Crossed Signals

Senior Catholic Church officials are scheduled to meet in Washington in mid-June with a newly formed group of rabbis hailing from three continents and representing all three major Jewish denominations, to begin what both sides envision as a new dialogue between Judaism and Catholicism.

The initiative is the latest twist — and perhaps the strangest — in a continuing Catholic-Jewish relationship that has gone through more flip-flops than the NASDAQ in recent years.

Relations hit a low point about 14 months ago, when the Vatican suspended ties with its longtime Jewish negotiating partner, an international coalition of Jewish organizations led by the World Jewish Congress. The coalition, known as the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, or IJCIC (rhymes with “nitpick”), had worked with the Vatican steadily through 30 years of profound church reforms. Last year’s freeze followed months of intense bickering over the church’s behavior during World War II.

Then, last month, relations hit a high point with the visit of Pope John Paul II to Israel, where he prayed at the Western Wall and toured Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial. Jews in Israel and around the world proclaimed the visit dramatic evidence of a new Catholic attitude toward Jews.

The upcoming Washington dialogue is meant to raise the communication between the two faiths to a new level, say spokesmen on both sides. Discussions will focus on issues like the divine roots of human ethics.

Church leaders had for years been pressing IJCIC, their traditional partner, to move beyond discussions of historic anti-Semitism and address the theological links between the two faiths. That’s met with little success. IJCIC leaders cite a traditional Orthodox ban on interfaith theological “disputation.”

The new rabbinic group, the Rabbinic Committee for Interreligious Dialogue, includes several internationally respected Jewish theologians. Among them are Israeli philosopher David Hartman, incoming U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council chief Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, University of Judaism provost Elliot Dorff, and former French chief rabbi Rene Sirat. Also included are two of America’s best known pulpit rabbis, Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth shalom in Encino and Ronald Sobel of New York’s Temple Emanu-El.

“These kinds of people are very important to us, because they are not representatives of secular organizations but religious representatives,” says Father Remi Hoeckman, Belgian-born secretary-general of the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations with the Jews.

What’s odd about the new group is that, in a crucial sense, they’re not representatives at all. In fact, the rabbinic committee was convened under the auspices of a Catholic college. Its founder, Rabbi Joseph Ehrenkranz, is director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. That’s a strange pedigree for a group purporting to represent Judaism.

Vatican officials are noncommittal on the significance of the new dialogue. “We are open to relating to any group of people that wants to share an agenda with us,” say Hoeckmann.

They haven’t always been so open. For 30 years they’ve refused to recognize any formal partner but IJCIC. Indeed, IJCIC was first set up at Vatican request, after the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s ordered the church to begin a long-term dialogue with Judaism.

What emerged was a coalition that included Judaism’s three main religious wings plus the World Jewish Congress and other defense agencies, representing Judaism’s communal and religious aspects. The Vatican has rebuffed repeated efforts by Jewish groups to open a second channel.

The decision to open a second channel now, with a Catholic-sponsored Jewish group, seems to show just how deeply frustrated the Vatican is with the petulant, one-note tone of its Jewish partners in recent years.

As for the new group’s strange pedigree, Hoeckmann dismisses it as a quibble. Ehrenkranz’s center, he said, “is run by Jews, and the initiative came from Jews. If it could be hosted by a Jewish university, fine. We are still waiting for it. In the meantime, you go to those who welcome you.”

Behind the complaint lies a fundamental imbalance in Vatican-Jewish relations. Catholicism, many observers argue, needs a dialogue with Judaism much more than Judaism needs a dialogue with the church. For the church, dialogue with Judaism is essential to understanding Christianity. “You can’t know what it means to be a Christian without understanding your Jewish roots,” says Eugene Fisher, ecumenical affairs director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

But Judaism has no such need. Jews entered the dialogue 30 years ago to help rid the church of anti-Jewish biases. Thirty years later, that job is largely done. Many Jewish community leaders see little further purpose to dialogue, other than courtesy.

But that’s begun to change. For growing numbers of Jewish thinkers and community leaders, the recent Catholic-Jewish war of words over the Holocaust has been a sobering lesson in Jewish oversensitivity. Some blame the traumas of the Holocaust. Some blame the consensus-driven, lowest-common-denominator structure of Jewish representative bodies.

Still others see a problem in Jewish education, which teaches young Jews about enemies but rarely mentions friends. “This is a moral failing of the first order,” Reform leader Eric Yoffie declared in a recent speech. Yoffie called for Reform and Conservative Judaism to seize the initiative and work to improve Vatican-Jewish relations.

Increasingly, Jewish leaders now argue that Judaism needs dialogue with Catholicism more than ever, to help Jews understand their new place in the world. For that to happen, though, the dialogue must include not just thinkers but community leaders who can be expected to bring the message back to their fellow Jews — as they have failed to do before.

That’s what’s oddest about the latest events: the Jewish community is finally ready. The Vatican is snubbing IJCIC, its traditional partner, just as IJCIC has completed a major facelift in response to church complaints. Since last fall it’s named a new chairman, set up a program committee — headed by a rabbi well-trusted at the Vatican — and offered a new agenda for discussions, which church officials greeted enthusiastically. Though they won’t use the word, IJCIC’s leaders have decided to bite the bullet and move, hesitantly, toward discussing theology.

“If we’re going to move from responding to the negative to building a deeper relationship, then we’re going to need to look at the questions we face as a religious community,” says New York attorney Seymour Reich, IJCIC’s new chairman.

Under the circumstances, the Vatican’s flirtation with the new rabbinic committee has some IJCIC leaders privately wondering what in heaven, so to speak, is going on in Rome.

J.J. Goldberg writes a weekly column for The Jewish Journal