CAN JEWS TRUST CATHOLICS?: Moving beyond repentance to Teshuvah
Signer, Michael A.
Medium When she'd outgrown a Medium, my daughter gave me a red ski sweater, strewn with snow in knitted flakes. It's thick—wool—but the sweater's extra warmth (despite the chilly rows of...
...Since the end of World War II, and with the growing consciousness of the enormity of the crimes of the Shoah, Jews and Christians have met face to face and have truly heard each other...
...We surely can have empathy for many Catholics who feel beleaguered about the continuity of their communities...
...But for two reasons a large dollop of cynicism is warranted on this score...
...In the end, though, our president would have been chosen as always by politics...
...How can Jews know that Christian Teshuvah is genuine...
...Some members of the Jewish community have condemned the Catholic church for not issuing an "apology" to the Jewish people...
...ultimately it was for Congress to judge in exercising its constitutional function of counting the electoral votes...
...Instead, they effectively declared: Game over...
...In short, trying to determine fairly who won the election in Florida was for the state itself to work out in the first instance...
...therefore, it couldn't have recounts at all...
...Will others follow...
...So there would have been two or perhaps three competing slates presented to Congress...
...Instead, the five justices played what amounts to a sleight-of-hand trick...
...It's thick—wool—but the sweater's extra warmth (despite the chilly rows of crystals on the yoke of knitted firs) had nothing to do with heft or wool or scarlet and everything to do with being hers Spirits, bidden by her outgrown clothes, materialize in what no longer fits her— revenants of the girl that she outgrows...
...They may have lost faith in the Florida Supreme Court, which had been somewhat overly aggressive in response to the blatant partisanship of Secretary of State Katherine Harris...
...A rabbi looks forward Michael A. Signer he celebration of Jubilee 2000 reached beyond the boundaries of the Catholic community, leading to dramatic steps toward reconciliation with other religious communities...
...The Honda Supreme Court had indicated that the state's desire to take advantage of the safe harbor "circumscribed" the determination of what a "reasonable" deadline for recounts was under Florida law...
...The pope sets this example...
...If so, the justices misread the situation and the Court's own role...
...Punch ballots, as we all know now, are much less accurate than other forms of ballot...
...And that fact points to a huge irony...
...But the relationship with the Jewish people is a relationship with the roots of the church...
...This assurance of our support for the process of Teshuvah may encourage further steps toward reconciliation...
...But those who are making Teshuvah did not commit those acts, and many of them are dedicated to ensuring that that history does not repeat itself...
...Is the goal (agenda) of the church, while showing compassion to gays, to support research to eliminate this objective disorder through means acceptable to the church, for example, genetic surgery in utero with no adverse side effects...
...Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has told my classes at the University of Notre Dame that the new attitude toward the Jewish people does not mean that the church has lost its evangelical message to the nations...
...He made a pilgrimage to Israel—not just the Holy Land, but Israel—where his actions demonstrated respect for and deference to both civil and religious authorities...
...As professor Mary Boys writes in her new book, Has God Only One Blessing...
...Can we, at a moment of our own sense of weakness against the forces of assimilation and secularism, afford to let down our guard...
...More than two hundred rabbis and Jewish scholars signed Dabru Emet, a Jewish theological statement about Christians and Christianity that appeared on September 10,2000 in the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun...
...The Florida fiasco will probably result in a more equitable manner of voting throughout Florida and the nation...
...That is what the majority did here...
...Supreme Court majority's insistence on standards, it is hard to know what the Court's standard was in this case...
...No simply articulated rule will apply perfectly, and the more intricate the rules, the harder not only to articulate but to administer consistently...
...But if indeed it marks the virtual end of punch-card balloting, that will be because of initiatives by county officials, state legislatures, or Congress, not because the U.S...
...It almost certainly would have been highly partisan...
...This is the way of the seed of Israel for their heart is predisposed in this fashion...
...And this red cardigan was even more...
