Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
Fortunately, Heschel saw signs of hope in our time, among both
Catholics and Protestants. I shall deal with Vatican II below, but let me
quote here a few words in this context: 'T must say that I found
understanding for our sensitivity and position on this issue on the
part of distinguished leaders of the Roman Catholic Church." 27
Some
Protestant theologians also had begun publicly to reject missionary
activity to the Jews—among them Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.
At a joint meeting of the faculties of Jewish Theological Seminary and
Union Theological Seminary, Niebuhr repudiated Christian missionary
activity in part because " 'Practically nothing can purify the
symbol of Christ as the image of God in the imagination of the Jew
from the taint with which ages of Christian oppression in the name of
Christ have tainted it.' " 2 S
This is a reference to what has come to be
called the "Teaching of Contempt." 29
Renouncing all such teaching is
the second "precept" incumbent today upon Christians who are
sincere in their desire to take Judaism seriously.
It is no easy task. The problem is almost as old as Christianity.
Christianity was born of Judaism, but "the children did not arise to
call the mother blessed; instead, they called her blind." 30
The original
affirmation became repudiation, Jewish faith came to be seen as
superseded and obsolete, the new covenant as abolishing and
replacing the first. "Contrast and contradiction rather than acknowledgment
of roots, relatedness and indebtedness, became the
perspective." 31
As we today know so well, this perspective was to have tragic
consequences, once Christianity emerged from its initial status of a
persecuted minority religion and became linked with the power of the
Roman Empire. Heschel is painfully aware of the heavy burden of
guilt which Christianity has incurred vis-^-vis Judaism over the
centuries, including a share in the Holocaust. In his talk On Prayer at
the 1969 Liturgical Conference in Milwaukee he said: "It is with shame
and anguish that I recall that it was possible for a Roman Catholic
church adjoining the extermination camp in Auschwitz to offer
communion to the officers of the camp, to people who day after day
drove thousands of people to be killed in the gas chambers." 32
The first four words of this sentence strike me as truly
extraordinary. Heschel speaks here of the failure—the gigantic
failure—of a major religious community not his own; yet he uses the
word "shame." Are we ever ashamed of the sins of others? We may be
shocked and scandalized, we may accuse and blame. But we are
ashamed only if in some way we feel related to, identified with, these
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