Epilogue: Sanctity as a Legal Duty: The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Dialectic of Difference: An Examination of Four Dimensions of Jewish Prayer
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The idea of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition is of relatively recent origin and it stands in contrast to millennia of mutual distrust between the two faiths, fuelled by mutually exclusive self-definitions and self-understandings. Interestingly, it can be argued that theological mutual exclusion was originally driven by sociological factors attendant on the emergence of Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism more or less at the same time and the rivalry between them. The current conception of a common ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ has come into favour for, arguably, similar sociological factors, notably a post-Holocaust reckoning and a ‘politically correct’ atmosphere. The idea is an expression of a very profound and sincere search for mutual accommodation between Christianity and Judaism, which is the outcome of a common humbling experience on the part of Christians and Jews. Make no mistake—this is not an argument of symmetry, sociological or theological. Sociologically, Christians do not have to contend with centuries of Jewish persecution, or rather their experience of it is as persecutors rather than victims. Theologically, too, as Jean Paul II famously explained, the Christian relationship to Judaism is intrinsic, not extrinsic. That cannot be said of Judaism. It does not experience theologically Christianity as intrinsic. However, partly through the effects of what we used to call Western-liberal democracies, observant Christians and Jews find themselves often in the same minority camp struggling within an increasingly secular society. The notion of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is a way of expressing that commonality. Ironically, the whole idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition sends Jews and Christians in quest of those elements of a tradition could be said to be central to Western civilisation, at the very time the God Jews and Christians believe in has become a matter of indifference to that civilisation. What content should one give to this notion of the Judeo-Christian tradition? The content may not be allowed to slide into syncretism or to mask the essential and profound chasm that remains between the two faiths. Understandably this chasm must continue to exist because the faiths make mutually exclusive truth claims about the most profound metaphysical issues that affect us. Some would say that we believe in the same God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I, however, do not believe that that tenet can provide the essential content of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, because it poses a theologically very complicated and delicate question which yields answers that both unite and separate. The search merely for a common denominator as the meaning of the Judeo-Christian tradition is in error. To articulate what is the Judeo-Christian tradition, we should not only refer to shared elements, but also to distinct elements that are only shared in the peculiar sense of a shared dialectic of mutual opposition. That art of dialectical opposition is essential to the two faiths and it is the impact of this dialectic on our general culture that constitutes what is most significant in their ‘shared’ tradition.
Source Publication
The Internal Market and the Future of European Integration: Essays in Honour of Laurence W. Gormley
Source Editors/Authors
Fabian Amtenbrink, Gareth Davies, Dimitry Kochenov, Justin Lindeboom
Publication Date
2019
Recommended Citation
Weiler, Joseph H. H., "Epilogue: Sanctity as a Legal Duty: The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Dialectic of Difference: An Examination of Four Dimensions of Jewish Prayer" (2019). Faculty Chapters. 1480.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1480
