Interfaith Dialogue
How is this Pope different from all other Popes?
Thursday, May 14th, 2009How is this Pope different from all other Popes? For one thing, Pope Benedict XVI has been an outspoken critic for the plight of Christian minorities suffering in Islamic countries. Most recently, in his visit to the Jordanian capital of Amman, Pope Benedict made it a special point to speak out about the shabby way Iraqi Christians have been treated by their host country. Fearlessly, Pope Benedict is continuing his ideological battle against religious extremism that he in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword. Although the Pope apologized to the Muslim community, he delicately made an apology only for the hurt his statement caused, but not for the substance of his remarks.
During his visit at the King Hussein Mosque in Amman on Saturday, once more Pope Benedict alluded to the 2006 speech. When he said, “It is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society,” Benedict was reinforcing—if cryptically—his basic criticism of radical Islamic extremism.
Obviously Pope Benedict realizes that Israel is the only country that can ensure that the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem remain protected under her care. The relationship between Jews and Christians is, according to the Pope, spiritually profound and intimate. In one of his speeches Pope Benedict spoke about “the inseparable bond between the Church and the Jewish people …. From the beginning, the Church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two Testaments. May our encounter today inspire in us a renewed love for the canon of sacred Scripture and a desire to overcome all obstacles to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews in mutual respect and cooperation in the service of that peace to which the word of God calls us!”
A Jewish interest in protecting the holy sites of Jerusalem is not merely a matter of Jewish concern; it is also of Christian interests. In saying this, the pope made clear that he views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage. For the record, the Islamic Wakf (religious leadership of Jerusalem) which desires to be the sole custodian of Jerusalem’s holy sites in the event of its partition, has already gone to great lengths to systematically destroy the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Jewish and Christian heritage of the holy basin through archeological theft, illegal building and digging.
The government of Israel needs to rethink its attitude about Pope Pius XII; this is an important matter especially since the Vatican wishes to canonize Pope Pius XII. Until now, there has been a lingering controversy about Pope Pius’s alleged support for the Nazis; Israeli scholars need to revisit and examine this matter with their Catholic counterparts. In one recent study a new revelation was introduced in January 2007 by Lt.-Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian KGB, that the allegations against Pius XII were the brainchild of the KGB. In an article published in National Review, Pacepa recalls, “In my other life, when I was at the center of Moscow’s foreign-intelligence wars, I myself was caught up in a deliberate Kremlin effort to smear the Vatican, by portraying Pope Pius XII as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer.”[1]
Excerpts from the Pope’s Speech at Yad Vashem
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009Pope Benedict XVI visits Yad Vashem Memorial, Jerusalem
“I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name … I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off” (Is 56:5).
This passage from the Book of the prophet Isaiah furnishes the two simple [...]
Journey through the Looking-glass: Pope Benedict XVI’s Interfaith Encounter in the Holy Land
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009One of the most interesting aspects of the Pope’s recent visit to Israel was the interfaith group that met with the Pope to discuss important issues and challenges that Jews, Christians and Muslims face as a faith community. Despite the good intentions of the forum’s organizers, the Pope’s desire to act as a facilitator for religious tolerance found some explosive road-blocks along the way, as they met at the holy site Norte Dame.
Following the pope’s visit to Yad Vashem, Palestinian leader Sheik Taysir Tamimi forced his way to the pulpit at an inter-religious event demanding that the pope to fight for “a just peace for a Palestinian state and for Israel to stop killing women and children and destroying mosques as she did in Gaza”; he asked the pope to “pressure the Israeli government to stop its aggression against the Palestinian people.”
Of course not a word was said about how these mosques were being used as military bases to attack Israeli citizens. Evidently, Tamimi doesn’t get what “Never Again” really means. Context is everything. But let us return back to our discussion.
Rather than confronting Sheik Taysir Tamimi, the Pope quietly listened and left the room. As one friend of mine wrote in his blog, “The biggest shame of it all is that the entire Muslim community he represented was not even embarrassed by or ashamed of this verbal explosion.”
