Spring 2015 Stories

The proposed theme for this lecture, “Interreligious Dialogue and Leadership: Building Relationships as Persons,” requires an analysis of the terms which appear in it. What does interreligious dialogue actually mean? In my understanding, interreligious dialogue is not a static reality, but a dynamic, active process. Dialogue begins when indifference towards the other is broken. This attitude necessarily leads to learning about the identity of the other, and coming to know the beliefs and ways of thinking of the other.

In the Scriptures, knowledge is often presented as a synonym for love, as in the most intimate relationship between a man and a woman, or referring to the love between the human person and God. Love without knowledge is merely a superficial passion. Knowledge without love is an incomplete relationship between people, which easily leads to misunderstandings and clashes. To love is not a simple concept easily defined. The development of a real dialogue requires being sympathetic and empathetic with the other, which means knowing and loving the other.

The beginning of the dialogical relationship between the then Archbishop [Bergolglio] of Buenos Aires—now Pope Francis—and myself was through invitations from one to the other to interreligious events. These invitations included: prayers for peace in the world in dramatic moments of the past; my invitation to him to assist in delivering a message to my congregation at the beginning of the recitation of the selichot—the preparatory prayers for the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; his invitation to me to give a lecture in the seminary of Buenos Aires; his writing the preface for a 2006 book I wrote about religious experience in our time (I suppose this must have been the first time in history that an archbishop wrote a prologue to a book written by a rabbi!); and, in 2010 Archbishop Bergoglio told Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, the two journalists who worked together in the writing of his authorized biography, that he wished for me to write the prologue of his biography.

Everything Bergoglio and I did in our dialogue was in accordance with our beliefs and understandings of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. He was, and is, coherent in his ideas and actions. In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis devotes a whole paragraph to the theme of relations with Judaism:

We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked ... The Church, which shares with Jews an important part of the sacred Scriptures, looks upon the people of the covenant and their faith as one of the sacred roots of her own Christian identity ... With them, we believe in the one God who acts in history, and with them we accept his revealed word. Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’ disciples. The friendship which has grown between us makes us bitterly and sincerely regret the terrible persecutions which they have endured, and continue to endure, especially those that have involved Christians.

In the last point, I understand the expression “Jesus’ disciples” in a literal and in a metaphorical way. Jesus is Pope Francis’ paradigm for his own thinking and his acting. When he calls upon the clergy not to be self-referential, but to go out of their churches, to reach out to those who have abandoned the church for several reasons, he is just imitating Jesus. When he approaches homosexuals and other people who previously, in one way or another, have been rejected by the church, he’s just imitating Jesus. And when he approaches the Jews in a dialogue and friendship, he is just imitating that singular master who 2,000 years ago had discussed with his colleagues, but never abandoned his friendship, love, and loyalty to his brothers [and sisters].

In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis goes on to reflect: God continues to work among the people of the Old Covenant and to bring forth treasures of wisdom, which flow from their encounter with his word. For this reason, the Church also is enriched when she receives the values of Judaism. While it is true that certain Christian beliefs are unacceptable to Judaism, and that the Church cannot refrain from proclaiming Jesus as Lord and Messiah, there exists as well a rich complementarity which allows us to read the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures together and to help one another to mine the riches of God’s word.

Pope Francis and I have read and analyzed together the Holy Scriptures on many occasions. Some of our exchanges around Scripture appear in the programs that we recorded for the Archbishop’s television channel in Buenos Aires. Through different relevant actions, Pope Francis has stressed the claim that the teachings of the Jewish masters are relevant for Christians. In all of our personal encounters, we used to ask each other: “What is our next action?”

We understood that once a personal relationship of trust and empathy was established between us, a consolidated message had to emerge from it. We understood that the deep challenge of each encounter in our lives is to perform some relevant action, through which we can carve out a message that can serve as an inspiration to others in the present time, and for generations to come. As Catholic and Jewish leaders, we understood that an answer must be given to the long history of clashes between our communities.

The first edition of our book, On Heaven and Earth, written by me and the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, only sold a 2,500 copies. After Cardinal Bergoglio was elected pope, the book was translated into 10 languages: Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German, Polish, Czech, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and was a bestseller in some of them. When we prepared the book, we did it with great humility, in the silence of our studios, and paying attention to our hearts and our consciences. The chapters were not written with the inspiration of leadership, but with the hope that we were serving God in this ideal of goodness, love, and justice.
In Argentinian society, anti-Semitic sentiment, that in the past had been expressed by certain members of the church, demanded an answer. This answer came from Cardinal Bergoglio through his words and his dialogical actions with his Jewish friends. As he comes to the anti-Semitism of the present, [Pope Francis] condemns it in sharp and unequivocal terms. A dialogue without a deep commitment to address the unsolved problems of the past and present, to face the gaps, is not a real one. Dialogue demands us to project changes in life and to search for the creation of turning points in order to build up a new reality with less conflictive situations.

One of our main aims in writing the book and recording of the 31 television programs together, was to teach Argentinian society, within which a real sense of dialogue is dramatically absent, that a priest and a rabbi, despite their differences in the perception of faith, are able to build a language of mutual understanding and friendship.

All leadership needs a dialogical attitude. When this element is not one of the basics of a leader’s behavior, we are in the presence of a dictator. The dictator does not need dialogue. He or she considers that his or her word is the truth. Even the Almighty, the one who knows the truth completely because he is the truth, found himself with a need to maintain dialogical relationships with human beings. The main challenge for all religious leaders is to establish the subject of real, genuine dialogue as the first and most vital point in their agendas, because the future of humankind depends on it.

Rabbi Abraham Skorka is rector of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, the rabbi of the Jewish community Benei Tikva, professor of biblical and rabbinic literature at the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano and honorary professor of Hebrew Law at the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires. Rabbi Skorka graduated from the Seminario Rabinio Latinamericano in 1973 with ordination as a rabbi and also received the degree of Doctor (HC) from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. In 1979 he also earned his doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires. In 2010 the Universidad Católica Argentina awarded him a doctorate honoris causa, marking the first time in Latin America that a Catholic university had given this title to a rabbi. With then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis), Rabbi Skorka held a series of interreligious conversations on topics such as God, fundamentalism, atheists, death, holocaust, homosexuality, and capitalism. They were published in 2010 in a book titled Sobre el Cielo y la Tierra (On Heaven and Earth). Most recently, Rabbi Skorka accompanied Pope Francis and Omar Abboud (a leader of Argentina’s Muslim community) to Jordan, the West bank, and Israel.

Endnotes

1. Rabbi Abraham Skorka, “Interreligious Dialogue and Leadership: Building Relationships as Persons,” lecture, 2014– 2015 Bannan Institute: Ignatian Leadership series, February 10, 2015, Santa Clara University. This essay is an excerpt from the lecture; a video of the full lecture is available online at: scu.edu/ic/publications/videos.cfm
2. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the Gospel, n. 247-248, available at w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazioneap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html.
3. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, n. 249.
4. Jorge Mario Bergoglio [Pope Francis] and Abraham Skorka, On Heaven and Earth (New York: Image/Random House, 2010).