Robert Daum

A commitment to dialogue

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) and the Canadian Rabbinic Caucus (CRC) committed last year to engage in “shared and sincere dialogue.”

Passed at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Nostra Aetate covers the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christians. Among other points, the fourth section affirms Christianity’s Jewish roots, states that Jews should not be blamed for Jesus’ death and decries antisemitism. The joint declaration of CCCB and CRC, issued on Nov. 25, referred specifically to that fourth section, “which profoundly changed Catholic-Jewish relations.”

The first national, bilateral dialogue between Catholics and Jews in Canada also took place on Nov. 25, in Ottawa. The joint initiative was launched the next day. It has several goals, including the strengthening of ties and increased understanding between the Catholic and Jewish communities; opposing “antisemitism and all forms of hatred”; advancing common interests in public policy, in areas such as social justice and religious freedom; and promoting civic engagement among Canadian Jews and Catholics.

photo - Rabbi Robert Daum is a delegate to the Catholic-Jewish dialogue initiative — Rabbi Robert Daum is a delegate to the Catholic-Jewish dialogue initiative. *(photo from Robert Daum)*

The Jewish delegation to the dialogue comprises Dr. Robert Daum, Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl, Dr. Victor Goldbloom, Rabbi Reuben Poupko, Dr. Adele Reinhartz and Dr. Norman Tobias, while the Catholic delegation is Bishop John A. Boissonneau, Archbishop Paul-André Durocher, Sister Anne Anderson, Father Martin Moser, Sister Eileen Schuller and Father Hervé Tremblay.

“Jews must recognize that contemporary Catholicism was profoundly changed by Vatican II and that the historic denigration and demonization of Jews has been eliminated from Catholic teaching,” said Frydman-Kohl, co-chair of the CRC – with Rabbi Jonathan Infeld and Rabbi Reuben Poupko – in a Nov. 26 statement about the dialogue. “Catholics must comprehend that contemporary Jews and Judaism can only be understood through the twin experiences of the horrors of the Holocaust and the creative existence of the state of Israel. While differences between our two faith communities still exist, we have moved from disputation to dialogue, persecution to partnership, and confrontation to cooperation.”

“The initiative represents a very serious commitment on the part of the CCCB and of the CRC, and of the individual delegates who will be meeting twice a year for the next few years,” said Daum, a fellow, diversity and innovation, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue, and an honorary associate professor, department of classical, Near Eastern and religious studies, University of British Columbia. “I am sure that none of us would have agreed to undertake this work without an expectation that the process would make a contribution to Canadian society.”

CRC is an affiliate of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “As faith communities active in public policy and public discourse, we have a responsibility to speak out against manifestations of hatred in society,” said Nico Slobinsky, director of CIJA Pacific Region. “Our voice is stronger when we speak out together.”

photo - Nico Slobinsky, director of CIJA Pacific Region — Nico Slobinsky, director of CIJA Pacific Region. *(photo from Nico Slobinksy)*

Slobinsky noted that CRC and CCCB wrote a letter, dated Dec. 15, to Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Dion, highlighting that “Christians experience religious persecution more than any other faith group on a global scale and in absolute numbers” and requesting that the “Government of Canada make a priority of advocating for at-risk Christian communities throughout the Middle East and Africa.”

He said CIJA has been “adamant in speaking for the right of religious minorities when threatened.” He described the “range of policies CIJA advocates on, from affordable housing to government support for health care and public services run by Jewish social service agencies,” and said he can see “natural areas of cooperation with faith communities like the Catholic community.”

“In the case of antisemitism,” he added, “given the sad history of Catholic discrimination and persecution of Jews, it is particularly poignant that Catholics condemn and actively counter antisemitism today, as evidenced in the pope’s recent remarks,” which continue the path of reconciliation that started at the Second Vatican Council.

Slobinsky said the Nostra Aetate “has had a profound impact within the Church leadership and clergy, though it is largely unknown by average Catholics and Jews.”

