Top 45 David Novak Quotes

A fully positive relationship between Christians and Jews is one that would elide all differences.

The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition.

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern with Jews and Judaism.

The common moral praxis of Jews and Christians is most definitely theologically informed by the doctrine we share in common: The human person, male and female, is created in the image of God.

We Jews who willingly and happily confirm our covenantal status and its attendant rights and duties must take the question of mission seriously: either to accept it or reject it knowingly and with conviction.

One cannot accept Christ and still be part of the normative Jewish community; one cannot live by Torah and still be part of the Church.

As a traditional Jew, I have benefited personally from the hospitality of Chabad Hasidim on many occasions, and I marvel at how many Jews Chabad has brought back to their primordial home.

All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community’s revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation.

Historically, Jews only accept converts rather than actively seeking them.

The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now.

The slogan ‘Never Again!’ that emerged after the Holocaust implies that the Holocaust has a universal moral meaning, which, if properly learned, can provide at least a theoretical prophylactic against its repetition against anyone.

Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.

There is no question that Israelis – indeed, all concerned Jews – have to continue to work out a Jewish public philosophy that truly justifies a Jewish state in the land of Israel.

The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.

When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.

The religious doctrine of traditional Judaism entails the acceptance of the nationhood of the Jewish people and the everlasting sanctity of the Land of Israel for them.

In deciding among theological views, one should be something of a consequentialist: the choice of one theological position over another should be, if not actually determined, at least heavily conditioned by the fact that it implies a better ethical outcome than the alternatives.

Many of us, both Jews and Christians, want the public square to be pluralistic, which is neither partisan nor naked.

Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us.

The community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.

Every individual is a person necessarily imbedded in a range of multiple relations, and therefore, no one is really independent in anything but a relative sense; no one is truly autonomous.

Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one’s own volition.

Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

God chose us to live both in body and in soul, but the body functions for the sake of the soul more than the soul functions for the body.

During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.

Christians and Jews alike are the new exiles of the contemporary world, struggling with how to sing the Lord‘s song in a strange land.

Theological reflection takes place within history, but the history within which it takes place is an ongoing, open-ended process.

Even when God chose Israel, he did not create the people of Israel as he created its human members, as natural beings. Instead, God formed the people of Israel from individual human beings already living in the natural world, calling them into a new historical identity.

The relationship between God and his people was always the one having absolute primacy, the one that had basically to determine all human relationships, whether those within the covenanted community itself or those between the covenanted community and the outside world.

It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.

The Vatican‘s recognition of the State of Israel in 1997 could not have occurred without John Paul‘s leadership.

The shortcoming of purely political discourse between Christians and Jews arises from the fact that it is largely built upon the perception of a common enemy.

The relation between Judaism, Zionism, and Messianism is one that is often hard for Jews to get straight. Needless to say, it is even harder for non-Jews.

Christianity and Judaism are united above all in their common affirmation and implementation of the moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible, or ‘Old Testament,’ and the traditions of interpretation of that teaching.

It has always been inevitable that, living as a small minority among a Christian majority, some Jews would convert to Christianity.

At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.

A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt.

Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone.

I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one’s sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people.

If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.

In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language.