David Novak Quotes
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When modern political Zionism emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, most Orthodox Jews opposed it.
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Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
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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.
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It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.
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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.
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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.
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During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
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The slogan 'Never Again!' that emerged after the Holocaust implies that the Holocaust has a universal moral meaning, which, if properly learned, can provide at least a theoretical prophylactic against its repetition against anyone.
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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.
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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.
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I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
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Even when God chose Israel, he did not create the people of Israel as he created its human members, as natural beings. Instead, God formed the people of Israel from individual human beings already living in the natural world, calling them into a new historical identity.
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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.
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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.
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At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
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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.
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The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.
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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.
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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.
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Roots can live without branches, although truncated; branches cannot live without roots.