's God’s first born, while the Rabbis put his sonship among those of the Egyptians whom God will smite. Any hope that Jesus might assert his name as the sprout of Jesse is dashed by the assertion of the sages that he will be sent from his grave like a hated sprout. This negation of Jesus’ claim to messianic prophecy is at the midpoint of the narrative and foreshadows his death by crucifixion for "misleading the generation."

The concluding parts of TY focus on the death and burial of Jesus. There is no resurrection but simply a misplacement of his body so that the grave would not be robbed. After the death of Jesus his disciples continue to dispute with the sages claiming, "You have killed the messiah of God and Israel"; while the sages asserted, "You believe in a false prophet." In some versions of the TY the separation of Jesus’ disciples from Israel is the result of the machinations of the sages. They convince a great sage named Elijah [in the ms. Strasbourg ver-sion] that he should lead the Christians out of the community of Israel. He agrees to the rabbinic request and tells the followers of Jesus that they must change their worship, cease to observe the Sabbath, and change the day of their worship to Sunday; no longer observe Passover but celebrate the feast of the resur-rection. He claims that circumcision is a decision that is up to them. The Christians call this Elijah "Paul", and it was he who brought about the separation between Jews and Christians. Arguments then ceased within the household of Israel.

Christians might want to read the TY with the same per-spective that Jews now read some of the more assertive rhetoric in the early Christian authors. Robert Wilken has taught us that even John Chrysostom’s paschal sermons are an assertion of Christian identity. Surely the TY stamps the life of Jesus with a Jewish narrative. All supernatural elements of Jesus' life are given natural explanations. Biblical messianic prophecies are refuted by utilizing the rabbinic hermeneutic technique of gezerah shavah, the use of the same word in another context. Surprisingly from our modern perspective, where so much violence has resulted from deicide, the death of Jesus by Jewish hands is asserted by the Rabbis in the Talmud and in TY. For them it was not deicide but simply the death of a rebellious Jewish student. The narrative about Jesus in TY is not about one who "is" in the profound sense of the Christian tradition, but about a man who "was" and whose existence brought sadness and sorrow to the house of Israel. It is an internal document, filled with passion and pathos and had a profound influence in the folkloric life of the Jewish people.

In the Book of Nestor the Priest we discover a linguistic framework much more suitable for academic debate. Sarah Stroumsa and Daniel Lasker have recently com-piled a modern edition that provides the interesting history of this text. It originated in the Islamic East and was composed in Arabic. In the ninth or tenth century it was translated into Hebrew. When comparing the Arabic version with the Hebrew, Stroumsa and Lasker point out that the latter version is more acerbic and describes Christian arguments with more derisory terminology. Removing the debate from the cultural sphere of Islam, where Judaism and Christianity were both minority reli-gions, to the realm of Christendom motivated the translator to "strengthen the weak knees" of his co-religionists.

N is described as a priest who converted to Judaism and debated with pagans and sages. This literary motif de-scends from antiquity but no doubt had verisimilitude in both the Islamic and Christian worlds of the Middle Ages. The composition is set in a series of propositions or questions which are then systematically refuted.

Rather than rehearse the responses to each of these questions, I think that it is more useful to gain some understanding of how N frames the discussion. It begins with the question of incarnation. How could God take on human form and guide humanity? A comparison of Jesus with figures from the Old Testament consistently reveals the superiority of the latter [par. 4]. A description of the Christian argument for the Trinity follows the problem of the Incarnation [par. 25-26]. Next comes a discussion of the religious practices of Jesus as an example. Should Christians follow the Jewish practices that Jesus did? [par. 33-36, 63-69]. N raises questions about the divine nature of Jesus based on his lack of omnipotence, asking why it was necessary for Jesus to pray to God to relieve his burden of suffering or how he allowed people to mock him before his crucifixion [par 51-53]. Furthermore, why did Jesus need to eat and sleep of he was divine?

The framework of these questions and responses is sig-nificant for the history of much Jewish-Christian debate in the Middle Ages and modernity. When it was asserted that reason could ultimately convince Jews of the truth asserted about Jesus Christ and Christianity, the arguments proffered by Nestor appear in many forms. Although largely unacknowledged until the modern period, scholars now find that the logic in most Jewish anti-Christian treatises have their origins in this work.

In his arguments N covers much of the same ground as TY. However, he adds an important additional dimension. N indicates that Christianity opposes the life and teach-ings of Jesus. For N, Jesus was an ordinary Jew who followed the law. As we have seen the assertion that Jesus was human and lived within history forms the basis of the Jewish negation of Jesus. At times they were reluctant to speak about Jesus at all, as Nachmanides asserted in his 1263 debate with Pablo Christiani, "We will not discuss Jesus but whether or not the messiah has come." On other occasions, particularly with the approach of modernity, Jewish authors fell back on the human Jesus theme as Moses Mendelssohn did when he averred, "Jesus of Nazareth observed not only the laws of Moses but also the teachings of the Rabbis … and you dear brothers and fellow human beings who follow the teachings of Jesus, should you be so angry with us when we do what the founder of your religion did that which was preserved through his authority."

