Must We Accept the Other's Self-Understanding?Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification. David Novak

Abstract

David Novak's latest book is the attempt of a self-professed traditionalist Jew to justify dialogue with Christians and to offer guidelines as to how such dialogue is to proceed. Professor Novak's traditionalism is seen most clearly in the importance he ascribes to halakhah, rabbinic law. is Judaism's most evident authoritative structure, he writes (p. 23); theology can do its work only within boundaries of that structure. In so holding, Novak distinguishes his method from the familiar liberal Jewish strategy of constructing, or reconstructing, Judaism exclusively or primarily from aggadah, the binary opposite of halakhah, which encompasses folklore, philosophical speculation, ethical maxims, and the like. Indeed, three of the six chapters in this volume deal with points of rabbinic law in historical and theological perspective, The Doctrine of the Noahide Laws (chap. 1), The Status of in Medieval European Halakhah (chap. 2), and Maimonides' View of Christianity (chap. 3). Novak is keenly aware of the rarity of his identity: aJew committed both to halakhah and to interfaith dialogue. He is convinced that a proper assessment of the current situation of the people Israel requires observant Jews to abandon their traditional hostility to dialogue with Christians, an attitude born, he argues, of the political and social situation of Jewry in medieval Christendom. Against those who maintain that the Holocaust has in our time proven that Jew hatred is ineradicable from the Christian mind, Novak points to those Christians who, in theory and in practice, manifested a specifically Christian antinazism. Their reading of Christianity, he tells us, was based on more theologically cogent Christian reasoning than that of [the] Christian Nazis (p. 5). He holds that this stress on the anti-Jewish character of also seems to be at a total loss to explain the most modern manifestation of anti-Judaism, that of communism, an explicitly secular philosophy (pp. 6-7). Indeed, it is the spec-