Writing in First Things before a new leader of the Catholic Church was chosen Seth Chalmer assistant director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at New York University observed that based on past experience the organized Jewish community was sure to “present a long wish list to the chief cleric of a religion in which it does not believe ” which he wrote “is no problem in itself.” But he cautioned Jewish leaders not to do what they’ve sometimes done in the past:
We in the Jewish community should resist the urge to tell Christians how to be Christians.… Instead … Jews should identify the maximum we can reasonably ask from the Catholic Church without asking it to stop being the Catholic Church.
He’s right but he should have stated more directly that when Jewish “leaders” do agitate for Christians to change their own doctrines they stir deep animosity towards Jews. He also might have asked why Jews would even care what Christians believe and why paradoxically the more religious the Jew the less he bothered he is by non-Jews’ religious beliefs and practices.
The answer of course has much to do with two deep-seated emotions harbored by secular Jews: fear and guilt. Fear that his children or congregants raised on a meager diet of tepid G-d-less Judaism will fall prey to Christian proselytization and guilt that he doesn’t have nonnegotiable beliefs about his religion’s superiority to match those of the non-Jew.
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