Interreligious Friendship after Nostra Aetate

J. Fredericks, T. Tiemeier, J. Fredericks, T. Tiemeier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137472113
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Religionssoziologie

Interreligious Friendships after Nostra Aetate explores the ways in which personal relationships are essential for theology. Catholic theologians tell the personal stories of their interreligious friendships and explore the significance of their friendships for their own life and work.

1

Learning in the Presence of the Other: My Friendship with Sara Lee

Mary C. Boys, SNJM

Sara Lee was my first houseguest when I moved to New York City in July 1994. About a week later, shortly after her return home to Los Angeles, she called, eager to tell me about a long conversation she had had with her seatmate on the plane. Not generally one to strike up a conversation during her frequent travels, Sara’s initial exchange with the middle-aged businessman seated next to her concerned their flight status in view of an impending electrical storm. A considerable delay ensued, but once finally en route, their conversation continued, growing more personal. Having told him that she directed a graduate program in Jewish education, her companion confessed that while he was a Jesuit-educated alumnus of the College of the Holy Cross, he had long ceased to be a practicing Catholic. Realizing he knew nothing of the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Sara reported to me that she began to tell him about some of the major shifts in the church’s stances, particularly in the interreligious realm. Regaling him with stories of various Catholics she had come to know in the course of our friendship and collaboration, Sara laughed with amazement as she recounted their conversation.

We have no indication whether her testimony persuaded him to return to the Catholic Church, but her encounter bears witness to her own transformed understanding of Catholicism. Born in Boston in 1933 and raised in the largely Jewish neighborhood of Roxbury, Sara was immersed in Jewish culture; she had virtually no social contact with Catholics. Nevertheless, the church’s enormous footprint in Boston raised her anxieties: “I felt on the margins, not because of the Brahmins [the wealthier White Anglo-Saxon Protestants], with whom I had no contact, but because of the pervasive Catholic culture and power Catholicism seemed to exercise.”¹ Her brother Joel, in contrast, had contact with Catholics—but not the sort of encounter that makes for interreligious amity. Gangs of Irish Catholic boys from the nearby neighborhood of Hyde Park invaded Jewish neighborhoods, particularly during Jewish holidays, to beat up Jewish boys like Joel. On occasion, the Jewish gangs would reciprocate, but her brother’s lifelong issues with Christianity suggest that the Irish gangs had the upper hand.

By the time Sara and I met in 1985, her initial feelings about Catholicism (and Christianity in general) had begun to change. A lonely year spent in Cleveland while her husband David spent long hours at the hospital in his surgical internship resulted in the unexpected gift of friendships with two young Catholic families. Like her, they also had a young child. This common experience initially drew them together, but it was the sharing of their own dedication as Catholics and their hospitality, especially around the Christmas holidays, that gave a face to the church and meaning to a tradition that had previously seemed so intimidating. In turn, Sara was the first knowledgeable, committed Jew whom they had known, and she had opportunities to share about her own identity.

Eventually, Sara and David settled in Los Angeles. Now the mother of three children, Sara also volunteered for Young Judea, a youth movement and camping program that had deeply shaped her own experience of Judaism. She became involved in the life of the synagogue, including teaching in congregational schools. When her husband died suddenly in 1974, Sara went to graduate school, earning degrees in education from the University of Southern California and from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC). Mentored by Rabbi Michael Signer, a medievalist with extensive involvement in Christian-Jewish dialogue, Sara deepened not only her knowledge of Judaica, but also the theological and historical complexities of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity.²

Upon graduating from the latter in 1977, she was invited to join the faculty of the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at HUC. In 1980, she became its director—a position she would hold for 27 years; she remains an adjunct faculty emerita. Collaborating with Rabbi Signer’s interreligious work, she became active in the Inter-Seminary Retreat program that brought together seminarians from the various Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish seminaries and theological schools in metropolitan Los Angeles. She attributes this program with exposing her to Catholic liturgical life and developing friendships with some of the priests who served on the faculty of St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. As an outgrowth of this program, she designed a project that placed Jewish educators in two Catholic secondary schools to teach about Jews and Judaism, including Ramona Convent Secondary School in Alhambra, which is sponsored by my own religious community, the Sisters of the Holy Names.

Although she was traveling to Alhambra in order to supervise her Jewish intern at Ramona, Cynthia Reich, Sara’s initial interreligious efforts were as yet unknown to me, then living across the country and teaching at Boston College. That, however, would change. Rabbi Signer had called me out of the blue in March 1985 to invite me to serve as a guest scholar for the Inter-Seminary Faculty Retreat. Immensely persuasive and possessing a wonderful sense of humor, he was a hard man to turn down. He coaxed this then just-tenured associate professor into accepting a daunting invitation to lead sessions with diverse faculty, many far senior to me. Having coaxed me into accepting, he arranged for his colleague Sara Lee to brief me on the event, as she would be coming to Boston to celebrate Passover with her daughter Aviva and her family in early April.

Even at the distance of more than 28 years, I have a distinct recall of greeting Sara in April 1985 on the porch of Boston College’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry. We talked so long that her daughter, then in medical school with a small child, grew frustrated when Sara was not ready at the time they had agreed upon for her ride back. From the beginning, we intuited that we had two vital commonalities. Each of us was seriously immersed in our home tradition yet also intensely interested in the other’s tradition. Moreover, we spoke a common language of education, with a love of teaching and expertise in educational processes. About six weeks after our initial meeting, I flew to Los Angeles, where Sara met me at LAX and hosted me in her home prior to the Inter-Seminary Faculty Retreat.