Daum described it as “a very important document. Because of that document, for example, I worked for the American Jewish Committee and the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Francisco for three years when I was working on my PhD at Berkeley. I was a guest lecturer on the topic of Judaism in five Roman Catholic high schools, so that the students could have the opportunity to learn about Judaism from a Jewish scholar.

“Like any historic document, the impact will vary from place to place, and from decade to decade, but one has to bear in mind that this relationship goes back many centuries. And there have been some very important statements issued by Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars over the past several years, including in recent months. These are related developments, which is very encouraging and very interesting.”

As for the dialogue initiative, Daum said, “We are bringing ourselves to this initiative as Jews and as Canadians, and our dialogue partners are bringing themselves as Catholics and as Canadians – in our diversity and in our unity, we will get to know each other and each other’s community better with each meeting.”

Zach Sagorin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

Limmud starts next weekend

Limmud Vancouver 2016, which takes place Jan. 30 and 31, includes seminars, lectures, workshops and discussions on a wide range of topics. This second article in a two-part series features a few of the presenters.

The love of two women

People who have a familiarity with modern Jewish and Zionist history know the name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as the man who nearly single-handedly revived Hebrew into a modern language. Ben-Yehuda’s grandson, also named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, contends the history of modern Hebrew, Judaism and Israel would be very different were it not for the two women in his grandfather’s life.

photo - Eliezer Ben-Yehuda — Eliezer Ben-Yehuda *(photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)*

“The story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is really very, very interesting and there’s an aspect of it which is really overlooked very often and it’s the issue of the women,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Florida.

Ben-Yehuda was married, consecutively, to two women – sisters – and the grandson contends that they are the reason the world still knows his name.

“Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, at the beginning of his path, was doomed to an early grave and all his dreams and all his great ideas about reviving the Hebrew language and reviving the Hebrew people in their land could have come to naught,” he said.

At age 21, while studying in Paris, Ben-Yehuda nearly died of tuberculosis. He wrote to his fiancée, his childhood sweetheart Devora Jonas, breaking off their engagement. “He wrote a letter and said forget about me, find yourself another man who is going to give you a life,” said the grandson. “She refused to be jilted. She said, you promised to marry and by God I’m holding you to your promise.”

The couple had five children before Devora died of tuberculosis. Three of the children died of diphtheria in short succession after their mother’s passing. Before she died, Devora insisted that Ben-Yehuda marry her sister, Paula Beila, who later took the Hebrew name Hemda.

“Hemda got this letter from her sister and it said if you want to be a princess, come marry my prince, my husband,” said the grandson. “Hemda decided that, yes, she wants that … and she says I’m going to come to Jerusalem, I’m going to marry you, I’m going to take care of your children for my sister and we’ll have our own children and I will help you in your job.”

They did have children – six, although only three survived, including the father of the Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who will be in Vancouver this month. He credits the two women for everything his grandfather accomplished.

“The first one [Devora] rebuilt his morale,” he said. “He was really quite resigned to the fact that he was going to die.… He married her and she filled him with hope and with strength through love and through her enthusiasm and through her caring of him.”

Hemda was the force that got a world-leading publisher to print Ben-Yehuda’s magnum opus Hebrew dictionary and, after he died with six of the 17 volumes completed, pressed her son Ehud (father of Eliezer the grandson) to complete the series.

Ben-Yehuda’s work changed the course of Jewish history, but his grandson assigns credit elsewhere. “The thing that made it possible was the love of two women,” he said.

Progressive Zionism

Kenneth Bob’s Zionist credentials are pretty strong. He is national president of Ameinu, the progressive Zionist organization, he chairs the board of directors of the American Zionist Movement and serves on the Jewish Agency for Israel board of governors. He believes it is those like him, who identify as progressive Zionists, who can have the most impact confronting the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement against Israel.

photo - Kenneth Bob — Kenneth Bob *(photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)*

“We share some of the criticism of Israeli policy,” he said of progressive Zionists and the BDS movement. “Where we differ is the BDS movement generally doesn’t support Israel’s right to exist and we are very strong supporters of Israel’s right to exist, we just disagree with some of Israel’s policies. Because the criticism of Israel is coming from the left, it is best for the left Zionists, the ones who can speak the language of the left, to combat their attacks.”

