National Jewish Scholars Project

Jewish-Christian Relations
in a Secular Age

The 1998 Swig Lecture, May 4, 1998

Dr. David Novak

I.

The topic that was announced, "Jewish-Christian Rela-tions in a Secular Age," is still my overarching topic. However, when one deals with a relationship between two communities, especially the relationship between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church, a relation-ship that has been so complex and one that has lasted now almost two millennia, it is important to be aware of just where that relationship stands at the point in his-tory where we now find ourselves situated. And since we negotiated the topic of this lecture today some months ago, something very significant has happened in the course of Jewish-Christian relations, and especially in Jewish-Catholic relations. This past March, just about two months ago, a public statement was issued by the Vatican, "The Catholic Church and the Holocaust," authored by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the president of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations, and in-troduced by Pope John Paul II himself.¹ The document itself is one that has received wide publicity and has already stirred up a good deal of controversy. So, I think that it would be quite useful in terms of my being here and you being here for me to give a Jewish reaction to what I consider to be the overall thrust of this important document, to express agreement with most of it, but also to point out in a forthright manner what I take to be some problems within it. To ignore this document in favor of the more general talk I had originally planned would pass up an opportunity for true dialogue that simply should not be missed. Nevertheless, this new subtopic is still within the range of the overall topic announced inasmuch as anything that happens in our age, even between religious communities, even within religious communities themselves, happens within an age that is not religious but very much secular.

Speaking of history, let me tell you at what point in his-tory I came to be interested in Jewish-Catholic relations. History is best appreciated and gains ethical significance when one’s own personal story is connected with the larger story of the community and communities in which he or she lives and works.

I came to Jewish-Catholic relations at a pivotal time in my own life history and at a much more pivotal time in the relationship between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church. In my own case, I feel privileged that this was during my youth, when I was unformed enough to be able to give Jewish-Christian relations a prominent place in my life’s work as a Jewish scholar and thinker. In the early 1960’s, 1963 to be exact, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, I became the student -– indeed, the close disciple -– of a man who to the mind of many was the most important Jewish theologian to work in America, my late revered teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel. At that time, Professor Heschel was engaged in serious discussions with the leadership of the Catholic Church at the highest levels, especially with the late Cardinal Augustin Bea, in preparation for Vatican Council II, which in 1965 issued a landmark statement Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time") about its view of Judaism and the Jewish people, a document that is undoubtedly the most significant statement of the Church regarding the Jews in modern times, perhaps ever.² I remember how hopeful my teacher was for this new attitude that was emerging in the Church then, and the tremendous chance he was taking in becoming the chief Jewish advisor to the Church in this whole enter-prise. And not only was he taking a chance, but Cardinal Bea and Pope Paul VI were also taking a chance, and for similar reasons. Professor Heschel was taking a chance because of the harsh criticism to which he was sub-jected by some other prominent Jewish scholars, quite unfairly I think, for assuming that a new relationship was even possible with the Catholic Church.³ That criticism sometimes took the form of verbal abuse, both private and public. And the leaders of the Church took a chance because there were elements in the Church, powerful elements, who argued that since the Jewish people had rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, what kind of positive relationship could there be with such a people? Yet there was enough momentum on both sides of this great divide to take the chance on developing a new relationship as something important, something good, and perhaps even something holy in the world, especially in a secular age.

We are all the beneficiaries of those chances taken over thirty years ago. In the wake of what happened "in our time" conversations between Jews and Catholics are now in progress, including conversations conducted at the highest levels of philosophical and theological dis-course. Anyone who has watched what has happened from then until now cannot help but marvel at how far we have moved from suspicion to a level much deeper than simply that of goodwill and tolerance. But in terms of this new relationship, there has always been a dark cloud hanging over it. And that has been that the Jewish people in particular and the whole Western world in general still very much lives in the shadow of the Holo-caust, the systematic program of mass extermination that resulted in the murder of six million Jews, and many others too, but which was directed against the Jewish people most particularly and vehemently. The question must thus be raised, on both sides: Just what role did the Catholic Church play in this historical drama in whose shadow we all still live? Until we engage in the most soul-searching discussion of this question, we may very well be at an impasse in this new relationship, which many -– but by no means all –- of us celebrate. This recent statement of the Vatican is certainly a major step in that direction.