...The Christian story will need rethinking...
...Such a thought sends tremors of fear and distrust into the minds and hearts of the gay community, who are already fighting an uphill battle for their legitimate place at the Lord's table...
...So we just have to move on, with the hope that expressions of disgust will shape the way history views this debacle...
...In a way, then, the most discouraging aspect of the whole affair is not that the Court acted improperly but that we, and it, seem to have lost confidence that any other institution but the Court is capable of acting properly...
...In "Laws of Repentance" he writes, "It is prohibited for a person to be cruel (akhzari) and not to be reconciled...
...It can work in collaboration with Christians on local projects that promote mutual understanding...
...remember that the legislature was getting into the act, with its legally unsupportable contention that it was entitled to appoint electors if the election were not resolved quickly enough...
...First there is the identity of the five justices (Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas) who anchored the majority...
...It will be long and it will require many years...
...But perfection is often unattainable, and lack of perfection, as judges who pronounce the importance of judicial restraint frequently remind us, does not make a constitutional violation...
...Reality is complex...
...He asked them, "If the roots are false, then what are we...
...The late Cardinal John O'Connor was among the first to proclaim this message...
...Federal law provides that, if multiple slates are presented and none qualifies for the safe harbor, a slate accepted by both Houses of Congress prevails...
...The great Jewish philosopher and theologian Moses Maimonides provides some guidance...
...10 Though the holding that the recounts violated the Constitution was overly aggressive, it was not particularly egregious What was egregious was the Court's decision on remedy Given the majority's determination that the recounts did not satisfy constitutional requirements, one would have expected a remand so that the Florida court could order recounts that did meet those requirements...
...First, the easy case: Bush may have won the recount...
...13 What are the signs or actions of Teshuvah demonstrated by this papacy...
...DIANE LAVOS Natick, Mass...
...Both communities can continue to forge alliances for social justice between synagogues and local parishes...
...These statements and liturgical occasions signal what is to come...
...For Jews it is at the very center of our religious lives...
...No matter what the initial reaction to the statement, however, members of the Jewish community note the significant linguistic phenomenon of having two Hebrew words appear' "Shoah" in place of "Holocaust" and— more important for our purposes—"Teshuvah" instead of "repentance...
...what we are saying is that when a court orders a statewide remedy, then we're really going to worry about uniformity...
...This dialogue has even taken on the character of a choreography: first comes dialogue, then a statement from the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews, and then the cacophony of voices from the Jewish community, with some respondmg "Not enough...
...How much more satisfying as a result that would have been than the one we have now...
...It was clear Florida couldn't have a constitutional recount by December 12...
...Under the Constitution, the electoral votes are opened in Congress, not before the Supreme Court...
...From the meeting between Jules Isaac, author of the groundbreaking ]esus and Israel, and John XXIII to the countless gatherings with John Paul II, a new Christian theological attitude toward Judaism has been forged...
...Supreme Court should have stayed out of the matter altogether...
...That's a conclusion, not a standard...
...It will not guide future doctrine, and the circumstances that allowed the Supreme Court in effect to pick our president are unlikely to be repeated...
...The Jewish tradition can be presented with integrity—emphasizing elements of difference and similarity...
...The Jewish community might be guided by Maimonides's statement when they read the recent call by the Vatican's Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews for Christians to make Teshuvah for two millennia of sins against the Jewish people...
...And in 1876-77 there was no thought that the power to resolve controversies concerning the choice of electors resided anywhere else...
...It may also be the time to step forward more boldly and adopt a less defensive attitude toward those Christian groups, especially the Catholic church...
...Paulist Press, 2000), perhaps the greatest consequence of Christian Teshuvah will be the resolution to work in collaboration with the Jewish community "to be a blessing to one another and to the world...
...11 CAN JEWS TRUST CATHOLICS...
...We are entering an era in which the main outlines of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation have been set by the present papacy...
