What do we mean when we use certain words and do we always know how they will be heard?
I deliberately chose a title that might evoke the conversation happening in the US, and reverberating across the world concerning the leaked draft decision of the Supreme Court on Roe v Wade. This has been very concerning news for me and an emotive topic for the American side of my family. It has left me thinking about just how deep the wedge has become, that a decision that most people unanimously find to be grave, difficult and deeply personal has truly become yet another political football. Or perhaps that’s just how I perceive it. It’s just hard to think of many seeing this as a straightforward victory or a straightforward loss when there’s so much pain and humanity in between.
From that subject comes a divide which I am actively navigating, not just pondering. This is one which I have been working on with the Jewish community for a number of months: a Jewish-Christian glossary. The idea is to turn years of dialogue into a resource of words and terms connecting to or even vaguely touching on what Christians call the Holy Land and Jews the Land of Israel. These terms were selected for being used widely but not understood mutually. Words like justice as found in the title, but also Kingdom of God, Mission, Holy Land and about 13 more. Each side of the glossary has two sides. One one side a Christian reflection on the meaning(s) of the term, its impact on Christian history, its impact on or relationship with Christian identity and what they as Christians would like Jews to understand and mirror reflection of the same themes on the Jewish side.
Each entry is a reflection of a dialogue between a rabbi and a minister. The perspectives are naturally limited as the ministers are all rooted in Presbyterian theology and the Rabbis come from the Orthodox Jewish community. That said, one rabbi was born in Brooklyn in the Chasidic community with English his second language after Yiddish. He admitted that even discussing a word like Mission with a Christian would have been too hard and felt like too much of a betrayal to his community before this process had started.
I have been incredibly privileged to have coordinated and edited this glossary (which will be launched in June). I have been witness to moments of sheer illumination as the participants discovered something new in the other. Both very different approaches to the same word or a remarkably similar approach when divergence was assumed. It has been painful though in recent days as there have been more intense negotiation for how this will be received by members of our own communities – the suspicions, the mistrust the desire to suppress some of the insights. Most interestingly the issues that have emerged so far on the Jewish side have been around the fact that by putting our perspectives alongside each other we have produced a pluralist theological exercise. This points to the discomfort that there is no final word for any entry. No way to answer back to some of the more painful perspectives on the Christian side that point to human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank and critical approaches to ethno-nationalism. On the Christian side I have been disappointed to hear concern that this will offer an ‘Israeli narrative’ which shows an automatic equation of Jewish and Israeli and an assumption that there is only one narrative at play in the Jewish community. Imagine if Christians discovered that everyone assumed we were of the same mind about LGBTIQ rights! Neither community have even seen this glossary and there is already a fear of what they will find and what they will have to face when they find it.
In trying to gently discern what each of us mean when we say things, to understand that our meaning may not correspond with how we are heard, the glossary will already be heard and received in ways which correspond to various political camps. There is definitely an irony in all of this. I can only hope that the impact of the process overcomes these predictable human pitfalls.
1 comment
Nothing to add except that I want a copy of this glossary! I suspect it may lead to long wine-assisted discussions the next time I join Beloved Jewish Friend for Shabbat.