But what was the reaction to this statement when it was issued? For the most part, with a few exceptions, the reaction of most of the Jewish leaders, at least those who have access to the media, was a negative one. Thus the New York Times, which although not an "official" Jewish publication certainly reflects –- indeed influences –- a certain type of American Jewish opinion, in a recent editorial basically branded the Vatican state-ment a whitewash, a rationalization of the conduct of the Church during the period of the Holocaust. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which does have an official Jewish status of sorts, also issued a reaction to the Vatican statement, expressing much the same dis-appointment. Now it should be pointed out that this view is not unanimous in the Jewish community. So, Rabbi James Rudin, who heads the department of the American Jewish Committee that deals with Jewish-Christian rela-tions, issued a much more positive and hopeful response. However, Rudin’s reaction seems to be a minority voice, at least so far.

What is the reason for this Jewish criticism? After all, the statement did condemn the Holocaust, it did con-demn antisemitism, and it even spoke of the "sinful behavior" of certain Christians, certain members of the Church.⁴ So, why should there be this kind of negative reaction? Shouldn’t Jews be happy to hear all of this from the Church? Isn’t this an important way of putting the Holocaust in the kind of perspective that enables us to get on with our lives, precisely not by forgetting but by remembering, which is itself for the sake of a painfully honest reconciliation? Hence, we must ask just what was all of this disappointment all about? As an attempt to answer this basic question, I would like to briefly explore with you today why I think this disappointment is largely mistaken, and why it is not only a misunder-standing of Catholic theology but also of Jewish theology as well. These reactions, then, were not only unchari-table, they were also unjust. For they do not reflect any attempt to try to understand how Catholic theology operates (and the statement was very much theological and not just political in the usual sense) and how its operation is in many ways quite similar to the way Jew-ish theology operates.

II.

The line in the statement that seems to have elicited the most negative Jewish response is actually a quote from none other than Pope John Paul II, from a speech he made on 31 October 1997 in Rome: "In the Christian world -– I do not say on the part of the Church as such –- erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility toward this people."⁵ And this nega-tive reaction to a statement of John Paul II, of all people, is itself ironic inasmuch as there has been no other pope in modern times, perhaps in all history, who has done more to develop rapprochement with the Jew-ish people and Judaism. And that is not accidental. Karol Wojtyla as a philosopher and a theologian has been deeply interested in the connection between Judaism and the teaching of the Catholic Church for most of his life. Furthermore, Karol Wojtyla has been intimately re-lated to Jews all of his life, beginning with his childhood in Poland, where Jews were among his closest asso-ciates. The Pope speaks Yiddish, and I know that for a fact because in 1985, when twelve of us had a private audience with him during a conference to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, I briefly spoke with him in Yiddish. And in the face of much opposition, it is during this papacy that the Vatican has established formal diplomatic relations with the State of Israel. So, it would seem that Jews have had nothing but good from this pope. Why, then, has there been such consterna-tion over this one sentence in the Vatican statement quoting John Paul II, indeed tying the whole document to it?

The criticism all seems to be about the fact that the Pope did not apologize for the Church per se. Where is the apology? Those who have now criticized the Church –- and especially the Pope -– have placed all their hopes on the utterance of an official apology by the Church "as such." But the Church seems to have separated herself as an institution from her condemnation of the behavior of those of her sons and daughters who cooperated with and endorsed the Nazi program of persecution and murder of the Jews. Of course, we must understand just what the Pope meant by "the Church as such." If we can reach some understanding of what that really means, then I think we can arrive at another perspec-tive on this statement, and it can be a Jewish perspective properly informed by an understanding of the Jewish tradition. In truth, Jewish statements that are not informed by our own tradition are not really "Jewish" in any essential sense, but simply express the views of a group of people who happen to be Jews. None of the negative reactions I have seen to date is informed by the Jewish tradition, even though I do not rule out the possibility that an authentically Jewish negative response could be so formulated.