...In 1994, John Paul II issued Tertio millennia advemente, in 12 which he set an agenda for the entire church to greet the year 2000...
...The editorial echoes the sentiments of many Americans, even beyond partisanship, yet speaks volumes about our resilient, but battered democratic system of government and the primacy of the vote...
...Members of the Jewish community can learn about what has happened among Christians so they do not continue to recite the same litany of negativity...
...That's a leap too far...
...Many of my Jewish colleagues have experienced the fruits of their long-standing relationships with their local bishops or senior pastors in the local parishes...
...But it is a one-time intrusion, not an attempt to resolve a continuing issue like slavery in the territories or abortion...
...It is not unusual for a court to caution that in a particular decision it is not articulating a broad rule of law but is only deciding the case before it, leaving other cases to the future...
...We shall continue...
...To read these statements, which can be found in Catholics Remember the Holocaust (United States Catholic Conference, 1998), edited by Eugene Fisher, is to experience in these various statements from the national bishops' conferences a sense of profound regret and loss—the loss of an opportunity during the Shoah to act m response to the highest ideals of Christianity...
...He was particularly sensitive to Jewish outcry during the controversy over the Auschwitz Carmelite convent in 1988, and encountered considerable opposition from local Catholic communities there...
...This call was reflective of the inner thinking of the church...
...And they may have thought their intervention was necessary to yield an orderly resolution...
...Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee issued a magnificent litany of regret...
...The recount certainly wouldn't have been perfect...
...An apology would be a once-and-done-with moment...
...The easy answer, that they simply wanted to see a Republican in the White House and were willing to do whatever it took to get that result, seems too crude, though a rooting interest for that outcome surely affected their thinking...
...D 14 (Continued from page 4) it is a virtual certainty that, given the rapid advances in these fields, we will know with a high level of confidence its causes within the next several decades...
...This lengthy litany of the consequences of Christian Teshuvah is unprecedented and unnerving for us as Jews...
...These so-called "strict constructionists" are not the ones we would expect to perceive the necessity of federal judicial intervention into an administrative procedure supervised by the state courts...
...We know this pain...
...The Florida court had never indicated that state law demanded finality by the safe harbor date (which the state statutes do not even mention), even if the only constitutional way to complete manual recounts (which the state statutes certainly do provide for) would be to miss that date...
...I will keep a copy of your editorial with my Boston Globe from the day after the election as a reminder of the preciousness of my vote and everyone else's...
...Clearly, Teshuvah toward the Jewish people will call for continuing reformulation of Christian self-understanding...
...The pope visited the synagogue in Rome, indicating that it is a place where God dwells with the people of Israel He has knelt in prayer at Auschwitz, and made that prayer a leitmotif of preaching throughout his papacy...
...Many young Catholics want more ritual and search for a deeper spiritual foundation for their faith...
...We will not preserve the Jewish people by preserving our anger about the sins of the past...
...What will be the consequences of Teshuvah for Christians with respect to the Jewish people...
...It was at least plausible to conclude that even a hastily arranged and loosely supervised statewide recount would come closer to ascertaining the intent of voters overall than simply ignoring all those ballots that the machines had spit out uncounted...
...and others responding "We have gone further on the journey...
...The fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz came in 1995, and every council of bishops in Europe, including those in Poland and Hungary, issued a statement that focused specifically on the crimes that the church and its members had perpetrated against the Jewish people during the Shoah...
...Even if the recount were incomplete by the date the Electoral College met (December 18), the Gore electors could have voted then and been certified later (in this case by the courts), as occurred with their Hawaii counterparts in 1960-61...
...We know this worry...
...One of the most astonishing episodes in American political history ended last month with perhaps the most imperial decision ever by the United States Supreme Court...
...So much has changed for them since Vatican II...
...A federal statute of 1887, anticipating another episode like the disputed election of 1876, provides a "safe harbor" to a state: If a state sets up a procedure before the election for resolving a dispute over who won, and that procedure results in a final determination by a certain date (December 12 in this instance), then the determination is binding on Congress when it counts the electoral votes...
