The Bridge

Jewish scholars and writers are showing an increasing interest in Christ as a teacher. Christians in their turn are more conscious of Judaism because of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber (TIME. Jan. 23). In such fertile soil the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies at New Jersey's Seton Hall University plants a seed of fact: Christ is the link as well as the difference between Christian and Jew.

The institute's director is an Austrian-born Jew who became a Roman Catholic priest: the Rev. John M. Oesterreicher, 51. Father Oesterreicher worked to further Jewish-Christian understanding in Europe before he was forced to flee the Nazis during World War II. In 1953 he founded the institute with the encouragement of some of the top Catholic scholars in the U.S. and abroad. One result: The Bridge, a Yearbook of Judaeo-Christian Studies (Pantheon; $3.95), the first in a series that will review the relationship between Christians and Jews in history, philosophy, theology, the arts.

Although not aimed primarily at conversion, The Bridge "tries to show the unity of God's design as it leads from the Law to the Gospel--the unbroken economy of salvation." The first volume has provocative articles by 18 highly diverse writers, e.g., Renaissance Scholar and Jazz Critic Barry Ulanov, Jesuit Philosopher William L. Rossner. Hebraic Scholar Mother Marie Thaddea de Sion, and covers the range of Judaeo-Christian interests from Abraham to Simone Weil. The Bridge offers many paths to better understanding of both the Jewish and Christian heritage. Items:

P:Writes Richard Kugelman, a Passionist priest: " 'The Jews' are for [John] not the Jewish people but cliques, groups that are inimical to Jesus . . . The Christian who associates his Jewish neighbors with those who plotted Christ's death is perpetuating an injustice never contemplated by the apostle. If a man reads John's account of the Passion without the spirit of the gospel, he may well be tempted to point his finger and exclaim: 'Those Jews!' But if he reads it with the spirit of the gospel, he will strike his breast and say: 'It is I who am the sinner; it is we, all of us, who are the crucifiers of Jesus.' "

P: Hilaire Duesberg, Benedictine monk: "Jesus Christ may divide us, but in our very quarrel He unites us. Since His coming, traditional Judaism is no longer what it was. It survives without Temple, without sacrifice, and that in a splendid fashion, giving proof of a religious vitality impossible not to acknowledge. The Jews carry on their case against us with the same energy they employ to maintain the past--our past--with an eye to the future. All we fear is that they might relax their effort . . . Assimilation . . . would be the surrender of their peculiar greatness, which remains the quest for the Messiah . . . The Jewish hope complements the Christian. When 'He' returns to call the roll of His own, the children of Abraham according to the flesh must not miss the mustering because they have abandoned the faith of their ancestor." P:Irving Suessman and his wife Cornelia, authors and teachers: "Not long ago a young Jewish scholar argued that the Jews never rejected Christ because they never encountered Him. This is an astonishing, provocative contention. There is. in spite of its vast historical inaccuracy, a certain psychological truth in it. The Jews encountered Christ once at a single moment in history . . . and as a people acquiesced in the rejection of Him by their leaders. From that moment in history onward, all that concerned Christ was carefully withheld from following generations, as parents withhold a painful and terrible secret from their children . . . Generations grew up encountering Christ only as an 'excuse' for their neighbors to despise or destroy them--which was, of course, not an encounter with Christ at all. rather with the devil . . . P: Raissa Maritain, philosopher-poet and wife of Philosopher Jacques Maritain: "The lives of the Old Testament saints are . . . marked by deeds for which neither God nor their consciences reproached them, but which the teaching of Christ and the Church forbids as faults and grievous sins. Thus lying, guile, harshness, cruelty . . . concubinage, incest and polygamy are linked with eminent names . . . Reason, by the loss of innocence reduced to its natural nakedness, is just beginning to discover the world; and God is sparing in His demands, proportioning them to human experience . . . All the laws which have formed our conscience were not yet engraved either on stone or in hearts." P: B. Christopher Butler, a British Benedictine abbot: "It is hardly necessary to labor the point that Jesus accepts the doctrine of the divine election of Israel.

The Twelve, in the instructions they receive for their first missionary journey, are bidden to go 'not on the way of the Gentiles nor into a city of the Samaritans' but . . . to 'the lost sheep of the house of Israel' . . . The extension of the good news to the non-Israelite . . . was not to establish an entirely new society of believers, rather to incorporate Gentile converts into the age-old people of God . . . "

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