{"id":75,"date":"2009-05-07T15:22:04","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T15:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/05\/why-im-christian-friendly.html"},"modified":"2009-05-07T15:22:04","modified_gmt":"2009-05-07T15:22:04","slug":"why-im-christian-friendly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/05\/why-im-christian-friendly.html","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m “Christian-Friendly”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jews are funny. Responding to my post on a certain strain even in Orthodox Judaism that resists accepting the implications of our being in exile<\/a>, galut<\/span>, a reader shot back that I must be some kind of Uncle Tom since I, a supposed Orthodox Jew, am associated with the “Christian-friendly” Discovery Institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I get this accusation all the time. My Wikipedia entry<\/a>, for example, cites as definitive the weighty opinion of one Larry Yudelson who “charges that Klinghoffer is paid to promote his ideas by his employer, the Discovery Institute” — paid by his employer, oh the scandal! — which the said Yudelson in turn “charges” with promoting a viewpoint that’s “Christian-friendly.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
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As one Jewish blogger mildly pondered, “David Klinghoffer: Self-hating Jew, or Hitler sympathizer?<\/a>“<\/div>\n
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I guess in the sense that intelligent design creates a space for theistic belief, whether Christian or Jewish, whereas Darwinism makes such belief really difficult to justify, there’s some truth in that. The Big Bang also has theistic implications. That’s why some scientists initially resisted it too, for giving comfort to that phantom menace, “creationists.” But sober minds know that a scientific idea, including Darwinism, needs to be judged independently<\/a> of its implications. Of course, if those implications are destructive<\/a>, that’s a fine reason to take a second look at the substance of the idea.<\/div>\n
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That’s all to one side. I speak only for myself here, not for the Discovery Institute, which has bigger fish to fry. But yes, I’m “Christian-friendly.” Why on earth would I not be? We don’t live in Europe — medieval, mid-20th century, or modern — where religious, ideological, and secular-fed anti-Semitism was and is rife. We live in America, the most philo-Semitic country in history and arguably the most passionately Christian in the world today.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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But even medieval Europe may get an unfairly simplistic rap. That was one conclusion I drew in a Forward<\/span> column<\/a>\u00a0some years back on the heritage of Torah-thought bequeathed to us by a French rabbinic sage, the Meiri.<\/div>\n
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Excerpt:<\/div>\n
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Jews and Christians alike need a way of understanding what it means to be tolerant of other religions and cultures in a way that does no violence to the integrity of our own faiths, or to common sense.<\/p>\n

Happily, Jewish history provides a solution to the problem. Let me introduce the fascinating medieval figure of Rabbi Menachem Ha-Meiri, who lived in Provence, in southern France, and died around 1315. Among Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers he went further than any ever had done before in articulating a rationale for religious tolerance. Best known for his Talmud commentary,\u00a0Beit ha’Becheirah<\/span>, Ha-Meiri set forth criteria for determining the characteristics of those cultures that deserve admiration and acceptance. He distinguished between “nations restricted by the ways of religion” (ummot ha’gedurot b’darchey ha-datot<\/span>) and “nations not restricted by the ways of religion.”<\/p>\n

The former merit our warm regards however they might diverge theologically from a true conception of God and His ways (that is, from Judaism). Ha-Meiri’s dividing line was based not on religious dogma, in which area Christianity with its Trinity and incarnation falls short, compared to Islam with its rigorous monotheism.<\/p>\n

Rather, as Moshe Halbertal of Hebrew University has written in an essay on Ha-Meiri in\u00a0The Edah Journal<\/a><\/span>, the difference is “between nations possessed of law and lawless nations, i.e. between barbarism and civilization.” There is even a certain sense in which such nations — again despite their errors in dogma — are to be considered under the designation of “Israel.”<\/p>\n

Of course, this doesn’t mean we can intermarry with them or breach other walls that God, wishing to set us apart for special responsibilities in the world, established to keep Jews separate from other peoples. Even with such limitations in mind, Ha-Meiri’s way of thinking still sounds radical from a medieval rabbinic sage.<\/p>\n

Yet traditional scholars today accept him as a standard interpreter of Judaism, because he constructed his ideology of tolerance on a sound Torah basis. The talmudic rabbis had formulated a distinction between, on the one hand, religious laws and other truths that can be known only through revelation and, on the other hand, those that can be discovered through our own powers of reason. The latter could form the basis of non-Jewish religions that promote the values of civilization, lifting gentiles to the heights of human potential — and “this would be entirely sufficient for them, according to the nature of their religions.”<\/p>\n

Looking around himself at the Christians of Provence, he saw a nation “restricted by the ways of religion,” a worldview “entirely sufficient for them.” Utterly to be condemned, however, were those peoples not possessing a religion, or possessing a religion that promoted barbarism. If he were alive today, we can guess what he might think of America, with a majority of Christian believers, a country that spends her own money and blood around the world promoting civilized values. And we can guess what we would think of what’s become of his own native land, France, where secularism is the state orthodoxy and laws are formulated to outlaw the display, in public schools, of religious garments such as Islamic headscarves and Jewish skullcaps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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That’s right, a key rabbinic interpreter of the Talmud was “Christian-friendly” in 14th-century France. Yet it’s somehow disloyal to Judaism to think similarly in 21st-century America? Oh please.<\/div>\n
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Read\u00a0the rest of my column<\/a>\u00a0and let me know what you think.<\/div>\n
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Jews are funny. Responding to my post on a certain strain even in Orthodox Judaism that resists accepting the implications of our being in exile, galut, a reader shot back that I must be some kind of Uncle Tom since I, a supposed Orthodox Jew, am associated with the “Christian-friendly” Discovery Institute.\u00a0 I get this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-faiths"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy I'm "Christian-Friendly" - Kingdom of Priests<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/05\/why-im-christian-friendly.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why I'm "Christian-Friendly" - Kingdom of Priests\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jews are funny. Responding to my post on a certain strain even in Orthodox Judaism that resists accepting the implications of our being in exile, galut, a reader shot back that I must be some kind of Uncle Tom since I, a supposed Orthodox Jew, am associated with the “Christian-friendly” Discovery Institute.\u00a0 I get this…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/05\/why-im-christian-friendly.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Kingdom of Priests\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-05-07T15:22:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Klinghoffer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Why I'm \"Christian-Friendly\" - Kingdom of Priests","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/05\/why-im-christian-friendly.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Why I'm \"Christian-Friendly\" - Kingdom of Priests","og_description":"Jews are funny. 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