Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Historically, Jews only accept converts rather than actively seeking them.
Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.
The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
Roots can live without branches, although truncated; branches cannot live without roots.
Religious traditions are in a constant state of development and renewed self-understanding.
During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
A fully positive relationship between Christians and Jews is one that would elide all differences.
The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.
Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us.
At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.
The Vatican's recognition of the State of Israel in 1997 could not have occurred without John Paul's leadership.
The community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.
Many of us, both Jews and Christians, want the public square to be pluralistic, which is neither partisan nor naked.
Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one's own volition.
It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral.
Theological reflection takes place within history, but the history within which it takes place is an ongoing, open-ended process.
I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
It has always been inevitable that, living as a small minority among a Christian majority, some Jews would convert to Christianity.
The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition.
Christians and Jews alike are the new exiles of the contemporary world, struggling with how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land.
One cannot accept Christ and still be part of the normative Jewish community; one cannot live by Torah and still be part of the Church.
God chose us to live both in body and in soul, but the body functions for the sake of the soul more than the soul functions for the body.
The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now.
The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone.
A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt.
The relation between Judaism, Zionism, and Messianism is one that is often hard for Jews to get straight. Needless to say, it is even harder for non-Jews.
The shortcoming of purely political discourse between Christians and Jews arises from the fact that it is largely built upon the perception of a common enemy.
To view any individual as being independent of relationality is like viewing a point outside of a line, a line outside of a figure, a figure outside of a body.
Cultural synthesis is how a compromise between various opinions is worked out. But truth does not change, and truth is not arrived at by some sort of compromise.
Because Judaism and Christianity are both covenantal religions, the relationship of the individual Jew or Christian to God is always within covenanted community.
As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern with Jews and Judaism.
The religious doctrine of traditional Judaism entails the acceptance of the nationhood of the Jewish people and the everlasting sanctity of the Land of Israel for them.
If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.
Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.
There is no question that Israelis - indeed, all concerned Jews - have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel.
In a very real sense, Jews have to believe that Christians have missed the point about how to wait for the end, and Christians have to believe something quite similar about the Jews.
As a traditional Jew, I have benefited personally from the hospitality of Chabad Hasidim on many occasions, and I marvel at how many Jews Chabad has brought back to their primordial home.
Every individual is a person necessarily imbedded in a range of multiple relations, and therefore, no one is really independent in anything but a relative sense; no one is truly autonomous.
The common moral praxis of Jews and Christians is most definitely theologically informed by the doctrine we share in common: The human person, male and female, is created in the image of God.
To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one's sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people.
We Jews who willingly and happily confirm our covenantal status and its attendant rights and duties must take the question of mission seriously: either to accept it or reject it knowingly and with conviction.
Christianity and Judaism are united above all in their common affirmation and implementation of the moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible, or 'Old Testament,' and the traditions of interpretation of that teaching.
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.
The slogan 'Never Again!' that emerged after the Holocaust implies that the Holocaust has a universal moral meaning, which, if properly learned, can provide at least a theoretical prophylactic against its repetition against anyone.
In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.