Becoming Friends

Becoming Friends Ellen T. Charry (bio) Keywords Jewish-Christian encounter, friendship, Leonard Swidler, Dialogue Decalogue, Franz Rosenzweig, religious freedom I began engaging in interreligious dialogue as a very small child, and it has framed my entire life. Being deeply socialized into one religious tradition, while eager to grow from the wisdom of others, is the only outlook on religion that I have ever known. Yet, Leonard Swidler provided the academic framework that gave me the language through which to enact that conviction in an academically sophisticated environment. Reading, thinking, questioning, and probing multiple traditions challenged me and complicated my life considerably but made it far richer and perhaps more stimulating than what I later learned is the more usual tunnel-visioned approach of much theological scholarship that is content to remain within comfortable parameters. My entry into interfaith and interideological dialogue was through the painful Jewish-Christian encounter, fueled as it is by the contempt that sometimes spilled over into violence. This sad history made me skeptical of binary oppositions in general, that is, other polarized oppositions that resist resolution for the sake of preserving the identity, rectitude, and power of one community opposed to another. This stance did not lead me to either cultural relativism or indifference to fundamental differences among traditions, however. Although my commitment to dialogue did not lead me to back off from theological commitments, it did influence them. Value judgments must be made; there is right and wrong, and good and evil haunt us. Further, the refined wisdom of the ages protects us from having to reinvent the moral wheel in many instances. For Jews and Christians, the Decalogue is foundational for civil society, and Proverbs is an ever-present reminder of the requirements of excellent living. Even Descartes, though he vowed to doubt everything, held on to traditional morality, at least temporarily. At the same time, religious traditions should be prodded and pressed by other philosophical and moral traditions in order to retain healthy distance on themselves. Judicious self-examination is salutary for both individuals and traditions. My study of the world’s religious traditions did not flatten them out. On the contrary, each path leads to a different summit. While there are important resonances among various traditions, they pose different ultimate questions about the meaning and proper conduct of life, and they work out different answers accordingly; these are often worth being tempted by. Further, where philosophical traditions may ask similar questions—as, for example, what the good life is and how we shall attain it—they, too, offer still other answers. I have not found this pluralism distressing on the assumption that truth is univocal and can be ascertained by training the mind to scour sacred texts, hoping to squeeze their fruit for pure nectar. Rather, I still long to taste the wisdom of all the great traditions to see how it might help us better understand ourselves and enrich our deepest convictions. I take the antipathy between Judaism and Christianity, perhaps the oldest war of all, to be the stellar example of competing belief systems as a blood sport. Jews persecuted Christians early on, but when Jews lost political power to Christians, the [End Page 117] reverse became common and enduringly so. The problem, of course, is not limited to ethnic or sociological factors, although economic and political interests are central to the sorry history that these two traditions share. The theological stakes here have been high. If one tradition is right, true, and good, the other must be wrong, false, and bad and, if so, a threat to the true way. It must either be subordinated or in some renditions eliminated. Such combative postures began eroding in the second half of the twentieth century for a variety of reasons, and my current hope is that one result of that erosion will be the development of healthy self-criticism on both sides of various binary oppositions, including those who have been the victims of contempt by the other. One commandment of Swidler’s “Dialogue Decalogue” is that dialogue can advance only when the partners perceive themselves to be peers. It is now time for those who have held power to recognize

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