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" A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists. "

David Novak

Political

Awareness

Better

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" Historically, Jews only accept converts rather than actively seeking them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

David Novak

Body

God

" The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance. "

David Novak

Guidance

Community

" When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it. "

" Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same. "

" 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. "

" Roots can live without branches, although truncated; branches cannot live without roots. "

" At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom. "

" It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust. "

" Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one's own volition. "

" Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral. "

" The Jewish tradition presents itself as the greatest revelation of God's truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves 'the chosen people.' It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah. "

" 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. "

" The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter. "

" The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it. "

David Novak

Holocaust

Taken

" I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. "

" All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication. "

" Religious traditions are in a constant state of development and renewed self-understanding. "

" Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It has always been inevitable that, living as a small minority among a Christian majority, some Jews would convert to Christianity. "

" 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. "

" Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says. "