When a Catholic speaks of "the Church," let alone when the occupant of the Throne of Peter speaks of "the Church," he can mean one of two things. On the one hand, the Church is undoubtedly a collection of fallible human beings. The Church is made up of her members, the parts of her body so to speak. At this level, it is certainly recognized that these fallible human members of the Church can do either good or evil as is their free human choice to do. However, on the other hand, when the Pope speaks of the Church "as such," he is not speaking about a fallible collection of human beings, instead he is speaking about what the Church under-stands as her magisterium, her teaching authority, an authority Catholics see as expressing God’s will, begin-ning with Scripture and extending into the ongoing development of Church doctrine. So, at one level the Church is a human association in the world, but at another level the Church is mater et magistra -– "mother and teacher" of her members. Understanding the Church at either of these levels, however, one can see why an "apology" is inappropriate. Thus a little later on, we will examine the word the document did use, which is a word of far more theological significance than "apol-ogy" ever was or ever will be.

Let us first take the Church as a group of human beings, which is certainly the easier thing for a non-Catholic like myself to do. Now just who would apologize to whom? If one takes a Catholic who actually participated in the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, how could such a per-son possibly apologize? How do you apologize to someone in whose murder you were a participant? In order to apologize, you have to make your apology to someone who is capable of accepting your apology. But those who were murdered are hardly in a position to absolve anyone else. And who am I as a Jew, who was only a potential victim of Nazi murder (for if Hitler had been successful, I who was born in 1941 would also be dead), to forgive someone who asks my forgiveness for what he or she did to Jews now dead? How can I exon-erate somebody for what he or she did to somebody else? Wouldn’t that be what Christians call "cheap grace"? And there is a parallel to this in the Jewish tradition, and it is important to call it to mind because we can only understand someone else’s tradition by analogy to our own. Thus when the Sanhedrin func-tioned in ancient Israel and had the power of capital punishment, a criminal about to be executed for murder had the right to confess his or her crime and assert that the death to be undergone is to be "atonement for all my sins."⁶ This was seen as one’s reconciliation with God in the world-to-come, but it was not, nevertheless, in any way a means of exonerating the criminal from the punishment he or she deserves in this world. And along these lines, I am reminded of the report that when Hans Frank, who had been the Nazi governor of Poland, where the largest number of atrocities took place, was about to be executed after having been sentenced to death at Nuremberg in 1946, he said that a thousand deaths would not atone for the crimes he committed. But that is between Hans Frank and God. We who have survived have no right to forgive him for what he did; we have no right to accept any apologies from him or from anyone like him. And, on the other hand, if an apology is made by people who did not commit any such crimes, either directly or even indirectly, and who do not at all even sympathize with the murders, then what would they be apologizing for?

The Jewish tradition on this point is quite clear: We do not believe in inherited guilt. Indeed, when the Church declared in Nostra Aetate in 1965 that she no longer regarded the Jews as collectively guilty of "deicide," that is the murder of Jesus as the son of God, she was mak-ing a point she now holds in common with the Jewish moral tradition.⁷ Each person is only responsible for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of "original sin" does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem to inevitably copy the sin of the first human pair. Thus the Talmud asks about how God can in all justice "visit the sins of the fathers on the sons" (Exodus 20:5). It an-swers that children are only punished for their parents’ sins when they themselves willingly identify with them and repeat them by their own free choice.⁸ So, justice, whether human or divine, must recognize as did the prophet Ezekiel that "the person who sins shall die" (Ezekiel 18:20) –- alone. Thus at either of these levels of humanly applicable justice, an apology makes no sense. At either level, an apology could only be emp-ty rhetoric.

But what about the second notion of the Church, name-ly, the Church as such? This refers to the magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church. Now the teaching authority of the Church does not refer to what we usu-ally mean by "teaching," that is, imparting information, like what is given by a professor in a university lecture to a class of passive note-takers, whose only responsi-bility is to pass an examination or write a term paper in order to "pass" the course and thus get it behind them. Magisterium, for which the Hebrew equivalent would be hora’ah from whose same root the word Torah comes, means teaching that calls upon the one taught to do something or believe something which is essential for the very existence of that person within the community for whom that teaching is authoritative.⁹ When the Church is understood as such, then the Church cannot possibly apologize based on her own theological assumptions. For if the Church at this level were to apologize, that would presuppose a criterion of truth and right that is higher than the revelation upon which the Church bases its authority, the revelation that the Church claims as her own. In other words, the Church cannot criticize herself based on criteria external to her own revelation and tradition because the Church not only claims what she teaches is true, even more so she claims that what she teaches is the truth per se, namely, the ultimate cri-terion whereby everything else is either true or false, right or wrong. So, for example, the great encyclical of Pope John Paul II is called Veritatis Splendor, "the splen-dor of truth." That is the way the Church presents herself in and to the world.

