Learning Experience
DON COHEN
Special to the Jewish News
F
ew things divide people more than what they
have in common," Rabbi Marc Saperstein told
an audience of more than 300 Christian and
Muslim clergy as he began the first of two talks at
Temple Beth El's 63rd Glazer Institute on Judaism on
Feb. 11.
The institute, founded in
1942 by Beth-El's former Rabbi
B. Benedict Glazer, annually
hosts an interfaith audience to
learn with a top Jewish scholar.
Dr. Robert and Fayclare Blau
chaired this year's institute.
"Easy slogans about [Jews,
Christians and Muslims] being
`Children of Abraham need to
be flushed out with some of the
complexities of what that has
Rabbi Saperstein
meant in the historical experi-
ence," explained Rabbi
Saperstein. "If not, it doesn't take it very far."
He is a Reform rabbi, professor of modern Jewish
history and director of Judaic studies at George
Washington University in Washington, D.C.
According to Rabbi Saperstein, the three faiths are
both united and divided by sacred geography and
sacred scripture.
While all three faiths consider sites in Jerusalem to
be sacred, only Jews and Muslims revere the same site:
the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Noble
Sanctuary.
"Christianity renounced the holiness of Jerusalem
and challenged the idea of sacred geography," said
Rabbi Saperstein. "The Temple Mount was ignored
and [Christians] made it into a garbage dump to show
that Judaism was replaced," he said, adding that
Christians forbid Jews to live in Jerusalem for the same
reason.
In contrast, when the Caliph Omar, a Muslim, took
Jerusalem from the Christians in 638 CE, he ordered
the Temple Mount cleaned and allowed Jews to return
to the city. But he also built two holy mosques, appro-
priating the site for Islam.
And while Christianity's main interest in the
Hebrew scripture was to prove that Jesus was the
prophesized messiah, Islam again took what was holy
to the Jews as their own.
"Muslims would not accept that their religion was a
latecomer on the religious scene and Muslim thinkers
asserted that Islam was the true religion from which
Judaism and Christianity broke off," Rabbi Saperstein
said. "Muslims said Abraham was a Muslim, not a Jew
or Christian. Here was a way of trumping both faiths."
"Each faith claims to be the original religion of
Abraham," he said. "Jews say Abraham was the first
Jew, Christians say Abraham was the pro-
typical Christian [because of his emphasis
on righteousness rather than law] and
Islam claims he was the first Muslim. This
identity has strongly contributed to rivalry
and competition."
But if you keep these differences in
mind, he believes, the character of
Abraham can help relations between the
three faiths.
"Abraham the monotheist, Abraham the
iconoclast, Abraham whose faith was so
strong he left his home and was willing to
offer as a sacrifice what was most dear ...
Abraham who welcomed the total stranger,
Abraham who challenged God about
Sodom, and that Isaac and Ishmael come
together to bury Abraham" all provide a
basis for understanding and cooperation,"
the rabbi said.
"I never understood why [Christians
used Hebrew scripture] as a predictor," said
Charles Hocking, a member of the
Dixboro United Methodist Church, outside
Ann Arbor. "But when he said what we call the
Old Testament the Jews consider laws and histo-
ry, it clarified my beliefs a lot. I have a friend
who tells me the King James version [of the
Bible] is literal, but it's all too perfect. It's a mat-
ter of who does the translation."
Pho tos by Don Cohen
Glazer Institute draws clergy to understanding.
C
Turning To The Holocaust
Openinglis second talk, Rabbi Saperstein
asked, "Was Auschwitz the culmination of the
teaching of contempt, or was it a radical break
from the past?" Saying that many believe that
Christianity is ultimately responsible for the
Holocaust, he argued that it was not.
"There is no evidence that any Christian
leader endorsed the Nazis," said Rabbi
Saperstein. "Some said that Christians had no
right to kill Jews, and [the Nazis would] bring the
divine punishment upon Germany ... Christians didn't
believe they were acting out their religious faith when
they machine-gunned people.
"Christianity has no doctrinal basis for distinguish-
ing between someone who converted to Judaism and
someone born to it," he said. "The intellectual origins
of Nazism came not from Christendom but from
pseudo-scientific philosophies of the 19th and early
20th century."
Likewise, while Rabbi Saperstein made it clear that
the Nazis believed "Jews needed to be reduced to con-
ditions that showed their subservience to the Christian
Charles Hocking and
Pastor John Clair Ferris
of Dixboro United
Methodist Church have
been attending the
Glazer Institute since
1977.
faith," he was equally confident that "the Nazi policy
of genocide had no precedent in Christianity.
Authoritarian Christian thinkers never conceived of, or
produced, an extermination."
"I really felt exonerated," said Pastor John Clair
Ferris of Dixboro United Methodist Church. "I had a
gut feeling that this might be some kind of guilt trip,"
but was pleased that "we've differentiated between clas-
sic Christian teachings and the perversion of logic that
the Nazis used."
Eva Asberry of the Carter Metropolitan CME
Church in Detroit said, "It helped me that we were
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