Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History

by Laura Bernstein, Ron Miller, Beatrice Bruteau (Foreword by)

Overview

How did a Jewish teacher, healer, sage and mystic become the vehicle for so much hatred and harm directed against his own people?

“Dialogue is demanding and difficult. It is often painful. It entails deep listening, letting others define themselves and being willing to confront and transform deep-rooted prejudices in ourselves. It requires the courage to re-envision absolutely everything we tend to cherish and protect, and to relinquish our entrenched vainglorious ego attachments, our inflated sense of ‘I, me and mine.’ This challenge to grow beyond tribalism, to approach others in a fair and reasonable way, is an essential step in our human evolution.”
—from the Invitation to the Reader

Judaism and Christianity have had a volatile relationship in their two-thousand-year history. Anger, rivalry, insensitivity, bloodshed and murder have marred the special connection these two Abrahamic faiths share. In the last several decades, scholars, activists, laypeople and clergy have attempted to expose and eliminate the struggles between Jews and Christians.

This collaborative effort brings together the voices of Christian scholar Ron Miller and Jewish scholar Laura Bernstein to further explore the roots of anti-Semitism in Christian faith and scripture. In a probing interfaith dialogue, Miller and Bernstein trace the Jewish-Christian schism to its very source in the first book of the New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew. Illuminating the often misunderstood context of Matthew’s gospel—a persecuted Christian minority writing some sixty years after Jesus’s death—this examination of a foundational Christian text discerns the ways in which the Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten and Jews and Judaism became Christianity’s foil. More important, it takes a renewed look at Matthew with contemporary retellings that present a new and better future of conciliation and compassion between the two faith traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594735332
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/04/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Laura Bernstein, a Jewish scholar, is active in interfaith ministry. She has published articles and essays on spiritual practice, led interfaith groups in sacred chant and meditation, and spent five years in rabbinical studies at the Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie, Illinois.

Ron Miller is the chair of the Religion Department at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he has taught for thirty years, and co-founder of Common Ground, an adult education group for interfaith religious study and dialogue since 1975. Miller is the author of many books and articles, including The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice, named one of Spirituality&Health's 50 Best Spiritual Books of the year; The Hidden Gospel of Matthew: Annotated&Explained and Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History (all SkyLight Paths). His website is www.ronmillersworld.org.

Dr. Beatrice Bruteau has pioneered the integrated study of science, mathematics, philosophy, and religion. She is the editor and author of many books, including Jesus Through Jewish Eyes and The Holy Thursday Revolution.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Dr. Beatrice Bruteau
"All Will Be Well," by Laura Bernstein
Introduction

1 What Is a Messiah?
2 A Miraculous Birth?
3 A Homicidal Jewish King
4 A Maverick Mentor
5 The Message and the Messenger
6 A Program for Jewish Renewal
7 A Master of Metaphor
8 Continuity and Discontinuity
9 Anger, Adultery, and Divorce
10 Opposing Evil without Emulating It
11 The Most Challenging Practice
12 The Lord's Prayer
13 True Treasure, True Vision, and True Worth
14 A Golden Rule and a Narrow Path
15 Teaching with Authority and Healing
16 Those Wonderful Romans!
17 Redeemer or Reminder?
18 Sin as Paralysis
19 The Wrong Sort of People
20 How New Is This Wine?
21 Good News?
22 Enemies at the Door
23 A Challenging Kind of Peace
24 Mixed Messages
25 Jeshu the Lawbreaker?
26 Those Terrible Pharisees!
27 Jews Seek Signs
28 What Makes Us Unclean?
29 Identity Issues
30 Jeshu the Rabble-Rouser?
31 Jews as Rotten Tenants
32 A Damning Diatribe
33 Christianity’s Greatest Lie
34 A Final Meal
35 The Unbearable Curse
36 Worse Than Liars

Invitation to the Reader
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

"Startling in its innovative approach … shatters the mold of most approaches to Gospel commentary. It imaginatively yokes together historical scholarship, literary freshness and commitment to interreligious dialogue—all with a spiritual energy that is unnervingly evocative for our turbulent times."
—Rev. Alan Race, editor in chief, Interreligious Insight: A Journal of Dialogue and Engagement

"Excellent and insightful … a fresh and dynamic model for Jewish-Christian collaboration. This book is going to open minds and, more important, change hearts."
—Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature: Selections Annotated & Explained

“Offers us sensitive reflections on key religious texts that have produced pain and separation in the past, and shows us a way through these texts to a more wholesome and productive encounter between the two faith communities. A welcome addition to the dialogue on Christian-Jewish relations.”
—John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, PhD, director, Catholic-Jewish Studies Program Catholic Theological Union, Chicago; president, International Council of Christians and Jews

From the Publisher