At the time of our first face-to-face meeting, I had made only occasional forays into Jewish-Christian relations. One of my earliest published pieces was an essay on Elie Wiesel in 1978, but it was not until 1981 that I wandered more directly into the field with an article, “Questions ‘Which Touch on the Heart of Our Faith,’” laying out seven concepts as a “ideational scaffolding” that I believe to be “foundational to constructing a more adequate understanding of Christianity’s relationship with Judaism.”³ A statement from the Catholic bishops of France in 1973 had inspired the title, acknowledging that the continued existence and vitality of Judaism “pose questions to us Christians which touch on the heart of our faith.”⁴

Recently revisiting that essay, I note that I had introduced it with the caveat it was an unfinished work, a “possible point of origin for a long-term project of rethinking one’s understanding of Christian faith.” Little did I know then that the “project” would become a lifelong quest for a way of living my Christian vocation in conversation with Jews and with determination to play a role in healing the wounds inflicted by Christianity’s “tormented” history vis-à-vis the Jewish people.⁵ Sara has been my vital conversation partner in this journey.

Unlike many writing for this volume, I did not focus my graduate work in the interreligious sphere; the field of comparative theology, in which I have considerable interest, but cannot claim expertise, developed after my own studies.⁶ Although I wish I could have been more systematically educated for the Christian-Jewish work I have engaged in for the past 25 years or so, I am grateful that my background in New Testament has enabled me to draw upon the recent scholarship on Christian origins in light of Second Temple Judaism. And when it comes to my collaboration with Sara Lee, I prize also my learning and experience in the field of education, because ours has been a relationship forged through a partnership in the teaching-learning process. Moreover, my friendship with Sara has opened up many contacts in the Jewish world.

Sara and I stayed in touch in the years immediately following the Inter-Seminary Retreat. When our travels took us to the other’s city, we took advantage of the occasion to have the other make a presentation to one of our classes or professional societies to which we belonged. We came to know one another’s students and colleagues. Several of my doctoral students, for example, came to know Sara and developed great respect for her brilliance and commitment to Jewish education. When the National Association of Temple Educators met in Boston, Sara invited me to give a workshop. One summer I participated with her in the national conference of CAJE, the Conference for the Advancement of Jewish Education; I was the only non-Jew among three thousand Jewish educators on a campus in rural Georgia.⁷ On another occasion, after I had led a session at the National Conference on Jewish-Christian Relations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one of Sara’s former students, Cynthia Reich (who had interned at Ramona Convent Secondary School) met with me and asked if I would encourage Sara to write. Her request spurred me to invite Sara to give papers with me at the Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education (APRRE), which we did in the early 1990s. We later collaborated in serving as guest editors of a journal, including writing the lead article, and ultimately in publishing a book in 2006, Christians and Jews in Dialogue: Learning in the Presence of the Other.

The Catholic-Jewish Colloquium

While over the years we have partnered in numerous workshops and consultations, it was particularly in imagining, planning, leading, and analyzing a three-year project, The Catholic-Jewish Colloquium, that we drew close and developed our notion of “interreligious learning” as a form of interreligious dialogue that emphasizes study in the presence of the religious other and encounter with the tradition embodied by the other. And while we have partnered in many other educational ventures since then—including serving as guest scholars at the Hong Kong International School—the colloquium was our most extensive project. Not only did it teach us a great deal about the relations between Jews and Christians, but it also served as a catalyst for a deep friendship.

In the course of our collaboration, we came to realize with new force the singular role of religious educators in forming religious identity. Religious and theological education within one’s faith tradition not only offers the foundation for self-understanding as a member of that tradition, but it also influences attitudes toward the religious other. How teachers (and preachers) interpret the fundamental narratives of Judaism and Christianity has too often resulted in a reductionist or negative portrayal of the other—and contributed to a distorted and oversimplified version of the home tradition, especially in the case of Christianity.

Studies of Protestant and Catholic textbooks in the early 1960s had exposed the difficulties in each tradition in presenting the “out group.” Too often the texts reinforced stereotypes or failed to foster adequate understandings of other religious, racial, or ethnic groups, with the narrowness and distortions especially evident in the treatment of Judaism.⁸ Subsequent studies in the 1970s revealed that while some defects had been remedied, further work was necessary. For example, Gerald Strober’s content analysis of Protestant teaching found that recent developments in Christian-Jewish relations were rarely incorporated into teaching materials and that few Protestant organizations reflected any substantial interest in out-group relations.⁹ Eugene Fisher’s analysis of American Catholic materials published between 1967–1975 (i.e., in the wake of the Second Vatican Council) showed that these texts were significantly more positive toward Judaism than had been earlier texts. Nevertheless, Fisher concluded, the residual prejudice was cause for concern.¹⁰

Such studies highlighted the importance of revising religious textbooks an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Learning in the Presence of the Other: My Friendship with Sara Lee
• 2  Michael Signer and the Language of Friendship
• 3  The Blessing of Sitting Together
• 4  Faith and Friendship
• 5  Friendship: Cultivating Theological Virtue
• 6  Ties That Bind: Interfaith Friend, Interfaith Kin
• 7  Rasoul, My Friend and Brother
• 8  Study and Friendship: Intersections throughout an Academic Life
• 9  Jivanmukti, Freedom, and a Cassette Recorder: Friendship beyond Friendship in the Tradition of Advaita Vedanta
• 10  Toddlers and Teas: Parenting in a Multireligious World
• 11  With New Eyes to See: Changing the Perception of Self and Other through Interreligious Friendship
• 12  Masao Abe: A Spiritual Friendship
• 13  A Friend and Scholar: A Guide on the Way to Understanding Buddhism
• 14  My Friendship with Rita Gross
• 15  Interreligious Friendship: A Path to Conversion for a Catholic Theologian
• 16  Interreligious Friendship: Symbiosis of Human Relationship vis-à-vis Religious Differences—A Christian Encounter with Two African Traditional Religionists
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index