...Will they answer from the standpoint of what Maimonides calls the "Jewish heart" (lev nachon)—a heart predisposed to generosity and forgiveness—or will they respond as idolaters7 The call for Christian, and specifically Catholic, Teshuvah is a measure of the success of the Jewish-Christian conversations on the international, national, and local levels...
...When the sinner asks him for forgiveness let him be forgiving with a whole heart and a generous soul...
...Teshuvah requires the baal teshuvah, the penitent, to be vulnerable...
...her— was mine...
...Rabbi David Novak has responded by saying that an apology would only cheapen the action required...
...They need to think about how they want to respond to that call...
...The Florida Supreme Court had attempted to resolve a very difficult situation and in a very short amount of time...
...Maimonides then notes a remarkable contrast between the predisposition of the heart of the Jew and the idolater—those of uncircumcised heart— explaining that the latter "keep their anger forever...
...Now the harder case—Gore wins the recount...
...Supreme Court orders it as a matter of federal constitutional law...
...And then what...
...Deborah Warren 9 Richard D. Friedman 'BUSH' v. 'CORE' What was the Supreme Court thinking...
...And, said the five justices, Florida didn't want recounts after December 12...
...Regret and confession of sins may lead Catholics to be more sensitive to the Jewish people and to stand in solidarity with them...
...In these statements Jews can discern the language of "co-responsibility" or "sin" that so many Jews found lacking in the Vatican statement "We Remember" that emerged in 1998 from the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews...
...He prayed at Yad VaShem and put a petition into the Western Wall of the ancient Temple, expressing deep sorrow over the behavior of sons and daughters of the church...
...He initiated a theology of Teshuvah with respect to the Jewish communities that climaxed in a liturgical ceremony in Rome in April 2000...
...Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade should have persuaded the Court that its decisions cannot quell political controversy Bush v. Gore is more stunning than those cases in one sense, because it steps on the central function of democracy...
...Part of this pastoral plan was a series of dialogues with non-Christian communities that had been the objects of harsh treatment by the church...
...Regret and confession of the sins of mistreating the Jewish people are found in the articulation of misdeeds that require reflection and resolution so that the actions will not be repeated...
...This whole process would have been messy...
...In his reflections on the jubilee, he often referred to the penitential actions of Christians toward Judaism by the Hebrew word Teshuvah, a term rooted in the idea of "return"—a return to God and God's way...
...It is a path that leads from acknowledgment of sin to the resolution not to commit the sin again...
...Therefore, when the pope asks Catholics to engage in the process of Teshuvah toward Jews, it engenders some questions: How shall the Jewish community respond to the papal call to Teshuvah...
...Until such time as the church can move toward a more neutral stance on the interpretation of the orientation itself—at root, a difficult, but serious theological and philosophical question—most dialogue between the gay community and the church will remain one of defensive posturing ROBERT J. COMISKEY Springfield, Va The editors comment: We doubt that the official church is supporting research to eliminate gays through genetic surgery, or otherwise...
...Play out what would have happened if the Supreme Court allowed a statewide recount to continue, subject to whatever safeguard it deemed necessary, and had then withdrawn from the scene...
...But the Supremes, in contrast to what they had done the first time the election fight had reached them, did not give the Florida court a chance to clarify its meaning...
...Many of their children do not know the church of the 1950s, and those children have a sense of rootlessness that resonates with what our own children have experienced...
...If the legislature can delegate broad authority to local officials, why can't a court leave it to local officials to implement on a case-by-case basis a legislatively prescribed standard for determining the validity of a vote...
...The U.S...
...Consequently, the recount ordered by the Florida court may be seen as an attempt to limit this larger disparity...
...The Jewish community might consider some rather basic steps that would be very much in continuity with what it has done in the past...
...For all the U.S...