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish negation of Jesus Christ came to focus more and more on the distinction between Jesus and Paul. While Abraham Geiger asserted that Jesus should be placed within the Pharisaic context, he argued that it was Paul who was influenced by paganism. Leo Baeck distin-guished between the classical religion of ethics as practiced by Jesus and the Pharisees and the romantic religion of abandonment asserted by Paul. Joseph Klaus-ner and Samuel Sandmel both argued that Jesus was a loyal Jew, while Paul was the founder of a Christianity that was harmonious with paganism. More recent his-torical scholarship by Jews examines Jesus and Paul within a broader historical context, reclaiming both of them into a pluralistic Judaism of the period, and some have asserted that there is a co-emergence of Judaism and Christianity as distinct religions only in the fourth century.

It is important to remember after rehearsing the specific Jewish negations about Jesus as Christ that they apply only to members of the Jewish community. Rabbis in the Talmud had already developed the concept of the "Noachide commandments," which opened God’s loving-kindess to all the nations of the world. Some medieval rabbis thought that Christian belief in Jesus and the Trinity was permissible for Christians because it brought them under the wings of the God of Israel. From an-tiquity through modernity Jewish theologians have been prepared to assert the independent validity of Christian-ity for Christians. Does this put Jewish theologians beyond any interest in future Christological discussions.

Toward a Future Agenda: The Jewish Interest in Continued Christological Discussion

In these concluding remarks I will argue that Jews have a profound interest in the internal debates by Christians. Our position as serious interlocutors will oscillate be-tween silence and intense discussions with you. There is no question that Jewish attempts at reclamation of Jesus have foundered within the Jewish community. Martin Buber’s assertion that Jesus was his elder brother did not earn him accolades among his co-religionists. Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath’s admonition to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations that we name Jesus as one of our great teachers received no enthusiastic re-sponse among some of his most ardent followers. The ontological horizon -- the change in the spirit and being of the individual believer -- that Jesus brings to Chris-tians as their Christ stops at the door of the rabbinic assertion that Torah is God’s living covenant with the Jewish people. The metanoia among recent Christian theologians that the covenant with God and the Jewish People has never been revoked surely reinforces the trust the Jewish theologians will develop in our future discussions.

Perhaps the time has come to recover Franz Rosen-zweig’s assertion that Jews do not come to God through Christ but as Jews, and Christians come to God through Christ as Christians. This axiom leaves us as Jews, according to Rosenzweig, with an opportunity to engage in conversation and deliberation with the Ecclesia, those who constitute the "body of Christ." It is precisely with Christians, through whom Christ acts, that Jews can enter into profound discoveries about the way that God acts in our lives and how our traditions make demands upon us to help in the establishment of divine sover-eignty in the world.

As Jews we have an interest in what you believe and how it transforms you. It has been the appreciation of Jesus Christ as human and his capacity for human suf-fering, as described by Professor Metz, which has brought Christians to a deep appreciation of Jewish loss during the Shoah. The trinitarian reflections in the writ-ings of Catherine LaCugna and Elizabeth Johnson that emphasize interrelationship rather than hierarchy open believing Christians to positive relationships with those who live beyond the household of the Ecclesia. Chris-tologies that emphasize Jesus Christ as one who lived with the poor, the suffering, the alien -- as we find in Liberation theologies -- have found sympathetic ears and outreaching arms from members of the Jewish com-munity, whose religious identity is founded upon the fusing of rite, ritual and prophetic justice.

In this paper I have attempted to reverse the perspec-tive that Jews and Christians have had about the Jewish negation of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ remains a stum-bling block, but not one that causes the downfall of either community. The presence of Jews and Christians in the world of the twenty-first century will be very different from the previous two millennia. After wit-nessing a near annihilation of those who denied Jesus Christ, many Christians have made radical metanoia about those to whom they have been so intimately and separately bound through the temporal horizon. The image of Ecclesia and Synagoga have found two new iconographic expressions in recent publications. The German edition of Cardinal Ratzinger’s book about the Jewish-Christian relationship and world religions has cleverly repositioned the medieval Ecclesia at the arm of Synagoga in a supportive gesture. Sr. Mary Boys' new book Has God only One Blessing bears a photograph of her newly commissioned sculpture where Ecclesia and Synagoga sit side by side. The temporal/eschatological horizon gives us many new opportunities, and let us hope we shall continue to speak. The ontological horizon in this new era may provide Jews an opportunity to listen and learn without fear.

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