A Dialogue That Excludes Most Jews Is Not a Dialogue

The Church of England’s General Synod voted this month to commend Kairos Palestine II to its congregations for study. To a lot of people, that will have looked like a decent thing, a church agreeing to listen to other Christians who are suffering. It is a serious mistake.

I have spent much time in the rooms where Jews and Christians actually talk to one another. The International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), the umbrella organization representing world Jewry, which I chair, is the body that has carried on that formal conversation for more than fifty years, with the Vatican and with other international Christian bodies. That is the background against which I read this document, and it is why the document alarms me as much as it does.

Let me be clear about where I stand on the substance. Its labeling of Israel as a colonial and apartheid state, its charge of genocide, its call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, its rejection of the very definition of antisemitism our community relies on — I reject all of it, and I could fill this column arguing each of them. But the merits are not what I want to press here, and they are not the only thing that should trouble a church deciding whether to teach this text.

One line in Kairos II ought to give any church pause. It urges Christians to boycott dialogue with “Zionist voices.” Consider what that means. Most Jews alive today, whatever they make of any particular Israeli government and however loudly they argue about it among themselves, feel some tie to Israel and to Jewish peoplehood. That tie is not a policy you pick up on Monday and drop on Thursday. It runs through our prayer book, our calendar, our family stories, and the memory of where we come from. A call to boycott “Zionist” partners is, in plain terms, a call to boycott the great majority of Jews as we really are, while offering a place at the table for the few willing to disown that part of themselves.

Whatever you want to call that, it is not dialogue. Dialogue means taking your partner as they understand themselves. Kairos II will deal with us only once we have agreed to become a different kind of Jew; one that it finds acceptable. That is not an invitation. It is a list of conditions for our readmission to a conversation we helped to build and in which we are essential participants.

And it is the very demand that Christians spent two generations trying to put down. The change that began with Nostra Aetate in 1965 was, at bottom, the church deciding to stop telling Jews what real Judaism is, and to stop handing us back a tidied-up version of our own faith. Kairos II reverts to that old condescension. It informs us, in a confident theological voice, that authentic Judaism is one thing and our attachment to land and peoplehood is a corruption of it. Jews have heard that voice before, in Christian Europe, and we know what it has cost us.

The document’s defenders have their answer ready. They are careful, they say, to separate Judaism and Jews, whom they respect, from Zionism, a politics they reject. Attacking a political movement, they say, is not the same as defining someone’s religion. For most Jews, no such clean distinction exists. A conversation that will include us only after it has subtracted our peoplehood does not include us at all. It is deciding which Jews are kosher and calling that decision respect.

I am not asking Christians to be silent about a conflict that grieves all of us, or to look away from the hardship of Palestinian Christians, which is real and which my own tradition will not let me ignore. And the vote, I know, has already been taken. So let me ask for something that is still within reach. If there is no appetite to reconsider commending this text, then do not let Kairos II stand alone. Place beside it, in the same body of material you commend to your congregations, the voices of those it writes out of the room — this response, and others drawn from the lived experience of Jews and Israelis. Study worthy of the name means hearing more than one side. A course built on a single document that erases a whole people is not study; it is the teaching of one narrative as though it were the whole story.

The dialogue between our communities was slow and hard to build, and it is still unfinished. Do not teach a new generation to enter it through a document that asks the Jewish people to disappear before it will speak to us. Commend our voice alongside it, and let your congregations weigh both.