Anniversaries, like birthdays and jubilees, are great times for looking back. At my great-grandmother’s 92nd birthday party a few years ago we spent much time looking back. We talked about William Booth, the Suffragettes, the loss of her first husband in the Great War and life in the Welsh valleys as a young Salvationist officer in the Depression.
It is right that we do this reflection, this looking back — it is part of being human and celebrating where we have come from. This celebrating is an integral part of the core of Jewish and Christian faith, for in a few weeks the Jews will look back and celebrate Passover, recalling the Exodus from Egypt and God’s initiative, victory and grace, while Christians will look back and celebrate at Easter exactly the same at Calvary.
This week 70 years ago, in the middle of war, the Council of Christians and Jews was formed. It was a somewhat surprising time to start a national movement — a time of austerity, severe food rationing, bombing and fear of invasion. Leaders of the Church of England, the Roman Catholics, the Chief Rabbi, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and prominent statesman brought together months of discussion and debate born of their reading of history and of the signs of the times as well as their personal anguish and finally composed a Constitution for a Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ). Centuries of separation were to be bridged by a practical grass-roots attempt at a new understanding. Soon the risky, pioneering business of bringing Jews and Christians together to explore commonalities and their shared humanity began. Since that time, huge advances have been made in Jewish-Christian relationship and dialogue; there has been a broad erosion of mistrust, deep friendships established and a mutual respect and new learning from one another about one another. Not that the journey has been either easy or comfortable. It has not been a journey for the faint hearted, for our beliefs about the other and about ourselves have been challenged and surprisingly changed.
Since then, what was unthinkable a century ago has happened. Vatican 2 brought Nostra Aetate to the Roman Catholic Church. The 1988 Lambeth Conference ushered in a new wave of thinking and relating to others of different faiths and, globally; just about all the main Christian denominations did the same. For the Jews, Dabru Emet was the early, gracious response to this new way of thinking and doing.
But anniversary celebrations, like jubilees, ought to embrace a looking forward as well. For the CCJ this means our engaging with the issues of the present and foreseeable future; bringing personal and corporate faith to inform and grapple with the moral, ethical and existential problems of our time. And there is no reason to believe that will be any less risky or need a less pioneering spirit than when we began in 1942. Our core focus today may not be Supercessionism but rather the commonalities that we share, like ethical values born of our mutual heritage. Today, 70 years on, we see it as essential that as Jews and Christians we move forward together, side by side, challenging present-day assumptions of the primacy of wealth and excess, or the zealous and insensitive secularism that would appear to ride roughshod over our deepest shared ethical values and aspirations; resisting the growing intolerance of expressions of faith and the intensifying trend of the cruel devaluing of the sanctity of human life, especially when it is at its most vulnerable — at its beginning in the womb and at its end in the deathbed.
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These were not the challenges of the 1940s when CCJ began — then it was Christian anti-Semitism and an embarrassing ignorance of each other’s worlds — but they are the challenges of the early years of the 21st century as we look forward.
Looking back on our achievements and the richness we have discovered in each other might properly be the driver of our journey forward.
The Rev David Gifford is the chief executive of the Council of Christians and Jews