Some commentators argue that BDS is having little real impact, while others see it as a genuine advancing threat. “I take the middle ground on this,” said Bob. Most of the BDS resolutions are emerging on large or elite campuses and gain much media attention, “so the number of BDS resolutions is actually maybe smaller than people might think. It’s in the dozens, not in the hundreds.” However, BDS is making inroads in the trade union movement.

In a world that sometimes seems awash in inhumanity and rights abuses, some people suggest singling out Israel for approbation is evidence of bigotry. As a strategic argument, he said, this approach is not very useful.

“We did some focus group work and liberals … don’t claim to be consistent. When you ask them in focus groups why you’re picking on Israel, they say, well, Israel wants to be like the West, so we’re going to treat Israel like we would the West. And I say, yes, I think we can hold Israel to a higher standard than we do Libya or Syria. I think that’s valid.”

His approach is that single-mindedly attacking Israel isn’t going to resolve the problem of Palestinian statelessness.

“If you really want to try to bring about a two-state solution, then let’s work with those coexistence NGOs on the ground in Israel and Palestine,” he said. “Let’s invest in Palestinian businesses and Israeli businesses that are trying to work across the border. Let’s do all kinds of positive things to encourage our kind of people on the ground in Israel and Palestine, but just punishing Israel doesn’t make sense.”

Life before 1492

The topic of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula immediately raises the spectre of 1492, the year the Jewish people were expelled from Spain. In his Limmud presentation, Robert Daum will delve into the dramatic history that came before that fatal date.

photo - Robert Daum — Robert Daum *(photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)*

“It would be a distortion of the history of any European Jewish context to focus only on the catastrophes that punctuated many centuries of dynamic community life, intellectual creativity and fascinating politics,” said Daum, a rabbi and academic with appointments at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue, among other positions. “To use an analogous case, the Shoah more or less destroyed European Jewish civilization, but it does not represent or describe European Jewish civilization. At the same time, one cannot ignore the elephant in the room, so to speak, and, of course, 1492 is a critical part of the story. We also need to understand what happened before 1492.”

The lasting impacts of Spanish and Portuguese life on the following half-millennium of Jewish history, Daum said, is panoramic.

“Just as one cannot begin to understand the history of Spain without knowing about the history of Romans, Christians, Jews and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula,” he said in an email interview, “so, too, one cannot begin to understand many aspects of Jewish civilization, from politics to law to Talmud study to poetry to the development of the Hebrew language, without knowing more about developments in Jewish communities on the Iberian Peninsula before 1492.”

Daum said that most people know that the history of the Jews in Iberia is a rich and storied one, but, he added, “the history is even more interesting than this!” Moreover, this history is still having an impact on Spain and Portugal today, something he will touch on during his presentation.

“In addition to exploring a few fascinating stories, one should expect to come away with a sense of some of the major debates about Jewish (and Muslim) history on the Iberian Peninsula, and an awareness of how these debates are deeply connected to heated debates within Spain today about that fascinating country’s founding narratives and its place in the region,” he said.

Old meets new

For a city that is so new – it celebrated the centenary of its founding in 2009 – Tel Aviv has become a global hotbed of artistic and literary ferment. That’s no coincidence, says Naomi Sokoloff, a professor of modern Jewish literature and Hebrew at the University of Washington.

photo - Naomi Sokoloff — Naomi Sokoloff *(photo courtesy of Limmud Vancouver)*

“It was designed to be that way,” she said. “It’s been a magnet for writers and artists and publishers almost from the beginning.”

Tel Aviv was created not only as the first Hebrew city, but also as a secular sibling to Jerusalem, the sacred city.

“The city was founded by visionaries,” she said. “Some of them were more utopian and some of them were more pragmatic, but they really founded the city as an idea and as an ideal.”

The name itself is a figment of literature. Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel of a Jewish state, Altneuland (Old New Land), was almost immediately translated into Hebrew and the title of the book was Tel Aviv. Aviv means spring, representing the rebirth of the Hebrew nation, while tel reflects the ancient heritage, meaning accumulated layers of civilization.

