A Review-Reflection

Abstract

A Review-Reflection Leonard Swidler Rebecca Moore, A Blessing to Each Other: A New Account of Jewish and Christian Relations. Pearl River, NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2021. Pp. 293. $32.95, paper. Rebecca Moore, A Blessing to Each Other: A New Account of Jewish and Christian Relations. Pearl River, NY: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2021. Pp. 293. $32.95, paper. This book is the work of a Christian scholar about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. First a word—or several—of self-disclosure. I was born of an Irish-American Catholic mother, Josephine Marie Reed, and a Jewish Ukrainian father, Samuel Swidler. I had twenty-two years of formal Catholic education, with a B.A., M.A., and S.T.L. from Catholic institutions of higher learning—including the fifteenth-century Roman-established Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen—and a Ph.D. in "Intellectual History" from the then reputedly "godless" University of Wisconsin, at Madison. My father became an active baptized Catholic at age forty-five. My mother was one of fifteen children raised Catholic. I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Despite being the home of the world-famous professional football team, Green Bay Packers, it had only a population of 35,000 then. Moreover, it could not muster the needed ten adult male Jews to form a formal Jewish religious community. Being born on January 6, 1929, I grew up as a Catholic "Great Depression Baby" until my mid-twenties, when I lived, studied, and taught for several years in 1950's Germany. Starting then, I became increasingly deeply aware of Judaism, the Holocaust, and interreligious dialogue. That led me—and the rest of Western Civilization, as well as the rest of the world—through the over three-quarters of a century since Adolf Hitler became the "Herr Kanzler, Sieg Heil!" of Germany in January, 1933. The world took a decade and a half to begin to recover from the blood lust of the 1930's and early 1940's. It redirected itself through the turmoil of the 1960's to a new consciousness and new vision. Vatican Council II (1962–65) [End Page 455] dramatically dragged the Catholic Church out of the seventeenth century into the twentieth. Deep in the heart of that Vatican II renewal—both Catholic and catholic—was the revisioning of the largest and most structurally organized religious body in the world. Hence, Catholicism—with its current 1,350,000,000 members of the world's 7,500,000,000—has an effect far in excess of its being eighteen percent of the world's population. Vatican II Catholicism has reoriented itself from a closed-fortress mentality to an open, dialogically directed one. At the foundation of that structural redirection has been a structural reunderstanding of itself. That meant rethinking itself and its relation to the rest of the world from its very beginning coming out of first-century Judea and the 6,000,000 monotheists then living in the Roman Empire (at that time within a total population of 100,000,000). The Vatican II dialogic self-understanding significantly affects the way Catholicism understands itself and the world—that is, in dialogue—and acts accordingly. Dialogue becomes a fulcrum to "lift the world" benignly. I long ago decided to use that fulcrum to my maximum ability. Now, to the book at hand! Moore does the contemporary world a great service. She carefully and with sensitive surety of current scholarship and research outlines for the reader whence came currently designated "Christianity" and "Judaism." She clearly describes the broad outline of their respective developments and interrelationships up to the present. Today, it is a much more benign relationship than in the prior grim centuries. The relatively positive relationship of the two monotheistic bodies in the Roman Empire of the fourth century deteriorated subsequently, so that, by the High Middle Ages (1200–1600), it deteriorated badly. However, in the wake of Vatican II, the relationship has dramatically improved so that it now has significantly surpassed in positivity even that of those earlier relatively benign centuries. Moore carefully lays out the positive developments in research and rethought and provides an excellent roadmap for...