Inside the Tunnel of Dialogue
Two encounters in Germany reveal how fragile the foundation of understanding remains — and how entrenched the blindness to Jewish reality still is.
The disappointment is not new. But it sharpens. Two recent conversations — one with a Christian theologian, the other with a German journalist — have once again brought into focus how shaky the foundation of our dialogues remains. Where I hope for openness, I encounter hardened certainties. Where I seek understanding, I find a blindness toward Jewish experience that has long since become structural.
- The Theologian
For many years, I have been a keynote speaker at an interfaith conference in Germany — a space for encounter, theological exchange, and the pursuit of mutual understanding.
The organizer, a Christian theologian with considerable knowledge and long-standing collaboration with me, was displeased about my fee. That alone would not have been noteworthy.
But during a committee meeting, he said — audibly and without hesitation — to the person next to him:
“You see how the Jews are always about money…?”
Not Gabriel is too expensive. The Jew is. The archetype. The old narrative.
This is especially painful coming from someone who has long drawn deeply from the table of Jewish wisdom — not least through my books and lectures. His own theological work rests heavily on Jewish mysticism, which he adapts into a Christian spiritual framework. That, in principle, is legitimate.
The next morning at breakfast, I confronted him. He replied:
“Yes, that was a dumb thing to say. But it’s not antisemitism. What I said about Jews and money — it’s based on experience.”
That was the end of our breakfast.
- The Journalist
The following day, I met a journalist friend in a Berlin café. We spoke about a legal scandal in Israel: The IDF’s chief prosecutor had secretly leaked prison video footage to the press, allegedly showing soldiers mistreating a Hamas terrorist.
The case is under judicial review — the soldiers’ culpability is unclear, the video’s authenticity disputed, the leak illegal. To make matters worse, the prosecutor misled Israel’s Supreme Court about her actions.
My journalist friend, however, praised her as a courageous whistleblower. For him, press freedom overrides everything. Israel, he claimed, is following the path of Poland or Russia — a state undermining its judiciary and silencing dissent. He even likened Israel’s behavior to the Catholic Church’s decades-long concealment of abuse.
I responded that press freedom is indeed essential — but Israel is neither Poland nor the Catholic Church.
Israel is a unique case.
As the Jewish people have been for two thousand years.
A Unique Case — Born of History, Not Self-Pity
Theodor Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state was born from the Dreyfus Affair — a French judicial scandal in which courts, aided by the press, wrongly convicted a Jewish officer and fueled public antisemitism. Herzl understood: Even in democratic societies, Jews are not safe.
The founding of the State of Israel was meant to change that. But even our own state cannot shield Jews from hatred, defamation, or violence. Antisemitism simply evolves — as it always has.
Double standards. Demonization. Discrimination.
The same old tools, now used against the Jewish state. Israel has become the Jew among the nations.
Once it was churches and courts that legitimized Jew-hatred. Today it is international organizations, political tribunals, activist journalists, and powerful media outlets. The BBC, Al Jazeera, and even parts of the Western press often amplify narratives that demonize Israel.
What Remains: Survival
Israel makes mistakes in its war in Gaza. But it does not act perversely like church abusers, not drunk on power like Trump, not tyrannically like Putin.
Israeli soldiers fight to survive. Parents send their children into war, knowing they may die — or worse, be abducted and tortured.
Every Israeli mother is a Sarah. Every Jewish father is an Abraham, laying their Isaac on the altar — hoping the child will return alive from Mount Moriah.
Who reports on Jewish teenagers murdered while hiking in the Judean desert?
Who speaks of girls afraid to walk near the roadside, fearing they’ll be pulled into a car and taken to Gaza?
Instead, headlines focus on settlers interfering with the Palestinian olive harvest.
Are uprooted olive trees more newsworthy than murdered children?
Dialogue in the Shadows
This, I said to my journalist friend, was my point:
Israel must defend itself not only militarily, but also in the media — against a propaganda war often fought through journalistic channels. In such extreme cases, limited restrictions on press freedom are not censorship. They are acts of self-preservation.
My friend was outraged. He said there’s no evidence of media bias. The BBC is neutral; any distortions are isolated incidents. Again, he repeated: Israel is on the path to dictatorship — just like Poland.
And Now?
Are the theologian and the journalist alike?
No. The theologian is an antisemite. The journalist is not.
And yet: Both are blind to the reality of Jewish existence. Both have stopped listening. Both trust their “experience” — and shut themselves off from the voices of those affected.
It is heartbreaking.
But this is not a farewell to dialogue. Not a parting letter to my Christian and journalistic friends, with whom I share much.
I find solace in those — Jews, Christians, Muslims — who are willing to see the uniqueness of Jewish history and understand the meaning of the Jewish state.
To them, I offer my gratitude and my affection.
Even in the darkness of the tunnel we are passing through.
Because, far away yet faintly visible, I believe I see the first sparks of light.