Yet, this was not the only place where Pope Benedict XVI found some difficulties. After he spoke at the Yad Vashem, the Pope proclaimed that he had come: “to stand in silence before this monument, erected to honor the memory of the millions of Jews killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah … ‘May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled or forgotten!”
Pope Pius XII and the Chief Rabbi of Rome
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009Pope Pius XII cannot win with certain kinds of people. No matter how many people he saved, someone will always say, “So, nu, only 850,000 Jews? Why didn’t he save two million Jews?” Even if the Pope had saved two million, someone would say, “Nu, only two million? Why not four million?”
If the mighty European nations couldn’t stop Hitler, how could the Pope? Maybe, just maybe, given the limitations of his office, he ended up saving more Jews than he would have had he made a public protest against Hitler …
Who can presume to have God-like power and adjudicate this matter once and for all? I know that I sure can’t, but the many Jewish witnesses I mentioned above saw firsthand what the Pope did; I think many folks may not like the quiet way the Pope got things done, but it is quite possible that he did the best he could given the circumstances he had to deal with.
The study of Jewish history is anything but boring. Here’s a little known fact: The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Yisrael Zolli, converted to Catholicism because of the Pope’s efforts in saving Jewish lives.
In a statement of thanks, Zolli said, “What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts. . . . Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.”[1] Although Zolli said he converted for “theological reasons,” it is generally believed that he did so out of gratitude for what the Pope did for his people. Rather than encouraging a massive conversion on the part of Jews to Catholicism, Zolli preferred to state that his conversion was a personal one based on his rethinking of Catholic theology and teachings and his personal friendship with Pope Pius XII, a man whose personal integrity he deeply respected and admired.
Lapide writes: “When Zolli accepted baptism in 1945 and adopted Pius’s Christian name of Eugene, most Roman Jews were convinced that his conversion was an act of gratitude for wartime succor to Jewish refugees and, repeated denials not withstanding, many are still of his opinion. Thus, Rabbi Barry Dov Schwartz wrote in the summer issue, 1964, of Conservative Judaism: ‘Many Jews were persuaded to convert after the war, as a sign of gratitude, to that institution which had saved their lives.’ “[2]
More on Pope Benedict XVI’s Historical Visit to Israel
Monday, May 11th, 2009Earlier we saw how a Rabbi Wolpe conducted himself in a manner that desecrates God’s Name, here is a different kind of response that reflects the best values of our faith and people that appeared today in the JPost written by the Chief Rabbi of Haifa, Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen:
“On the occasion of your visit to Israel I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you, our most honorable guest, Pope Benedict XVI.
Pope Benedict XVI arrives on the altar inside the International Stadium of Amman to celebrate a Holy Mass on Sunday.
I pray that you will continue the work begun by your predecessors, John XXIII and John Paul II, and express your friendship for the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
I see in your visit to the Holy Land a declaration that you intend to continue a policy and doctrine that refers to my people as “Our Older Brothers” and “God’s Chosen People,” with whom He entered into an everlasting covenant.
We deeply appreciate this declaration. There is a long, hard and painful history of the relationship between our people, our faith, and the Catholic Church leadership and followers - a history of blood and tears. It is difficult to speak of this relationship without recalling the centuries of persecution of Jews by the Church.
But a new era was ushered in with the cancellation of the replacement theory. In the Second Vatican Council and the Nostra Aetate document, it was made clear that no efforts would be made by the Catholic Church to convert Jews. Rather, the Jewish people should continue the faith of its forefathers as expressed in the Bible and rabbinic literature.
Chabad’s Reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s Visit to Israel
Monday, May 11th, 2009Rabbi Sholom DovBer Wolpe, leader of Chabad’s messianist faction in Israel, condemns the Church and Pope. As Israel prepares for Benedict XVI’s historic visit, head of SOS Israel believes ‘rabbis must not meet with the pope because the Catholic Church tortured and murdered Jews and helped the Nazis annihilate the Jewish people’ (Efrat Weiss, Ynet).
Question: What is your opinion about this reaction?
