David Novak Quotes

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.

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 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.

Roots can live without branches, although truncated; branches cannot live without roots.

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.

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.

Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.

The work of man is to respond to the Covenant by obeying the commandments of the Torah, those commandments that can be obeyed here and now.

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.

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.

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.

Because Judaism and Christianity are both covenantal religions, the relationship of the individual Jew or Christian to God is always within covenanted community.

The religious doctrine of traditional Judaism entails the acceptance of the nationhood of the Jewish people and the everlasting sanctity of the Land of Israel for them.

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

Christianity and Judaism are united above all in their common affirmation and implementation of the moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible, or 'Old Testament,' and the traditions of interpretation of that teaching.

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.

Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair.

A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt.

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

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.

If human language, with its logic, is the way God has given us to understand the world, then the Torah must be understood in that same language and with that same logic.

Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.

The Jewish tradition presents itself as the greatest revelation of God's truth that can be known in the world. That is why we call ourselves 'the chosen people.' It is not that we choose ourselves. It means that we have been elected by God and given the Torah.

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

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.

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 community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.

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

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

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.

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.

It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.

The relationship between God and his people was always the one having absolute primacy, the one that had basically to determine all human relationships, whether those within the covenanted community itself or those between the covenanted community and the outside world.

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.

Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.

To be a Jew, essentially and not just accidentally, is to regard the Jewish people as one's sole primal community. Election by the unique God requires total and unconditional loyalty to one people.