by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

February 07, 2008

A former priest and a current rabbi offered their differing perspectives on pluralism and fundamentalism before a standing-room-only crowd at Congregation B’nai Israel in Millburn Feb. 3.

While author James Carroll discussed how his Catholic upbringing informed his strong moral stands against fundamentalism, biblical literalism, and anti-Semitism, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield urged understanding even for religious approaches that may appear extreme or threatening to those viewing them from the outside.

Carroll, a Boston Globe columnist, discussed his 2000 book Constantine’s Sword, a damning history of anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church.

“I am firmly part of that emerging church that is arguing for a post-Enlightenment, rational, pluralistic, ecumenical, open belief that respects the beliefs of others and is determined to root out the sources of intolerance and violence from faith,” he said. And that includes “eradicat[ing] anti-Semitism from its sources.”

Hirschfield, president of CLAL-the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, is author of the new book You Don’t Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. The book describes Hirschfield’s fairly secular suburban upbringing, his time as a militant settler in Hebron, and his ultimate decision to become a rabbi who has devoted his professional career to promoting pluralism.

It is Hirschfield who has urged his fellow Jews to form relationships even with the evangelical Christians they may distrust.

“By and large those American Christians whose theologies are most comfortable for most Jews take positions on the State of Israel that most Jews find distressing,” Hirschfield said. “And those Christians whose positions on Israel seem to endlessly delight most Jews are of theologies that most Jews frankly find repugnant at best and deadly at worst.”

Suggesting a different approach, he posited, “What if we actually began to imagine that there is no such thing as the perfect partner in anything?” With such a presumption, “We should all look carefully at whatever relationships we have and be willing to admit some of the real downsides.” Such an examination, said Hirschfield, suggests Jews not only form relationships with Christian Zionists, but with liberal Christian groups that are seen as less supportive of Israel.

Basis for hope

But Carroll, who has said that fundamentalists are marked by the belief that “one’s own personal virtue is the ultimate value,” suggested that all fundamentalists are dangerous, and that Christian Zionists are in fact no friends of Israel.

Christian Zionists, he said, “support the most rejectionist, fanatical, far right-wing position there is in the State of Israel” and “reject the two-state solution out of hand.”

“What if the State of Israel comes to terms with the Palestinians and accepts certain compromises on these questions? Is it a friend of Israel who radically rejects those compromises?” he asked. “The Christian Right represented by the Christian Zionist movement is radically opposed to any compromise, is radically opposed — let’s put the name on it — to peace.

“It is no friend of Israel.”

Hirschfield acknowledged that as a militant religious Zionist, he himself had the fervor of so many of the destructive historical characters described in Carroll’s book and in his remarks. “I had that clarity,” Hirschfield said. “I was convinced I knew God’s will and that it spoke through me.” He said he knows firsthand the “intoxication” that comes with not taking what he called Carroll’s “invitation to serious self-reflection” to heart.

Hirschfield went on to assert that it was not the Christians who invented forced conversion or theologically inspired murder — it was the Jews.

“The notion that someone needed to join your religion or be entirely dispossessed or die was created 300 years before Jesus ever walked the earth,” he said, referring to the actions of the second generation of Hasmonean kings. “The oldest record we know of theologically inspired mass murder is our own Torah’s admonition against Amalek: to kill every man, every woman, every child, every animal.

“This does not make Jews who read the story equivalent to Nazis burning Jews,” said Hirschfield. “But it does tell us something profound about the fact that whatever we delight in finding over there — we have over here too. And by extension, it is fair to assume that whatever it is we delight in possessing, other communities probably possess that as well.

“So there is a basis for hope, there is a basis for reconciliation, and there is a basis for genuine relationship building.”

The event was the annual Rabbi Max Gruenewald Memorial Lecture, sponsored jointly by the synagogue’s adult education committee and the Gruenewald Fund. Gruenewald served the congregation as rabbi and rabbi emeritus from 1944 to 1970.