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Rituals of Reconciliation? How Consideration of Ritual Can Inform Readings of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue After the Holocaust

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Interreligious Relations and the Negotiation of Ritual Boundaries

Part of the book series: Interreligious Studies in Theory and Practice ((INSTTP))

Abstract

This chapter will explore particular practices that have emerged in the context of post-Holocaust Catholic-Jewish dialogue, reading them as instances of interrituality and analyzing the extent to which their interriting advances the project of reconciliation. One advantage of investigating interreligious exchange through the lens of ritual is that it permits attention to be paid to a range of extra-textual phenomena such as tone, gesture, pacing, costume, and locatedness, which are capable of adding nuance to, or even subverting, a textual tradition. In the case of post-Holocaust reconciliation, it is worth considering whether and to what degree a consideration of ritual alters the conclusions that can be drawn from the record of published documents.

Reconciliation is … a form of normative theory, being bound up with notions of peace-making, positive transformation, toleration, atonement and harmony, that to critique it risks a charge of illiberalism, if not nihilism.

—Jacques Derrida (2001)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The issue of mission to the Jews is a useful barometer of Christian post-Holocaust repentance because the repudiation of anti-Semitism as merely a racial crime permits churches to sidestep any reflection on the history of the spiritual violence of forced conversion. As I wrote in Making Memory: “[I]t has become popular for Christian theologians to draw a distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, between objecting to the Jewish faith as incapable of providing redemption, and objecting to Jews as people incapable of being redeemed. However, while the latter leads to Auschwitz, where Jews are permitted their Jewishness—and, indeed, many from assimilated families, whose parents or grandparents may have converted to Christianity, have Jewishness forced, or reinforced, upon them—but can do nothing to save their own bodies, the former leads just as surely to the Inquisition, in which Jews are able, and indeed compelled, to save their bodies at the cost of their souls, through conversion and assimilation. What Ruether and others who make this distinction and treat anti-Judaism as the lesser of two evils (though still evil) fail to grasp is that both anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism attack Jews at the very core of their being, and aim to rob them of a vital component of selfhood. The distinction to be drawn, then, is not between what each does, that one is more damaging or less escapable than the other, but rather the way that each does it” (Vincent 2013, pp. 132–33).

  2. 2.

    See also the contributions by R. Cohen, J.W.H. van Wijk-Bos, M. Godin, G. Haaland, and D. Weissman in Part III of Svartvik and Wirén (2013, pp. 137–91).

  3. 3.

    For example, Seventh General Convention of the American Lutheran Church (1974; Lutheran World Federation 1975; Lutheran World Federation 1983; Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland 2017, pp. 47–48)—though note that this statement represents a massive change of position from the EKD’s earliest statement, the 1948 “Message Concerning the Jewish Question,” reprinted in Hockenos (2004, pp. 195–97), which I might charitably describe as a textbook primer in theological anti-Judaism, and less charitably—and more colloquially—as a hot mess.

  4. 4.

    The problems with treating the Holocaust as a uniquely German sin are discussed in Vincent (2017, pp. 187–204).

  5. 5.

    Readers who have been brought up in the tradition of Nostra Aetate as representing what Gilbert Rosenthal and others have termed a “Copernican revolution” in Jewish-Christian dialogue (see Rosenthal 2014) are likely to object to this characterization but without wishing to dispute the very wide gap between the theological and social attitudes that preceded the publication of Nostra Aetate and those that followed it. I refer these readers to the text of the document itself. It is as much at pains to emphasize the role of “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead” in the death of Christ as it is to note that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” The idea of the Church as “the new people of God”—still carrying a whiff of supersessionism, albeit one much more faint than that in Faulhaber’s homily quoted below—is given equal weight with the admonishment that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” One would not wish to understate the importance of the statements on Jewish collective guilt in Article 4, and it is these statements that are most frequently cited in discussions of the impact of Nostra Aetate. But they occupy a relatively small place within the document as a whole, and even in Article 4 the emphasis falls more on a repudiation of discrimination on the broad grounds of human dignity than on a comprehensive rethinking of Catholic theological attitudes toward Judaism. The idea of a bilateral relationship between Judaism and Christianity is almost entirely absent; Nostra Aetate is concerned with making a small adjustment to theology of religion—which had the consequence of making dialogue possible—rather than with setting out a structured program of dialogue to be immediately pursued.

  6. 6.

    See, for example, Cornille (2013, p. xiii): “[D]ialogue presupposes some degree of humility about one’s own conception of truth and a certain receptivity, even hospitality, to the truth of the other.” Marianne Moyaert has argued for hospitality to extend beyond the conceptual domain and into the practical, but in so doing she acknowledges that its normative use does not refer to an actual practice: “There is also a sense that dialogical openness, or interreligious hospitality, cannot come to full fruition if one is not prepared to receive ‘the other’ in one’s house of worship” (2014, p. 223). See also Moyaert (2011, pp. 95–108; 2008, pp. 337–64).

  7. 7.

