It is in the ideal dimension of secular society that we have to find room for the ethical core of the religions of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This does not mean that we assume the existence of a unitary, easily defined and identified core of ethical principles. In each tradition, there is likely to be a spectrum of interpretations of its ethical substance. But every religious community possesses an obligation to contribute to the moral-spiritual elan of the nation as a whole, as well as to mold the character of its citizens.
The attempt of the New York Board of Regents to formulate a prayer, expressing the common core of American religions, was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. It is not for the agencies of government to fix the outlines of the common core. Its meaning may be conveyed only indirectly, by teaching about the religions of the community, for instance. There is need in this area for experimentation and for the spirit of accommodation, since the alternative of a total “wall of separation” is unthinkable. It would drive both the Church and the Synagogue to the catacombs.
The religions of the Judeo-Christian tradition nurture a common vision of perfection for the individual and for society, but they articulate this vision in diverse ways. Within the context of a democratic society, they have a twofold obligation: to maintain the distinctiveness of their own heritage and to sensitize their people to the appreciation of other traditions. The first obligation has been generally recognized in our contemporary society. It is axiomatic for every religious community to seek to perpetuate its heritage in its own way. But the second duty is equally important. We have to teach our young to understand and to revere the religious ideas and the symbolic panoply of the faiths of our neighbors. In the past, we have acted as if diverse religions were antagonistic to each other as a matter of course. The differences are of course real, and they must not be blurred. But, there is also the common heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Holy Scriptures, and the grand evolution of the culture of the West. There is also the common task to combat the universal evils of “extremism” in spiritual life-fanaticism at one end, nihilism at the other.
Through our instruments of religious education we have now begun to guard against the building up of “negative stereotypes” of other faiths. A sincere effort is being made to refrain from identifying Jews as “deicides,” to keep from stigmatizing Catholics as idolators, to guard against the misrepresentation of diverse Protestant groups. While this effort is only in its initial stages, we should look ahead to the positive task of teaching our followers to appreciate the depth and grandeur of other faiths. Does one religious group have the right, or even the duty, to seek converts from other groups? From the standpoint of Judaism, every religious community can find salvation by nurturing the core of religious idealism, “the Seven Commands of Noah.” There is no need for conversion, except in the case of intermarriage. We recall the words of Micah, “Let each people walk in the name of its God, and we shall walk in the Name of the Lord, our God.”30
Missionary propaganda can be offensive, even though it be motivated by a self-sacrificing idealism. We must revere the people of other faiths and admit the finitude of our own knowledge about the Infinite. In a democratic society, all religious groups should maintain an attitude of openness to each other. They can only profit by learning from one another and by laboring together for the needs of the community. It is only the “men of little faith” who can have any reason to fear any untoward consequences resulting from the interreligious dialogues that are becoming a permanent fixture in our society.
COMPARISON OF JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS
It is extremely difficult to establish a fair basis for the comparison of Jewish and Christian philosophies of ethics. On the one hand, when the two traditions are taken as historic wholes, it is easy to see that the colors which are bright and strong in one faith are mixed and muted in the other. On the other hand, both traditions were deeply transmuted by the modern spirit. The patina of modernism overlies the two faiths, obscuring the differences of shade and nuance. Furthermore, the Jewish as well as the Christian traditions are now so deeply divided, in doctrine and in practice, that a philosophy of life purporting to be Jewish or Christian is more likely to reflect the personal opinion of the author and the temper of his time, than it is to represent the historical tradition.
Be it noted that the realm of ethics was not a battleground in the ancient and medieval disputations between Jews and Christians. The issue was the Messiahship of Jesus, the nature of the Promise in the Bible and the character of God—all else was incidental. Those Jews who accepted the Christian interpretation of the Messianic verses in the Bible had no difficulty in accepting the ethical injunctions of Jesus; the self-sacrificing pietists, Essenic, Pharisaic, or Hellenistic, who actually lived by the ethical precepts of Jesus, remained part of the Jewish community if they did not accept the dogma of his being an incarnation of God’s Word.
To abstract an ethical issue out of the eschatological context of the first century is hardly instructive, though both Jewish and Christian authors have done so with gusto. On the Christian side, writers have asserted that Jewish ethics were at worst legalistic, at best a rigid insistence on the principle of justice, while Christian ethics were based on love. In this juxtaposition, the specific atmosphere of Jesus’ life and teaching was forgotten. As Albert Schweitzer pointed out, the ethics of primitive Christianity was “interim-ethik,” the thought and action of a community that expects daily the end of the world. Hence, their proto-communism, their total unconcern with the normal tasks of society. With the records of the Qumran sect available to us, we see how a similarly minded community, living in anticipation of Messianic redemption, retreated from the world and gave itself up completely to the service of the Lord.
We need hardly add that the Jewish tradition fostered the virtues of love, compassion, and faith as well as those of obedience to law, justice, and reasonableness. Jewish ethics have been presented as the field of tension between the Way and the Vision; the philosophic counsels of balance, fitness, and harmony, constituting the pattern of the Law at one pole, and the religious passion for supreme self-giving at the other. Leo Baeck, writing from the Jewish viewpoint, described the Christian ethic as romantic, the Jewish as classical. This distinction is justified only if we narrowly restrict our view of Christianity to certain specified periods. Thus, in the time of Jesus and in the Apostolic period, we see a “threshold-mentality,” the mood of a people living on the verge of the End, giving all for love. Such moods were recreated at various times—by the “Montanists” in the second century, the Franciscan spiritualists, the Anabaptists at the time of the Reformation, the English Radicals of the seventeenth century. In terms of our analysis, we should say that in those periods the tension between the Way and the Vision was broken, with the Vision of the End becoming all in all.
But the Christians did not normally emulate the Montanists, who, we are told, would crowd into the Roman governor’s chamber, pleading to be allowed to die. Paul’s rejection of the Law and Jesus’ injunction, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” did not prevent the pious Emperor Justinian from promulgating his code.
Actually, Christianity reestablished the tension between the Way and the Vision when it set out to embrace the philosophic heritage of the Greeks and the legal principles of Roman Law. Only at rare intervals did the consuming fire of romanticism burst asunder the restraints of reason and law. To be sure, in Catholic Christianity, it would appear that two ethical codes are offered—one for the “religious,” the other for secular society. Yet, Catholics would maintain that there is no break between the two classes, only a state of mutual challenge. For monks and nuns retreat from the world only in order to serve it better.
The idealization of celibacy is far more prevalent in Christianity than in Judaism. But it would be wrong in our day to impute to Christians, Catholic or Protestant, the view of St. Paul, that “it is better to marry than to burn.” Marriage is a holy state of life; sanctity embraces the whole of man, not merely his soul.
In general, Christians and Jews come together closest in the realm of ethics. The rigidities of law and dogma in both camps yield progressively to the softening effects of the historic perspective that is common to both of