To the Editor:

Since my book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History came out, it has been met by impassioned responses from every quarter, including the two major evangelical Christian magazines, World and Christianity Today. In each of those reviews there was no doubt where the reviewer himself stood. I wish I could say the same for Commentary’s critic.

Hillel Halkin’s review essay, “Jews for Jesus—and Vice Versa” [June], describes some questions raised by my book. But Mr. Halkin decides not to offer his own views about the book’s main topic: what Jews have believed about Jesus and the role of Christianity—its role, as I put it in a phrase Mr. Halkin finds unacceptable, from “God’s perspective.” In other words, how are Jews to understand the curious fact that there is another biblical religion hard at work trying to bring humanity closer to God, as we are supposed to be doing, as our own Torah instructs us? What does God mean to communicate to us by allowing this rival faith to flourish? In my book, I seek to answer these questions in the form of a two-thousand-year history of the Jewish-Christian debate about Jesus.

Mr. Halkin’s response is merely skeptical: “Yet even if I were such [an Orthodox Jewish] reader, arguments formulated in terms of God’s ‘purpose’ or ‘perspective’ would leave me, I suspect, uneasy.” Why uneasy? Because “such speculations, whatever their heuristic value for religious debate, are ultimately of limited persuasiveness.” So Mr. Halkin lets himself—and Jews as a whole—off the hook. Because some people may not be persuaded, none of us has to make the effort. Mr. Halkin also dismisses my book because he feels that neither conservative Christians nor Orthodox Jews nor secular Jews will, on the basis of my attempt to make sense of Christianity, be moved to join in a political alliance.

I had hoped that Mr. Halkin, a serious and thoughtful writer, would grant us a view of what he believes—about God, about Judaism, even about the role of the messiah. It is too easy to use politics or other practical concerns as an excuse not to do the thinking that God wants us Jews to do—the thinking that will bring us closer to Him. I assume that Mr. Halkin has done such thinking. Why does he not tell us what he has come up with?

One of the reasons I wrote my book is that I have often been struck by the complacency of modern Jewish culture. Whether religiously involved or not, Jews tend to be satisfied with the vaguest sorts of answers to the questions posed by religion, or with no answers at all. We bequeath this bland, content-free “Jewishness” to our children, who go out into the world and are confronted by religious cultures that actually mean something when they speak. Pity the bar-mitzvah boy who grows up and meets serious evangelical Christians who seek to introduce him to their faith. They have definite beliefs founded on a certain understanding of religious texts. In the encounter with their beliefs, our young Jew is intellectually disarmed, utterly defenseless. No wonder Jews wander off into foreign spiritual wildernesses in the numbers they do.

If my book makes just one young Jew contemplate the problem of what it means to anticipate the messianic future, I will consider my efforts to have been worthwhile.

David Klinghoffer

Mercer Island, Washington

 

Hillel Halkin writes:

David Klinghoffer challenges me to tell him and Commentary’s readers what I think is “God’s perspective” on the relations between Judaism and Christianity. I wish I could oblige. I wish I knew what God’s perspective was on anything. But I don’t, and Klinghoffer (who, I will repeat for the record, has written a serious and articulate book) will just have to take me as I am.

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