Britain's Chief Rabbi cites strong Catholic-Jewish ties
By Lou Baldwin
Special to The CS&T
PHILADELPHIA — Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, believes we face the possibility that the 21st century could be a century of unprecedented power for destruction. A century, he says, in which the liberal states of the global economy are especially vulnerable.
If so, he suggests, it may be caused by a lack of religious toleration. He points to 9/11, which showed how a very small group of religious fanatics can wreak terrible damage, and technology is such that no security force can hope to prevent it every time.
Rabbi Sacks, who has written several books on religious toleration, brought this message to a May 20 seminar at the Allied Jewish Federation at 22nd and Arch Streets. The seminar was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and a number of interfaith groups, including the archdiocesan Office for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
“When a political conflict becomes religious, then it is the hardest to resolve,” Rabbi Sacks said. “Compromise, which is a political virtue, is a religious vice.”
Speaking specifically of the three great Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — Rabbi Sacks called for the search for “a road to tolerance, a road to co-existence and on a much stronger note, a road to mutual respect.“
One path, he believes, is by going back to the Book of Genesis, which all three religions share. In the early chapters of Genesis, he maintains, God is speaking to humanity as a whole, not to a single nation.
In Chapter 9, the covenant with Noah after the Great Flood is a covenant with people. Such noble figures in the Old Testament as Melchizedek and Job were not Jewish. It is only after Genesis 12 that the focus is on a single nation, but even there, he said, “it never assumes that only one nation knows God.”
“The God of Abraham is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Abraham is not the religion of all nations,” Rabbi Sacks added. “The most fundamental source of human evil is the fear, which leads to hatred, of those who are different. This leads to violence, and ultimately, God forbid, to genocide.”
Fundamentalism, including religious fundamentalism, “is the attempt to force a single truth on a pluralistic world,” he said. “The great religious challenge is, can we see God in religious difference?”
The heart of the Abrahamic message, he said, “is the dignity of difference. It is a great challenge but a good challenge, great enough to heal some of the rifts between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which have gone on far too long.”
Rabbi Sacks cited the great progress which has been made in Catholic-Jewish relations and spoke of his own deep friendship with England’s late Cardinal Basil Hume, and more recently Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.
In an interview after his lecture, Rabbi Sacks expanded on the subject of Catholic-Jewish relations, both in the United Kingdom and the world, and said they are probably better than they have ever been. This, he believes, may be attributed to the aftermath of the Holocaust.
“The Catholic Church wrestled with that long and hard and courageously, and the relationship therefore has been transformed,” Rabbi Sacks said. “We have to apply the lessons of the Jewish-Catholic conversation to the conversations between Christians and Islam and between Judaism and Islam.”
Cordial Jewish-Catholic relations continue under Pope Benedict XVI, Rabbi Sacks said. “The Jewish community thinks highly of him and that is important. The fact that when he was here (in America) he went to a synagogue on Park Avenue was deeply noted and deeply appreciated. We, as Catholics and Jews, are charged to be agents of hope in a world threatened by despair.”
Lou Baldwin is a member of St. Leo Parish and a freelance writer
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