Now, of course, self-presentation of oneself as the truth is highly offensive to people of a largely secular mental-ity. That is much of the modern charge against all religion. Religions seem to arrogate to themselves divine authority. They seem to hold themselves above judg-ment by "impartial" criteria. And this lies at the heart of much of the criticism of the "authoritarian" character of the Catholic Church. But I must tell you that on this score, Judaism is no different. Even though Judaism and Catholicism make some very different claims, some of which are not only different but mutually exclusive, the logic of the way the Jewish tradition makes her claims and the way the magisterium of the Church makes her claims is virtually identical. Thus when Jews thank God for giving us the Torah, that is not only the Five Books of Moses but the whole authoritative tradition of the Jewish people throughout history, we speak of torat emet, which means not just "true teaching" but that "the Torah is the truth." The Jewish tradition presents herself as the greatest revelation of God’s truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves "the chosen people." It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah. The law of heaven has now come down to earth to a singular community entrusted with its teach-ing.¹⁰ This does not mean we should not share that truth with other people, and that does not mean this truth has nothing in common with other sources of truth. That is why we do not reject science; we do not reject the proper findings of human reason. But a Jew who is committed to the Torah as the word of God cannot in good faith criticize anything taught within the Jewish tradition based on external criteria.¹¹ Thus the criticism of liberal Judaisms by traditionalists like myself is that they have all in one way or another attempted to judge Judaism based on criteria that can only be regarded as higher than Judaism herself, and that is simply contrary to the way the tradition has ever defined herself in the past. And how could a tradition that admits of external justification require her members to die as martyrs rather than exchange her for any other identity in their lives as does Judaism (and Catholicism)?¹²

However, if that is the situation both for Jews and for Catholics, does that mean religious traditions like Juda-ism and Catholicism are incapable of any critical development? Does that mean they cannot in effect ever change their minds? No, religious traditions are in a constant state of development and renewed self-understanding. But the criteria of development, the standards for change, are based upon what is within. That is, if we discover that something we may have taught in the past now appears not to be God’s will, or even contrary to God’s will, then we have to discover again what are the fundamental principles of our own revelation and tradition and reinterpret our teaching so that we do not lead our people astray again. Thus the rabbinic principle that "the Sages be careful in their words" means that even correct teaching, when not properly formulated, can lead people to conclusions that are really unwarranted by the tradition when properly interpreted and understood.¹³ They can lead to "erro-neous and unjust interpretations"; in fact, these are the very words the Pope used when speaking in a self-critical mode about Catholic teaching, words we have seen are repeated in the document we are now ana-lyzing.

This charge that the Pope could not criticize the Church as such is true but mistaken. Of course, the Pope cannot criticize the Church the way an uncommitted outsider might criticize her. The Church, like the Jewish tradition upon which she is largely patterned, can only look inward for guidance. The only criticism, then, that could be made either by an insider or a sympathetic outsider is if either the Jewish tradition or the Church as such refused to engage in any self-criticism at all. But, clearly, if that were the stance of the Church under this pontificate of John Paul II, a document like "The Catholic Church and the Holocaust," and even more so Nostra Aetate, could have never been written. That is how the Pope, when he spoke in the synagogue in Rome (by his own unprecedented invitation, I might add), condemned antisemitism: "at any time from any source," which means that when antisemitism has come out of Church teaching, those who so taught it are to be considered in error by the internal criteria of the teaching authority of the Church per se.¹⁴

