A student who requests to remain anonymous asks: Why did the Rav rule against interfaith dialogue? Isn't it necessary to maintain a healthy relationship with the surrounding world?
This question touches on an exceptional reality of American Judaism. The very notion of having interfaith dialogue, rather than presuming interfaith hostility or defending the Jewish religion against the claims of others, is born of the freedoms of expression that we are so blessed to have in this country. And yet, as you write, the Rav indeed rejected the idea that we should take advantage of such opportunities in order to have open dialogue about our respective religions with members of other faiths.
While I’m certainly no expert on the Rav, I will try to explain what I have read in his own words about this issue. Specifically, we can get a sense of the Rav’s perspective within the book Community, Covenant and Commitment, which is a collection of the Rav’s letters on the topics indicated in the title, edited by Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot.
In a number of letters, the Rav clearly distinguishes between communicating across religions about matters of broad social, humanitarian, and cultural concern on the one hand, and participating in dialogues for the purpose of clarifying and/or debating our religious differences and similarities vis-à-vis other faiths on the other. He explicitly supports the former: “We are ready to enter into dialogue [with other faith communities] on such topics as War and Peace, Poverty, Freedom, Man’s Moral Values, the Threat of Secularism, Technology and Human Values, Civil Rights, etc., which revolve about religious spiritual aspects of our civilization.” If you think about it, those topics comprise an incredibly broad range of questions and challenges that the Rav was perfectly willing to discuss with non-Jews! We could spend a lifetime debating these matters, thereby (as you say in your question) fostering a healthy relationship with the surrounding world; or, as the Rav puts it, “Communication among the various communities will greatly contribute towards mutual understanding and will enhance and deepen our knowledge of those universal aspects of man which are relevant to all of us.”
As I understand it, the Rav’s strong objection to interfaith dialogue about religious dogma and practice was grounded in his insistence that there are essential differences between the relationship Jews have developed with Hashem and the nature of non-Jews’ (and particularly Christians’) relationship with God, as played out in each religion’s history and rituals. The Christian view, says the Rav, places Christians at a distance from God, renders them passive before God’s presence, and places God (within both doctrine and ritual) in an other-worldly position. In contrast, the Rav describes the Jewish faith and practice as bespeaking Jews’ intimacy with Hashem, engagement in constant, active dialogue with Hashem, and participation in a natural (rather than super-natural) relationship with Hashem. The Rav, as I understand his writing, insists that we should not put ourselves in the position of opening up these essential components of our approach to rationalizations or apologetics, which would surely be part of any interfaith dialogue – at best – between members of faith communities whose conceptions of God differ so vastly. At worst, as the Rav himself witnessed in the 1960s, Jewish engagement in ecumenical conversations about the rudiments of faith could lead Christians to assume that we are prepared, God forbid, to consider the possibility that “the historical mission of the Jews exhausted itself… in paving the way for Christianity” – a component of Christian theology. The Rav had no problem with Jews’ clarifying aspects of our religion to non-Jews who express an interest in understanding it, but this of course is different than involving ourselves in formal, open discourse.
I think it is important to note that there are many ways in which Jews can be (in the Rav’s words) “members of the universal community”, working together with non-Jews to better the world and promote common values. Indeed, to name just a few examples, Jews and Jewish organizations across the denominations participated in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and in the past few years we have been involved in all sorts of disaster relief programs following natural catastrophes (hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.). All this can be done while heeding the Rav’s warnings I described above. At the same time, there certainly have been rabbis and other Jewish leaders who have engaged in the kinds of conversations the Rav would shy away from, with results the Rav himself might have found acceptable. Has the world changed enough since the 1950s and 1960s that the Rav would modify his position if he were alive today? I am most definitely not in a position to answer that question. But regardless of whether each of us follows the Rav’s specific guidelines on this matter or adopts a more permissive approach, I believe we would do well to keep in mind the Rav’s beautiful explication of the intimate nature of our relationship with Hashem, as well as heed his cautions against engaging in debates that might, by their very nature, besmirch Judaism.
Chag Kasher ve-Sameach
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