    When considering Nostra Aetate as a document of Jewish-Christian reconciliation, it is important to keep in mind that there was a considerable gap between the liberation of the camps (including the release of photographic evidence bringing the reality of the Holocaust into public awareness) in 1945 and the appearance of the Holocaust as a substantive theme in Christian theology. Notwithstanding the Stuttgart Declaration (1945), the 10 Points of Seeligsberg (1947), and the condemnation of anti-Semitism published by the Protestant World Council of Churches (1948), Nostra Aetate is still located very early in the development of Christian engagement with Judaism in response to the Holocaust. See also Rittner et al. (2000).

  8. 8.

    This quote comes from a homily delivered by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber in (1933, quoted in Köhler (1998, pp. 139–57).

  9. 9.

    The debates on the Jewishness of Jesus and the political context in which they were framed are recounted in Heschel (1998) and Heschel (2010). More recently, see the dispute on the translation of ioudaioi as “Judean” in Levine (2006, pp. 159–165), and on the Marginalia Review of Books forum, especially the contributions by Reinhartz (2014), Reed (2014), and Taylor (2014).

  10. 10.

    See also the discussion in Moyaert (2016, pp. 137–63).

  11. 11.

    Note that this critique does not demand that a Seder meal be constrained to a prescribed form in order to pass a test of authenticity; nor am I suggesting that the presence of non-Jews at a Seder invalidates it. An instructive point of comparison is the Freedom Seder, “a multicultural and interfaith celebration” (Goldbaum 2012) that draws a connection between the ritual retelling of the Exodus story and the American Civil Rights Movement, initially celebrated on the first anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1969; see The Shalom Center 2009). While there is room for dispute on the universalization of the Exodus story, the focus of that Seder is on using the liturgy to create a bond of common experience between the Jewish and African American participants, rather than on projecting a framework of meaning onto the liturgy that one or the other set of participants are unlikely to recognize (see Waskow 1969).

  12. 12.

    The highly ritualized Seder meal that is practiced today did not begin to emerge until after the destruction of the Second Temple. The modern Seder, on which Christian Seders tend to be based, bears relatively little resemblance to the Passover meals of the first century CE, which, in the accounts given by Josephus and Philo, appear to have been centered around the consumption of a sacrificial feast, accompanied by “prayer and songs of praise”; see Philo, Special Laws II:148, cited in Arnow (2008, p. 17). See also Johnson (2006, p. 44). A more thorough, albeit slightly dated, weighing of the scriptural evidence in the debate may be found in the first chapter of Jeremias 1966; while the Synoptic gospels suggest that the Last Supper coincided with Passover, the Gospel of John places it prior to the beginning of the feast, and a number of current scholars, including Levine (2006), argue that John should be taken as historically authoritative, especially given that the Pauline texts appear to favor the Johannine chronology. Lathrop (1998, pp. 72–73) notes that there is some evidence of Christian communities beginning to celebrate Passover “at least by the mid-second century” but that there is also ample evidence that this was a new practice, rather than a continuous observance of the sort that might have been expected to exist had the Last Supper been clearly linked to Passover in the minds of the pre-second-century Christian community. That being said, however, the coincidence in timing of this adoption, however short-lived, and the redaction of the Mishnah (and Tosefta), is highly suggestive. See also Bradshaw and Hoffman (1999).

  13. 13.

    Though it is interesting to note that the two most recent documents from the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “We Remember” (1998) and “The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable” (2015), have dropped any explicit discussion of ritual continuity between Judaism and Christianity.

  14. 14.

    This problem is present explicitly in the 2015 “Gifts” document, which recasts the covenantal theology underlying Catholic-Jewish relations as a fulfillment theology, in which Christ “fulfils the mission and expectation of Israel in a perfect way” but also “overcomes and transcends them in an eschatological manner” (Article 14). What is identified here is not a point of difference between separate religious traditions but rather a difference in the degree to which participants are capable of understanding their own tradition, as Article 20 makes clear: “The faith of the Jews testified to in the Bible, found in the Old Testament, is not for Christians another religion but the foundation of their own faith, although clearly the figure of Jesus is the sole key for the Christian interpretation of the Scriptures of the Old Testament.” The document acknowledges that Jews are unlikely to recognize Christ as the fulfillment of their religion, and the manner in which such recognition will come to pass “remains an unfathomable divine mystery” (Article 36). Nevertheless, the conviction that “[t]here cannot be two ways of salvation … since Christ is also the Redeemer of the Jews in addition to the Gentiles” (Article 37) is clearly identified as the theological basis on which Catholic-Jewish dialogue rests.

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  1. University of Chester, Chester, UK

    Alana M. Vincent

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  1. Alana M. Vincent
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  1. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Marianne Moyaert

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Vincent, A.M. (2019). Rituals of Reconciliation? How Consideration of Ritual Can Inform Readings of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue After the Holocaust. In: Moyaert, M. (eds) Interreligious Relations and the Negotiation of Ritual Boundaries. Interreligious Studies in Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05701-5_14

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