Much the same is the case with reappraisals of morally charged issues within the Jewish tradition, which enables Jews who know our tradition and the way it operates to appreciate something quite analogous in another tradi-tion. A good example of this type of reappraisal is the way Jews have been dealing with the whole question of the role of women in Judaism. Now such reappraisal is false to the whole internal integrity of the Jewish tradi-tion if it simply assumes that because the role of women has changed so radically in the surrounding society and culture, therefore it ought to change in Judaism accord-ingly. One must look into the tradition herself for sources -– and there are such sources -– for a process of careful and responsible reinterpretation.¹⁵ That is not to say that religious traditions are not, to a certain extent, influenced by what is happening in the surrounding cul-ture, even a culture largely indifferent, perhaps even hostile to these traditions. How could it be otherwise? Are not religious traditions and the faith communities that sustain them in the world? Nevertheless, those external influences can only stimulate thinkers within a tradition to be sensitive to some issues more than others, issues for which there are already sources within the tradition herself.¹⁶ These influences are part of the human judgment even religious teachers must exercise, but they are not in any way sources of authority them-selves from which moral conclusions can be drawn.

This analogy between Jewish and Catholic moral logic is not to say that the issue of the Holocaust for the Church and the issue of women for Judaism (and for the Church as well) have the same moral gravity. I have simply made this analogy to illustrate how much of the logic employed in the criticism of the Church on this issue could be similarly employed against Judaism. Of course, it might well be true that many of the Jewish critics of the Vatican statement on the Holocaust think Judaism can and should be subjected to the same type of criticism they have leveled against the Church. But if that is so, I find it rather disingenuous that such critics would label their criticism in any way "Jewish," unless, that is, they regard the Jews as nothing but a contem-porary political interest group, having no tradition from which to draw authority to make any kind of authentic Jewish critique at all.

When one sees how moral logic within religious traditions like Judaism and Catholicism operates, then it is possible to understand why it is not an apology that is called for. Apologies are cheap. It seems that everyone is apolo-gizing for just about everything in the past these days. No, this is not an apology, nor should it be an apology either. Instead, it is a process of the most profound introspection. As such, we Jews can appreciate the way the Church, and especially the Pope as its current leader, are grappling with this issue in the way we Jews ourselves have to grapple with this and similar issues. Indeed, as regards this issue of the Holocaust, as much current Holocaust scholarship is showing, we Jews also have great moral questions of our own to confront and judge.

If, then, the Church, either as an association of fallible human beings or as a community claiming authority from the revelation of God, could not and should not utter an "apology," what should it be doing? Well, the statement says it is "an act of repentance." And then, mirabile dictu, in parenthesis we see the Hebrew word for "repentance": teshuvah.¹⁷ Here the Church has quite consciously and deliberately chosen a central term straight out of the Jewish theological tradition. Why an act of repentance, an act of teshuvah? It is because, as the statement then says, "as members of the Church, we are linked to the sins as well as the merits of all her children." This means what we might very well take it to be a certain kind of collective responsibility. Of course, in a literal moral sense, I am not responsible for some-body else’s sins, and so a Catholic today, who is horrified by Nazism and all it stood for and all it wrought in the world, is certainly not responsible for what Hitler did, even though Hitler was baptized a Catholic. It is not that person’s responsibility by any moral logic I know of. However, the religious tradition, be it the Catholic Church or the ongoing tradition of the Jewish people, is "covenantal," that is, for both, the relationship with God is primarily a communal affair. It is not primarily a rela-tionship between an individual person and God as many seem to think is the essence of any religion, especially in a secular age when many would like to confine religion to the realm of individual privacy. That is because human beings are essentially communal creatures. If we are to be related to God in the fullness of our humanity, then it has to be in the context of a community. In the cove-nant, a particular community is elected by God for a unique relationship with God. Traditional Jews can recog-nize this point quite readily. For example, virtually all Jewish prayer is uttered by plural subjects, "we" not "I." And that is the case even when a Jew is unable to pray with a congregation. He or she is always part of the congregation, even when unable to be physically part of them.¹⁸

