CLAL on Culture Archive
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A House of Prayer for All Peoples
By Steve Greenberg
The
problem of religious arrogance has haunted me since the events of September 11.
We all came face to face with the moral and mortal danger of
“God’s chosen ones” carrying out the punishment of an evil empire in a
terrible Islamic fundamentalist drama. Once
heaven’s spotlight shines exclusively upon a single religion, the rest are easily
cast as supporting players, walk-ons or antagonists.
When I was a young rabbi I preached this sermon, not to Moslems but to Christians.
A
couple of years following my rabbinic ordination, I was asked to speak to a group of
Christian seminary students about Judaism. Because
it happened to be just after Yom Hashoah, I could not resist the temptation to introduce
my talk with a few words about Christian anti-Semitism.
These bright-faced seminary students were totally unprepared to be forced by
me, a rookie rabbi, child of a Holocaust survivor, to face Christianity’s complicity
in the death of millions, including my own grandfather.
I
asked them to read aloud a few of the most rabid accounts of Christian clerics, ministers
and popes and, haltingly, they did so. Disturbed
that I might believe that they, too, subscribed to such vile opinions of Jews, they
insisted that these were not true Christians nor was this true Christianity.
“And
the Crusaders,” I asked, “were they not Christians? Luther, was he not Christian?” Motivated as they were by the sweetness of
their calling, these students were ill prepared to accept that the same scripture and
traditions in which they found profound healing and love could be so viciously employed to
justify such cruelty and violence. They
wanted to comfort themselves with the thought that the Crusaders were just bad people, or
that the Christian theology of these moments were aberrant blips on the screen. They could
not see the linkage between Christianity’s universalist theology (specifically that
God is mediated for all humanity only through Christ), and its brutal medieval and modern
history.
Of
course, I too was irresponsible. I had
conveniently described Jews as the eternal victims of other people’s bad theology. I thought the record spoke for itself. Historically speaking (and likely not unrelated
to the accident of Jewish powerlessness over the last two thousand years), Jews have not
perpetrated a fraction of the violence that has marked both Christianity and Islam.
What
I failed to remember is how Jewish truth claims have been played out in the Land of
Israel. One might consider the early
Canaanites as the first people to suffer the consequences of a holy war waged by
God’s people against infidels. Were at
least some Jews not invested in an exclusive narrative truth, there would not have been
Jewish radicals willing to do almost anything in order to secure every last inch of the
Promised Land (that is, the land promised to the Jews in the Hebrew Scriptures).
Reflecting on this, I wonder if
arrogance were a feature of monotheism itself. When
the one universal God prophetically speaks to any one people, the temptation to
universalize the particular is enormous. In
the struggle to balance these strands, Judaism actually has a lot to offer. Among the monotheistic faiths, Judaism places
clear limits on the range of its interests. Judaism
is not a faith practice for the whole world. We
have no conversionary ideals. We are
“chosen” to help the world move, not toward particular Jewish faith or
observance, but in a moral/religious direction that might be easily described as ethical
monotheism. As a vanguard, Jews have unique
duties that are not incumbent upon others. Jews
are to be a holy people in the service of humanity, a blessing to all the families of the
earth.
Still,
some might claim that the notion of chosenness was the kernel of the problem. Isn’t the rejection of every other religious
story implicit in the idea of God’s choosing of one people over others? If so, my critique of Christian supercessionism
may amount to little more than resentment at them for having stolen our trump card. The church, it would seem, merely supplanted an
original Jewish arrogance by claiming to have replaced the Jewish people as God’s
chosen.
This
year Rosh Hashanah followed less than a week after the attack upon the Twin Towers. As I began on Rosh Hashanah Eve to pray, I found
myself comforted by the liturgy. “May
all Thy creatures know Thee, and all humankind bow down to acknowledge Thee. May all Thy children unite in one fellowship to
do Thy will with a whole heart.” At the
climax of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, verses from Isaiah are recited that are the epitome of Jewish
messianic hope.
