On a blackboard below a bronze crucifix, Rabbi Laurence Edwards wrote out some basic vocabulary words and then tried to help the class pronounce them: kosher, shofar, Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah.
“ROW-SHA-shun-uh,” tried one of the freshman theology students at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette, her body twisting with each syllable as she sounded her way–mostly successfully–through the unfamiliar term.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sundown Friday. That opens the high holiday season, which continues through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Oct. 9.
This is a fundamental fact of Jewish life, but it was brand new this week to some of the Regina Dominican students, who are part of a growing program to teach Catholic and Jewish youths more about one another’s faiths.
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As the international Catholic-Jewish dialogue endures what seems an ever-accelerating cycle of breakthroughs and setbacks–the latest, a Vatican document on the means of salvation that some Jewish leaders took as an affront–conversation at the local level continues with hardly a hitch.
Next month leaders of four Jewish organizations and the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, including Cardinal Francis George, will make a journey together to Israel and Palestine.
Meanwhile, the opening of the new school year marked the seventh anniversary of the Catholic/Jewish Education Enrichment Program, a national effort to bring Jewish educators into Catholic classrooms and vice versa.
Sponsored here by the local office of the American Jewish Committee and the Archdiocese of Chicago, the program has not only helped schoolchildren become acquainted with faiths that are new to them, but also helped adults keep the winding path of reconciliation in perspective.
“You can get on this roller coaster and get distracted,” said Sister Mary Ellen Coombe of the archdiocese’s office for interreligious affairs, who teaches in area Hebrew schools through the program. “Sometimes it’s very good to step back into this ordinary world where people aren’t aware of every twist and turn. … To even come and say to the grown-up dialoguers, `Look, our young people are learning about one another’s faith’–we wouldn’t even have thought of that 30 years ago.”
Rabbi Edwards said almost the same thing Wednesday to another class of Catholic students, this time at Resurrection High School on the city’s Northwest Side.
“For much of our history together there has been hostility; it’s often been lethal,” Edwards told 30 freshmen in a world religions class. “However, in recent times things have changed between Christians and Jews in very important ways. The very fact that a rabbi has been invited to teach at your Catholic high school is one sign. Fifty years ago this would not have happened.”
Some students said they had never had an in-depth conversation about Judaism until they spoke with the rabbi Wednesday. Resurrection High School freshman Sara Sorrentino, 15, began by asking Edwards about the Jewish conception of the Messiah.
“A lot of us don’t think much about other religions, being in a Catholic school and all. Now I want to know more. I want to know why they don’t think Jesus is the savior, and if they think Jesus was born to Mary,” she said.
Edwards said such questions are a call that Jews cannot ignore.
“There is a hand that is being extended by many Christians,” he said. “It’s not a fist. It’s not proselytizing. It’s an attempt to understand the Jewish people and deepen the conversation. And I think we have an obligation, especially at Rosh Hashanah, to engage in it.”
That is a considerably different tone than was set last week in Rome, where the city’s chief rabbi called off a Jewish-Catholic celebration of the Roman Catholic Jubilee year.
The event Tuesday was shelved in part as a reaction to the release earlier this month of the Vatican document Dominus Jesus. The document, which restated traditional teachings that the Roman Catholic Church offers the full means to salvation and that other religions can be “gravely deficient” by comparison, came as a blow to many Protestant churches as well as to Jewish groups involved in interfaith dialogue.
A separate Vatican department distanced itself from that document last weekend when the church’s chief of dialogue, Cardinal Edward Cassidy, said he would have presented it in a way more palatable to an ecumenical and interfaith audience.
Catholic-Jewish relations seemed to have reached a new high in March when Pope John Paul II visited Yad Vashem and the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. But the recent flap has cast a shadow, especially coming after a controversial decision to canonize Edith Stein, a nun and former Jew who died at Auschwitz, and efforts to beatify Popes Pius IX and Pius XII, figures criticized by Jewish leaders.
Locally, reactions to this volley of events have been cautious.
“In some ways it depends on a person’s preconceptions,” said Michael Kotzin of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, a member of the delegation traveling from Chicago to Israel next month. “The problematic issues are more playing out on an international level. At the local level we are moving ahead steadily.”
“I would say it is a little `wait and see,'” said Rev. John Palikowski, another delegate and one of the Catholic Church’s international leaders in Jewish-Catholic dialogue. “I haven’t heard anyone deeply involved in the dialogue say, `This is it. I’m done.’ … But there is a certain fatigue born of uncertainty.”
If such controversies present a crisis at the global level and a concern in local dialogue, they all but disappear when it comes down to the students.
“These kids are in a state of wonder about other faiths,” said Nancy McCabe, principal of Regina Dominican High School. “I don’t think they bring along their parents’ tensions, if there are any. I think they are very open to interfaith connections.”
At North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, where Coombe will help teach an after-school comparative religion course, some students listed Christian weddings and Christmas carols as their only exposure to the faith.
“There’s so much we don’t know,” said Julie Adler, 15, a sophomore at New Trier High School who met Coombe at an orientation meeting Wednesday. “It’s just not something you talk about with your Christian friends. But with a nun in class, I think things will be much different, much more open.”
On both sides, educators said the open minds of children give them a better chance for building understanding.
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At Regina Dominican on Tuesday, Edwards sounded a ram’s horn known as a shofar in front of a class of 27 freshmen dressed in plaid skirts and white blouses.
“The shofar is our call to action on Rosh Hashanah. It means wake up, pay attention, do better,” the rabbi explained, holding the horn out in front of him. “Who wants to try?”