David Novak Jews Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

The relation between Judaism, Zionism, and Messianism is one that is often hard for Jews to get straight. Needless to say, it is even harder for non-Jews.

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

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.

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.

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.

For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.

Historically, Jews only accept converts rather than actively seeking them.

Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us.

Jews have not only become equal citizens in Western democracies, they have become leading citizens. And, of course, the reestablishment of the State of Israel has given Jews a political presence in the world they have not had since biblical times.

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

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.

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 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.

The shortcoming of purely political discourse between Christians and Jews arises from the fact that it is largely built upon the perception of a common enemy.

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

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.

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

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.

The common moral praxis of Jews and Christians is most definitely theologically informed by the doctrine we share in common: The human person, male and female, is created in the image of God.