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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.
David Novak -
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.
David Novak
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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.
David Novak -
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.
David Novak -
Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone.
David Novak -
Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
David Novak -
Although most Christian churches advocate some sort of mission to non-Christians, no Jewish group advocates a mission to non-Jews. Proselytization seems to be foreign to Judaism.
David Novak -
The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
David Novak
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Every individual is a person necessarily imbedded in a range of multiple relations, and therefore, no one is really independent in anything but a relative sense; no one is truly autonomous.
David Novak -
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.
David Novak -
All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community's revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation.
David Novak -
I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
David Novak -
The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.
David Novak -
To view any individual as being independent of relationality is like viewing a point outside of a line, a line outside of a figure, a figure outside of a body.
David Novak
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During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
David Novak -
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.
David Novak -
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
David Novak -
A fully positive relationship between Christians and Jews is one that would elide all differences.
David Novak -
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.
David Novak -
The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition.
David Novak
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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.
David Novak -
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.
David Novak -
At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
David Novak -
The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.
David Novak