Summary:
This piece has been with me for some time. I’ve been sitting
on it, concerned that my all-inclusive, non-sectarian religious humanism might
be compromised by posting it on this blog. Yet, when I review the entire
spectrum of my experience with Jewish-Christian dialogue, as a
religious/theological question, I find that the discussants often talk past
each other. While it is the case that Jews and Christians share more
theological positions than we might at first acknowledge, as Rabbi Irving “Yitz”
Greenberg taught us in his book For the Sake
of Heaven and Earth, in certain respects, Jews and Christians speak very
different religious languages. The divide actually has little to do with
whether or not the Messiah has already come. The religious quest of
Christianity is, in so many ways, very different from the religious quest of
Judaism. Were we to address this significant difference, we might actually be
in a much better position to understand and learn from each other.