In a covenantal religion, the ties are not only between the community and God. For these very ties with God undergird the ties between the members of the community herself. As such, these human ties within the community themselves are themselves much more in-tense and long lasting than the ties we experience in our largely secular society and culture. Thus in an ordinary society, we are obligated to practice justice, and a certain degree of compassion as well. But the inter-human relations in an ordinary, secular society are quite "thin" when compared with the much "thicker" ties within a covenanted community.¹⁹ Thus in a covenanted com-munity, even though one is not morally responsible for the sins of fellow members of the community, there still is an existential sense of collective sorrow and shame when another member of the community -– even those as estranged from the community as many of the Nazis were -– commits a sin, especially a sin having great public consequences. In talmudic teaching, one says "every Jew is responsible for every other Jew" (kol yisra’el arevim zeh ba-zeh).²⁰ That is what it means to be part of a covenanted community. So, I remember how my grandmother would occasionally read in the newspaper that some Jew or other had committed a crime –- someone she didn’t even know or know of personally -– and she would express her sense of sorrow and shame at what they had done. She felt that what they had done personally affected her, even if by stan-dards of ordinary morality her reaction would have to be judged irrational. And in the same way, by contrast, she would take pride when some Jew or other –- also someone she didn’t know or know of personally –- did something that had benefited others. And, although my grandmother was not a learned woman, she was reflect-ing by a kind of folk wisdom about what the Rabbis called qiddush ha-shem ("the sanctification of God") or hillul ha-shem ("the profanation of God"), that is, when Jews do good in the world, it reflects well of God who elects them for the covenant; and when Jews do evil in the world, it reflects badly on God similarly.²¹ With this in mind, we Jews can see how the Church, who after all learned about covenant from us, is engaged in the covenantal act of repentance, of teshuvah.

As regards the Holocaust, the Church feels sorrow and shame about those of her members who did not respond properly to the moral outrage that Nazism surely was, or even only sympathized with what was being done to the victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder. And here we do see a powerful moral component at work, for although a covenant is more than just a moral rela-tionship between humans, it certainly takes much from human universal morality (what is called "natural law") as well as contributing to it.²² And that sorrow and shame is not just because of a kind of guilt by association with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who happen to have been Catholics or of Catholic origin; it seems to be sorrow and shame that perhaps the teaching authority of the Church did not do enough to influence such persons to resist the evil to which they so horribly succumbed. In other words, perhaps the Church did not do a good enough job of teaching what the Pope has called "the principles of Christianity" to many of her sons and daughters.²³ This sorrow and shame has led the Church to condemn racism and antisemitism.

The Church has thus learned from her mistakes, and she seems to be doing this by an ongoing process of intro-spection. Isn’t that more prolonged and more painful than any mere apology? For an apology under these circumstances would either be a once and for all way of getting the Holocaust "out of the way," or it would be an act of moral suicide. That is because no religious com-munity can judge itself by someone else’s standards and still exercise its existential claims upon its own faithful. A covenanted community engages in teshuvah, which lit-erally means "return." Those responsible for teaching the tradition must constantly be returning to her true, re-vealed sources, always discovering that they could have interpreted them better and made their principles more intelligible and more effective.

However, to expect an apology rather than teshuvah is to call for something quite cheap when there is the pos-sibility of doing something much more precious. It calls for something ephemeral when there is the possibility of something more permanent. An apology is an event; teshuvah is a process. An apology gets us "over" the past, putting it permanently behind us; returning is al-ways on the horizon. Thus we Jews pray daily, three times daily to be exact, for God to enable us to return to God and to forgive us our sins that have been a barrier between God and us. To be a member of a covenanted community means to acknowledge the sins of all our fellow members. This is an awesome covenantal respon-sibility; it is certainly beyond the demands of any ordinary morality. Indeed, one can only bear such re-sponsibility when he or she believes that the community has been elected by God and is the object of God’s special, supernatural, concern. What all of this shows, I hope, is that only Jews who are theologically sensitive can appreciate what the Church is trying to do in this statement. Furthermore, it does not in any way diminish the fact that Jews have a different, even contradictory, view than that of Catholics as to how God makes contact with us and what that contact consists of. Actually, by properly understanding what we share with Catholics in common, we are better able to understand what makes us different from one another. To assume we have nothing in common is as erroneous and spiri-tually dangerous as to assume that there is nothing that separates us from each other.

III.