...Some essence seemed to pass from young to old, as if it was the girl herself I wore (or she was wearing me), as if her whole self, in a reverse metempsychosis —not a sweater, not a message...
...Voting rights Your stand against the bombastic activities of the Bush campaign was courageous, ("Votes Count," December 15, 2000...
...The second reason is that the majority opinion is Procrustean...
...But now we have come to expect the Court to decide great issues of our national life...
...Since 1994, however, the Catholic side, under the pope's leadership, has moved the consequences of the dialogue deeply inside the church...
...And indeed some observers have suggested that the decision in Bush v. Gore heralds a new era of constitutional doctrine assuring the fairness of voting...
...By shifting the term to the Hebrew term Teshuvah, rather than simply using "penitence," the Catholic church is calling for a process of healing...
...Members of Congress perceived to have acted unfairly would have had to answer at the polls...
...Perform any recurrent task involving any complexity and you will recognize that, even if you are the sole actor, your standards will vary...
...But if the two Houses do not agree, then the slate certified by the executive of the state should be accepted...
...We have the stories of our martyrs, both in the medieval world and during the Shoah...
...Most significantly, an incomplete perforation of a ballot was more likely to be counted as a vote in some times and places than in others...
...Regret and confession of sins for Catholics means that they will pray to discover ways to end the hatred and the stereotypes that produce hatred...
...Sometimes such opinions represent tentative openings onto new vistas of law...
...No, says the Court, we're not saying that counties can't use different voting systems...
...Rather, let a person be inclined to be forgiving and hard to anger...
...Yes, the "intent of the voter" standard established by the Florida legislature is open-ended and leaves room for variation, but so are many other standards—begin with the "reasonable doubt" standard for juries—that courts have declined, for good reason, to define more precisely...
...It also makes a claim upon the one who has been wronged...
...We are in no position to forgive for specific acts...
...as if what most completely clothes us, keeping our meager bodies from the cold, is what belonged to someone else before— what's cast off, like a transmigrating soul...
...Their parents are concerned about intermarriage and what that will mean for the shape of their families and faith...
...In its December 12 decision, Bush v. Gore, the Court ruled that the recount of November's presidential election as ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated constitutional requirements...
...We know how to defend ourselves against proselytizing...
...In these projects there is no need to worry about homogenizing Judaism...
...Justices Ginsburg and Breyer agreed rather ambiguously that the recount raised constitutional difficulties, but they disagreed on the ultimate result...
...The nation's highest court seized on this vaguely stated expression of desire and used it to shut the process down...
...If we Jews respond to Christian Teshuvah with acknowledgment and encouragement, we need not think that we have betrayed our sacred martyrs, our history...
...Beyond the pope's confession, many local bishops have spoken directly to the Jewish people and to their own dioceses about the need for Teshuvah...
...They have rejected and will continue to reject targeted proselytism of the Jewish people...
...If Jews receive Christian Teshuvah with an open heart, do they betray their ancestors who died as martyrs rather than submit to forced conversions...
...Both responses have contributed to furthering the dialogue for more than forty years...
...In particular, Pope John Paul II focused his efforts on putting an end to the enmity that has existed between Jews and Christians over much of the past two thousand years...
...He established diplomatic relations with the State of Israel...
...Why did they do it...
...In one stroke, the Court exercised power that belonged to Congress, the legislature of Florida, Florida's courts and administrators, and, most importantly, the people of the state...
...But I also agree with those who said Gore should have asked for the statewide recount first thing, so it wouldn't look like he hand-picked the counties where he expected the most support...
...it articulates rationales just broad enough to cover this case...
...We will not agree on every social and economic issue, but the work for social justice can be more explicitly grounded in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible—a sacred text our traditions share...
...But we have not yet faced a Christian world that turns toward us with respect for our integrity as a people whose covenant has never been revoked...
...The decision emphasized the variance, not only from one county to another but also from one recount team to another, of the standard used to determine the "intent of the voter...
Vol. 128 • January 2001 • No. 1
