David Novak

“In a very real sense, Jews have to believe that Christians have missed the point about how to wait for the end, and Christians have to believe something quite similar about the Jews.”

“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.”

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

“A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists.”

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

“The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.”

“Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair.”

“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.”

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

“It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.”

“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.”

“Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral.”

“Cultural synthesis is how a compromise between various opinions is worked out. But truth does not change, and truth is not arrived at by some sort of compromise.”

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

“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.”

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

“To view any individual as being independent of relationality is like viewing a point outside of a line, a line outside of a figure, a figure outside of a body.”

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

“Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.”

“The Jewish tradition presents itself as the greatest revelation of God's truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves 'the chosen people.' It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah.”