The Blessing of Sitting Together

Abstract

On October 28, 2015, the Roman Catholic Church will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Declaration on the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions. Referred to more regularly by its incipit, Nostra Aetate, this document of the Second Vatican Council famously states in part four that “in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”¹ One wonders if the Church had awakened to its “common spiritual patrimony” with Judaism and condemned antisemitism, for instance, at Vatican I instead of in 1965 whether the Holocaust could have happened. To be sure, there were factors other than Christian anti-Judaism also driving the success of Hitler’s war against the Jews, but it was at least, as Claremont philosopher John Roth has taught, a necessary if not a sufficient cause of the Holocaust.

This chapter title alludes to Psalm 133:1, which the Jewish Publication Society translates as “How good and how pleasant it is that brothers dwell together.” Other translations use an inclusive “brothers and sisters,” other translations use “sit” instead of “dwell,” and contemporary musical renderings of the verse may add “in peace” after “dwell together.”