From all of what I have tried to say so far, you can see that I am very much sympathetic to the Vatican state-ment. I appreciate its significance, not only because it is immediately beneficial to Jews, but even more impor-tantly because it is part of a larger process of the Church’s coming to grips in a way she has never come to grips before with her Jewish origins and with her co-existence with the Jewish people until the end of history. But, by way of conclusion, I must state, in a spirit of friendly response, what I find lacking in the statement. This critical response is not a moral one, and it is not a theological one either. That should be evident from all that has been previously said in this lecture. Rather, my critique here is rhetorical. On one point in particular, I think the statement tries to say too much and thus does not say it well.

The statement raises the whole issue of the behavior of Christians who did resist the Nazi policies, especially the Nazi policies against the Jews. Thus it cites the 1937 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge ("with burning concern"), which condemned Nazi racism quite explicitly. And this was an encyclical, an official state-ment of Church teaching, unusually written in German rather than the usual Latin, which seems to be a way of making its point directly to the Nazi powers in Germany then. Also, it seems quite likely that the actual author of this encyclical was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, who was to become Pope Pius XII two years later in 1939. Nevertheless, this Vatican statement raises the complex historical question of the entire role of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, espe-cially in its discussion about the actual conduct of his papacy in that incredibly difficult time. It raises this is-sue in order to defend the whole record of Pius XII.²⁴

There is a tremendous historical debate about Pius XII. On the one hand, it is well known that Pius XII did save a number of Jewish lives and encouraged others who were doing likewise. But, on the other hand, ever since Rolf Hochuth’s 1963 play, The Deputy, which builds on the plausible assumption that the Pope did know about the mass extermination of the Jews from 1942 on, the question has been raised with increasing frequency: Why didn’t the Pope condemn what the Nazis were doing to the Jews? But on that whole question, we might say "the jury is still out." If we assume that the Pope did know what was happening –- and for argument’s sake let us assume that, as the Vatican document itself seems to assume -- then the question is whether the Pope’s public silence was an act of moral cowardice or an act of moral prudence. Concerning moral cowardice, it has been said that the Pope did not want to upset the Nazis under whose control he was living in occupied Italy (and Vatican City) and, also, that he had always been more concerned with the danger of Communism, with its very explicit anti-Christianity and anti-Catholicism par-ticularly, than he had been concerned with Nazism. After all, wasn’t it the Pope when he was Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, who had negotiated the concordat of 1933 with the new Nazi regime in Germany, an act that gave this questionable new regime much international respectability? And, wasn’t the Pope a good deal less reticent in condemning the evil of Communism than he was in condemning the evil of Nazism, which is evidenced by the fact that after the war he excommu-nicated any Catholic who even voted for Communist candidates, something he did not do to any Catholic supporters of Nazism?

Concerning the assumption of moral prudence on his part at that time, it could be said that he reasonably feared that he might be killed by the Nazis if he so spoke, or that certainly many other Catholics, especially Catholic clergy who would be taken as his agents, would be killed. Because moral judgment in this case still requires much more historical enquiry, one can hardly be very conclusive about either alternative in this most compli-cated case. And the case is further complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with a moral judgment, which if unfavorable, would be condemning Pius XII for a sin of omission –- a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. For no one could say that the Pope actually spoke or acted positively on behalf of the Nazi regime (as did some bishops), and certainly not on behalf of the crimes of the Nazis.

As anyone can readily see, it is far more difficult to fix blame on somebody for what he or she could have done but did not do than it is to affix blame on somebody for what he or she should not have done but did do. The reason for this distinction is because what has not been done, like any negative, is potentially infinite, whereas what has been done is actually finite. Needless to say, it is easier to get a hold on what is finite than on what is infinite. Of course, that does not mean we cannot condemn sins of omission. Surely, we would morally condemn somebody who would, as Scripture puts it, "stand idly by the blood of your neighbor" (Leviticus 19:16).²⁵ However, once the proximity of the one being condemned to the victim of harm is not literal physical proximity, then the cogency of any condemnation be-comes more and more vague. Furthermore, at least according to Jewish morality, one cannot be condemned for not gravely risking his or her own life for the sake of the life of another.²⁶

Hopefully, the historians will be able to tell us enough so that we will be able to decide whether Pius XII was blameworthy, praiseworthy, or somewhere in between. That cannot be done now. So, for that reason, and for the sake of presenting an undiluted theological-moral statement, the Vatican document would have been stronger and less open to the wrong kind of criticism from those usually hostile to anything Catholic if it had simply not raised an issue it cannot possibly adequately deal with here, or anywhere else so far.

