inside america

The Jews, Us, and the
Primacy of Charity
It’s impossible to know Jesus without trying to understand what his Jewish identity means. This is the first step for a real dialogue between Christians and Jews, which can surprisingly pass through something that they both share: the features of a community of faith.

by lorenzo albacete

Consider the following description of a community of faith: “They were taught to care for the most distant in the most immediate, knowing that the passing is a reflection of the lasting, that tables in their humble homes may become consecrated altars, that a single deed of one man may decide the fate of all men… Saintliness was not thought to consist in specific acts, such as in excessive prayer or performance of rituals, but was an attitude bound up with all actions, concomitant with all doings, accompanying and shaping all life’s activities. Saintliness was not an excursion into spirituality. Its mark was loving kindness. A saint was he who did not know how it is possible not to love, not to help, not to be sensitive to the anxiety of others…”

Does it sound like a description of a Christian community, say, in the Acts of the Apostles? 
It isn’t. It is a description of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, a description of what it meant for them to be Jewish. Consider this: for these people, Jewishness was more than a set of beliefs and rituals; more than what was compressed into tenets and rules. Jewishness was not in the fruit but in the sap that stirred through the tissues of the tree. Bred in the silence of the soil, it ascended to the leaves to become eloquent in the fruit. Jewishness was not only truth, it was vitality, joy–to some, the only joy. The intellectual majesty of the Shema Israel, when translated into the language of their hearts, signified: “It is a joy to be a Jew.” (The Earth is the Lord’s, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish Light Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2008).
Substituting a few words, we could have a description of a community created, sustained, and guided by the Christian faith. What stands out the most in this description is the link between faith and experience, between the faith of the community and the members’ experience of their humanity; between faith and identity. For such a community, all of reality is a symbol. The “immediate” is a symbol of “the most distant;” the “passing” is a “reflection of the lasting.” Saintliness is an “attitude bound up with all actions,” a way of looking at reality, of standing before all circumstances of life, “accompanying and shaping all life’s activities.”
Such a community of faith is a communion of life. Hence, its awareness of the value of sacrifice: “a single deed of one man may decide the fate of all men.”
And here, indeed, precisely on this point, we run into the dramatic encounter between the Christian and the Jewish communities of faith: for us Christians, that “one man” who with “a single deed” can change the history and destiny of the world–and not only Christians and Jews, but all human beings—that one man is Jesus Christ, whose sacrifice of self has destroyed all barriers that separate us. The faith that unites us is faith in Him, the Jewish man Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Christian faith in Jesus is not the evolution of the faith of the Jewish community described above. The two acts of faith are radically different. In his book on Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI reflects on the dramatic encounter between Christians and Jews referring to Jacob Neusner’s book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In the book, another Rabbi asks Neusner about the difference between Jesus’ interpretation of the Torah’s commandments in comparison with other teachers: “What did he leave out?” Neusner replies: “Nothing.” Then he asks: “Then what did he add?” Neusner replies: “Himself.” Neusner’s conclusion after his conversations with Jesus is clear, dramatic, and painful: “I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking.”
Does this conviction (which we, of course, share) put an end to a Jewish–Christian dialogue based on anything but mutual respect?

For us Christians, it is impossible to understand Jesus without trying to understand what His Jewish identity means. Our understanding of how close are our views of what a community of faith is gives us hope for a dialogue that will help both Christians and Jews grow in faith. I have in mind Heschel’s observation about saintliness: “A saint was he who did not know how it is possible not to love, not to help, not to be sensitive to the anxiety of others.”
For us, too, saintliness is defined by charity. This is the hope we share, and around which we can shape our dialogue and our relations: the primacy and victory of charity.