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" 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. "

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" 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. "

David Novak

Land

People

Israel

" 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. "

" The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition. "

" 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

" 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 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. "

" Theological reflection takes place within history, but the history within which it takes place is an ongoing, open-ended process. "

" 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. "

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

" Many of us, both Jews and Christians, want the public square to be pluralistic, which is neither partisan nor naked. "

" 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. "

" For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights. "

" The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. "

" Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair. "

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

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

" 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. "

David Novak

Live

Christ

" During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Even when God chose Israel, he did not create the people of Israel as he created its human members, as natural beings. Instead, God formed the people of Israel from individual human beings already living in the natural world, calling them into a new historical identity. "

" 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 theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms. "

" All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community's revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation. "

" 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. "