Answer: Rabbi Wolpe is an outspoken Habad rabbi who believes that the deceased Rebbe of Lubavitch is going to come back from the dead and redeem the Jewish people. His perspectives on a variety of Jewish and political issues are regarded by many Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews as provocative-even fanatical.
Personally, I think you need to look back at the eulogies Jewish leaders gave in honor of Pope Pius XII.
Numerous Jewish leaders, including Albert Einstein, Israeli Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett, and Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog (who was a brilliant rabbinic scholar), expressed their public gratitude to Pius XII, praising him as a “righteous gentile,” who had saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.
In his meticulously researched and comprehensive 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, the Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, who had served as the Israeli Counsel General in Milan, and had spoken with many Italian Jewish Holocaust survivors who owed their life to Pius, provided the empirical basis for their gratitude, concluding that Pius XII “was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands.” To this day, the Lapide volume remains the definitive work, by a Jewish scholar, on the subject.
“December of 1940, in an article published in Time magazine, the renowned Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein, himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, paid tribute to the moral “courage” of Pope Pius and the Catholic Church in opposing “the Hitlerian onslaught” on liberty:
“Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom: but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Catholic Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.”
What does “rabbi” mean and when was the title first introduced?
Friday, March 27th, 2009What does “rabbi” mean, and when was the title “rabbi” first introduced?
This question is much more complex than most people realize. However, antecedents to the term רַב (rab) has some basis the Tanakh, where it denotes “great,” or chief (2 Kgs 18:17; Isa 36:2). Elsewhere the expression rab māg means [...]
Cain and Abel: According to Levinas
Thursday, March 26th, 2009Emmanuel Levinas was in France in 1930 and reveals that, even at this early stage, he enlisted in the French army. In 1940 he was captured and spent the remaining five years of the war in two prisoner-of-war camps. Upon being liberated he returns to Lithuania and finds-out that his parents and siblings had been killed by the Nazis, while his wife, whom he had left behind in Paris, had survived thanks to the help of French nuns who hid her. Levinas eventually became one of the greatest ethical philosophers of the 20th century. In one of his books, Levinas writes a special dedication that reads:”To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions of all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism” (OB, vii).
Feminine Imagery in the Bible
Saturday, March 14th, 2009In a gender conscious society, people often ask if there are any specific references in the Tanakh and within Jewish tradition where God is depicted in feminine terms. Without going into considerable detail, we will briefly one example:
Similarly, in Isaiah 42:14, the prophet also depicts God’s biocentric passion for justice in feminine terms:
For a long time
I have held my peace,
I have kept still
and restrained myself;
now I will cry out
like a woman in labor,
I will gasp and pant.
Isaiah 42:14
The imagery of God acting as a mother giving birth to her child, portrays a Divine Presence that is present alongside those people who are trying to midwife a new world where human degradation, apathy and suffering no longer exist. This organic depiction of God does not portray the Divine Reality as being extrinsic or unaffected by the harsh presence of evil that is incarnated by malevolent people. The Talmud and the Midrash both describe the unfolding of the Messianic Redemption as the “Hevlay HaMashiach”-the birth-pangs of the Messiah.
According to the Talmud, the Messiah was born on the day of Tisha B’ Av, the Ninth of Av for the number nine symbolizes birth and new life. One of the most popular and intimate rabbinic names for God is Rachmana – “The Merciful One.”
The Hebrew word for “compassion” “rahameem” comes from the Hebrew word “rechem” for “womb.” God’s compassion and mercy are not extrinsic for in a metaphorical sense, we come from God’s womb. The womb is the place where all life is mysteriously conceived, carried and born. Throughout the Talmud and Midrashic literature, the Divine Presence as it is manifested among earthly mortals is called the “Shechinah.” The Talmudic depictions always convey a feminine quality that one does not find in the more traditional masculine metaphors of the Divine.
Respecting the Human Face
Saturday, March 14th, 2009Martin Gilbert in his book on the Holocaust tells the story about a young sixteen year-old named Zvi Michalowski. On September 27, 1941, Zvi was supposed to be executed with 3,000 other Lithuanian Jews. He had fallen into the pit a fraction of a second before the Nazis shot their guns. [...]