Post-Shoah dialogues: re-thinking our texts together

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Post-Shoah Dialogues: Re-Thinking Our Texts Together, edited by James F. Moore. Studies in the Shoah, Vol. XXV. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 270 pp. $35.00. It is not often that one is confronted with a text so complicated, so densely packed with challenging ideas, and so critical for truly moving Christian-Jewish dialogue to a new level of action than this book. So many words have been spoken, so many words have been written-yet the scourge of 2000 years of hatred of Jews by Christians continued unabated through to the Holocaust. Christianity after the Shoah is confronted with the idea that it may have been the catalyst that ultimately led to the Shoah through its own original core sacred texts. Jews and Judaism, after the Shoah, are confronted with the problem of what Judaism should be in light of the Shoah. We all have to do what Rabbi Irving Greenberg has suggested Jews have to do after the Shoah, which is restoring our connection to the covenant with G-d by restoring our connection to Torah. While Jews and Christians share common texts, there is nothing common about what they each do with those texts. Christians use Torah to prove the divinity of Jesus, while Jews use the texts to explore their relation to G-d and their historical and cultural memory. The common texts shared by Jews and Christians when looked at from a Jewish perspective have a very different meaning than when they are looked at from a Christian perspective. What the four authors (James Moore, Zev Garber, Henry Knight, and Steven Jacobs) argue for and demonstrate in an impressive way is a shift in interpretive response to both Jewish and Christian texts based on the Jewish rhetorical tool known as midrash. Midrash is defined by the Jewish Encyclopedia as A term occurring as early as II Chron. xiii. 22, xxiv. 27, though perhaps not in the sense in which it came to be used later, and denoting exposition, exegesis, especially that of the Scriptures. In contradistinction to literal interpretation, subsequently called peshat (comp. Geiger's Wiss. Zeit. Jud. Theol. v. 244), the term designates an exegesis which, going more deeply than the mere literal sense, attempts to penetrate into the spirit of the Scriptures, to examine the text from all sides, and thereby to derive interpretations which are not immediately obvious. Christian reading of Torah, which has often been a one-sided search for the rhetorical evidence of Jesus' divinity when coupled with the bag and baggage of anti-Jewish polemic, has set the grounding for the 2000 years of Christian anti-Jewish action. Jewish Midrash rarely if ever includes Christian or even secular interpretations. So this book's use of midrash to explore both Jewish and Christian texts by a team of Jewish and Christian scholars is not only unique but powerful. For example, these four authors looked at Genesis 32, on Jacob wrestling with the angel, and Matthew 26 about Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane. Moore sets out in his essay the overarching approach taken by the four authors. His five chapters tackle the issues of looking at Christian tradition in a new way; antisemitism; creating an ethic of dialogue; and the genocidal mind in religion. Steven Jacobs wrote three chapters focusing on the question of how to deal with Biblical texts after the Shoah; wrestling with the images of God and the Devil; and finally, defining what the genocidal mind is in light of religious expression. Henry Knight's focus is also in three chapters which explore in great detail both Genesis 32 and Matthew 26 and how to operationalize these kinds of dialogical explorations based on texts; he also explores in a passionate essay how to deal with the idea of the Holy in light of the Shoah: his final chapter is entitled Coming to Terms with Amalek. …