David Novak

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Because Judaism and Christianity are both covenantal religions, the relationship of the individual Jew or Christian to God is always within covenanted community.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms.”

“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.”

“Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.”

“All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”