Finally, though, I think we need to look at one more statement from the document in order to better appre-ciate what it means for Jews. It says, "The Nazi regime was determined to exterminate the very existence of the Jewish people, a people called to witness to the one God and the law of the covenant."²⁷ No Jewish statement could have better enunciated any more precisely just what the purpose of the existence of the Jewish people is in the world. Jews are committed to survival. Much of our language, uttered to both ourselves and to others, is the language of survival. Surely, that is quite under-standable considering what the Jewish people has suffered, especially in this century. But survival for Jews is not enough. Jews always have to understand for what -– better, for whom –- we are surviving. (Assimila-tionists of various stripes have concluded that there is no good reason for Jewish survival, and that only as human beings in general should individual Jews survive.) And perhaps that for which the Jews are to survive is the true source of the Nazi venom against the Jewish people. That a statement issued by the Catholic Church recognizes the chosenness of the Jewish people, the vocation of the Jewish people, is nothing short of what we Jews call qiddush ha-shem, "the sanctification of the name of God."²⁸ If this is now what the Church, from the top down as it were, recognizes as the reason for the survival and ongoing strength of the Jewish people, which is a reason we Jews ourselves ought to recognize because this is what the Torah has always taught us, then despite certain reservations about how appropriate the exercise in posthumous moral exoneration is, we Jews have to see this document as making a most positive contribution to the always complex relationship between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church. It is a document Jews can and should accept because its theological thrust and conclusions have a resonance in our own theology and law. it is by no means the last word -– nothing is in this world -– but its integrity and wisdom should not be missed because of moral and political antagonism stemming from those having less in-tegrity and less wisdom.

Endnotes

¹All quotes from this document are from the version of it in First Things, no. 83 (May 1998), 39-43.

²See The Documents of Vatican II, ed. W.M. Abbott, S.J. (London and Dublin, 1966), 660-668.

³See, e.g., Joseph B. Soloveitchik, "Confrontation," Tradition (1964), 26. Cf. D. Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (New York, 1989), 3-9.

⁴See sec. I, p. 39a.

⁵Sec. II, p. 40b, quoting from the speech to the Sym-posium on the Roots of Anti-Judaism on 31 October 1997.

⁶Mishnah: Sanhedrin 6.2 re Joshua 7:25.

⁷See The Documents of Vatican II, 666.

⁸Berakhot 7a.

⁹See Mishnah: Avot 1.16.

¹⁰Thus the great 9^th-century Jewish theologian, Saadiah Gaon, stated that the Jews are only a people because of the Torah (Book of Beliefs and Opinions, 3.7).

¹¹See Palestinian Talmud: Peah 1.1/15b re Deuteronomy 32:47.

¹²See Babylonian Talmud: Sanhedrin 74a.

¹³See The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, chap. 5, trans. J. Goldin (New Haven, Conn., 1955), 39.

¹⁴See sec. IV, 42b at n. 18.

¹⁵See D. Novak, Halakhah in a Theological Dimension (Chico, Calif., 1985), 61-71.

¹⁶See Mishnah: Avot 5.22.

¹⁷Sec. V, p. 43a.

¹⁸See Babylonian Talmud: Rosh Hashanah 34b-35a.

¹⁹For this "thick" and "thin" distinction between cultures, see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 5ff.

²⁰Babylonian Talmud: Shevuot 39a-b re Lev. 26:37; Sanhedrin 44a.

²¹See Palestinian Talmud: Baba Metsia 2.4/8c.

²²See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2/1, q. 94, a. 4 ad obj. 1.

²³Sec. IV, p. 42b.

²⁴See sec. IV, p. 42a, n. 16.

²⁵See Babylonian Talmud: Sanhedrin 73a.

²⁶See ibid.: Baba Metsia 62a re Lev. 25:36.

²⁷Sec. IV, p. 41a.

²⁸See D. Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge, 1995), 1-5.

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