Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
many processes of dehumanization. Care, humanity, and a zealous
protection of the dignity of each individual are the only guarantees of
our ultimate worth. We are naked and unprotected, weak and strong
alike, when we sacrifice even one person's uniqueness and value.
Those who were reduced to numbers, and then to ashes, testify that
this is so. We are citizens of a century whose ideologies and
technologies must serve as a warning to listen diligently to their
testimony. "You shall not murder"—not with weapons, nor with
your tongue, nor with apathy toward the root of all human dignity,
the image of God in each person.
JEREMIAH 31:31-34
Advent for the Christian community celebrates a relived memory
and a hope. It represents four weeks of anticipating the birth of Jesus
as a retrospective event and as a prospective, redeeming event for the
future. The Christian ecclesia's reading of Jeremiah 31:31-34 hears in
Jeremiah's words a prophecy which foresees events meaningful to the
experience of the church: a new covenant, the law written inwardly,
on the heart, and an age of forgiveness and direct knowledge of God.
Jewish readers understood the chapter as a prophecy of an age to
come, the messianic era in which the land of Israel, the people of Israel,
and the God of Israel would be reunited covenantally forever. The
ultimate external, historical "proof that all parties to the covenant were
fulfilling their covenantal responsibilities was the possession of the land
by a sovereign Jewish people. The messianic era dawned when that
reality could be eternally guaranteed by an ongoing fulfillment of the
Torah, the law, by the Jewish people with God's help.
Given the history of Judaism and Christianity, Jews did not hear in
this passage of Jeremiah what Christians do. This does not mean that
as that history unfolded Jews were uninterested in or unaware of the
Christian comprehension of this passage. Indeed, R. David Kimchi, a
medieval Provencal Jewish grammarian and commentator, commented
directly to the Christian understanding of this text, especially
regarding the "new covenant" section of it. Kimchi writes:
The new aspect of the covenant (described in Jeremiah 31:32) is that
it shall be upheld and never be broken (by Israel) as was the Sinaitic
covenant which God made with Israel. One who says that the
Prophet foresaw a new Torah to come, a Torah unlike the one given
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