Jewish-Christian relations in historical perspective

Christians and Jews learn to stand in their respective traditions with a blind eye toward the other. Most of us were taught to read and interpret our sacred texts, to think and act without any sustained attention given to the beliefs and practices that define the other. Those of us who are religious professionals, educators and clergy, have been particularly reluctant to scale walls and leave the comforts of home. Rarely have we ventured beyond our familiar surroundings and faced the disorienting affirmations of our religious neighbors. When our practiced isolation is critically challenged, our anxieties are triggered and we reactively wonder: Why should we teach about the other's tradition when the people in our midst know so little about their own? How can we venture onto alien theological turf without leading our people astray? It is easy to get lost in a morass of conflicting religious claims. Interfaith dialogue seems to blur vital distinctions, confuse the uninitiated, and erode the integrity of each community. So, most Christian and Jewish professionals insist that religious revitalization depends upon education that turns us inward, connects us more firmly to our own foundational stories, and enables us to retrieve our own distinctive voices. An educational task has increasingly emerged as a top priority for both Jews and 16Christians: to reclaim our separate spiritual identities and to affirm the irreducible singularity of our religious allegiances.