Moreover,
the holiest spot on earth, the spot most associated with our unique destiny as Jews,
belongs to the whole world: “And I will bring them to my holy mountain,
and they will rejoice in my house of prayer. All
their offerings will be received upon my altar, for my house will be called a house of
prayer for all peoples, says the Lord” (Isaiah 56:7).
Deep
inside of Jewish sensibility is the idea that Jews are chosen for the sake of all the
families of the earth. This is the core of
God’s covenant with Abraham. The
children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are chosen and blessed by God as both an end in
itself and as a resource for world blessing.
In
fact, chosenness, as Isaiah sees it, is not ultimately exclusive to the Jews. Isaiah insists that, at the end of days, not
only Israel, but the arch enemies of Israel, Egypt and Assyria will all be blessed. God will say, “Blessed be Egypt my people,
Assyria the work of my hands, Israel my inheritance” (Isaiah 19:25).
The vision is not of one people nor of one final and true religious
narrative, but of one God who is celebrated in different ways by different communities,
all chosen, all blessed.
What
I told those innocent seminary students nearly twenty years ago I say now with a bit more
calm and, I hope, a good deal more humility. No
faith can claim to be the exclusive path to the divine and avoid being implicated in the
violence done in the name of God. Those who
believe that their religious story is ultimately the only story, who claim that one cannot
reach God except through Moses or Jesus or Mohammed, have become a threat, not only to the
plausibility of any religious world vision, but to the very safety of the world. The rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism
challenges us all to find, within each of our faiths, the capacity to speak a language of
personal faith that we do not force upon others and a public religious language that
struggles to include everyone.
Judaism
can play a crucial role in the shaping of this United Nations of religions. As religions go, we have learned how to sustain an
enormous amount of dissent without compromising deep commitment. Its most faithful adherents tend to honor
questions, and often prefer them to answers. Even
the name, Israel, means God-wrestlers. For
us, two completely opposing views can both be “the word of the Living God.” The Talmud edges closer toward divine truth not by
narrowing perspectives, but by multiplying them.
Last
spring, I helped bring a friend of mine, a scholar of Islam, to Jerusalem from New
Zealand. I helped her to her hotel in the
Moslem quarter of the old city so that she could participate in the morning prayers at Al
Aksa, on the Temple Mount. By the time we
finished getting her settled it was late, but she was eager to walk around the city. I told her that I wanted to pray that evening at
the Western Wall and she excitedly asked me if I might bring her with me. She was overwhelmed at the stark spiritual beauty
of the wall and prayed on the women’s side for nearly an hour. When we met again, she thanked me for the
opportunity to visit with me a place she would not have come to on her own. She asked me what it was that I really wanted for
this little hilltop at the edge of the desert. We
talked quietly about the Temple Mount as we walked through the narrow streets back to her
hotel.
I
think I want this sacred place to be open, to be for all those who worship God, I told
her. Despite the fact that I had at one time
longed for the Jewish recapture of the Temple Mount, I realize that I no longer need or
want to mark the most sacred place for Jews as “only ours.” If the chosenness of the Jewish people is
not so much for their sake as for the sake of all, then surely the holy mount, the place
of God’s choosing, should be a place for
all. It should be our honor that the sacred
rock of the Temple Mount be deemed holy for members of every monotheistic faith. Surely each faith needs its own sacred
space. Retaining the plaza of the Western
Wall as a Jewish pilgrimage and prayer space and keeping Al-Aksa open for Moslems on the
southern side of the Temple Mount would seem right. At
the same time, the Dome of the Rock standing at the center of the Temple Mount, roughly in
the same place as the temples of Solomon and Herod, should be open to all for
contemplation and prayer to the One God. But
this isn’t really a new idea. It is quite old. The prophet Isaiah leads us to this vision of a
redemptive future: “For my house will be
called a house of prayer for all peoples, says the Lord.”
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