Sokoloff’s presentation at Limmud will look at the literature and art of Tel Aviv through the writings of S. Yizhar, a song by Naomi Shemer, a story by Etgar Keret and some paintings of Tel Aviv, all of which may shed light, she said, on the tension between the founding ideas of Tel Aviv and how things turned out.

For this year’s Limmud schedule, visit limmudvancouver.ca.

How to talk about the Middle East peacefully

Some of the violence in the Middle East has inflamed tensions closer to home. Online, there is a recent interview conducted by the University of British Columbia with its resident expert Prof. Robert Daum, who offered his thoughts on navigating these frictions. Daum is a faculty associate with the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, a faculty member of Green College, project lead in UBC Transcultural Leaders, a Reconciliation ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a dialogue associate at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue.

UBC: How do conflicts afar, like the Israel-Gaza situation, spark local tensions?

RD: Sadly, some conflicts push people into rigid positions rooted in insufficiently rigorous, self-critical and nuanced analysis. Simplistic narratives about historical and contemporary events resulting in loss of life raise tensions. Inadequate media coverage heightens tensions, and people tend to gather in narrowly circumscribed assemblies of like-minded thinkers. Conflicts such as these are teachable moments, but learning and teaching require an attitude of openness to authentic inquiry on the part of everyone.

Imagine what we can do in addressing any number of complex conflicts and challenges if we can cultivate a culture of evidence-based, authentic inquiry and dialogue. I have seen this approach in action in my work with UBC’s Transcultural Leaders 2014 Conversation Series, SFU’s Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation Canada.

UBC: Have you been surprised by the tensions arising locally and across Canada?

RD: No. In the context of genuine human suffering, we encounter hateful slogans, racist images, one-sided narratives, vicious social media comments and self-righteous oversimplifications. This does not honor the dead. Inflammatory rhetoric gets most of the headlines. Research shows that anxiety and clear thinking tend not to be compatible. Our discourse has to be as levelheaded, sober and reasonable as possible. People need to feel that they can learn in an environment of safety, civility and mutual respect. I consider myself to be a principled pragmatist. It is precisely when we feel angriest about world events that we need to take a deep breath. Imagine if the Supreme Court had to reach decisions under fire. If we cannot learn how to share narrative space – that is, how to reconcile competing, deeply held, national narratives, in a way that does not require the annihilation or complete negation of the other’s position – then how can we expect geographical space to be shared at one of the most fraught intersections of regional and global politics?

I have participated in forums on antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, the Indian residential schools and many other issues. Two years ago, I co-sponsored with the Vancity Office of Community Engagement a three-hour public forum downtown on Islamophobia, featuring a critical media analyst, three Muslim speakers from very diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and three equally diverse non-Muslim speakers, including myself. A mixed audience of more than 250 listened to stories of prejudice experienced and prejudice confronted. It was a thoughtful, nuanced and multi-layered conversation over the course of three hours. And we were just getting started.

UBC: What are some healthy ways in which people can deal with tensions that may arise between themselves and others?

RD: Seek to engage in a dialogue, rather than a debate. Ask genuine questions: “What did you mean by that? What are you trying to say? Have you considered different perspectives on this? Have you tried to understand why others hold positions different than yours? On what can we agree? Is there another way to understand the phenomenon, whereby our positions might be reconciled, even partially?” Try building on ideas and making connections between ideas. Don’t reduce multi-faceted conflicts to a single variable such as religion or oil, for example.

Politics, history and ethics are not reducible to simple equations. Complex questions can rarely be reduced to the logic of black and white, right and wrong. I may see the world very differently than you, but that does not necessarily make you (or me) wrong. Of course, moral assessment matters, and I believe that some behaviors, like the intentional murder of civilian non-combatants as prohibited in the Geneva Conventions, are abhorrent. But, as any first-year law student knows, such an assertion is the beginning, not the end of the inquiry. If such matters were simple enough to be reduced to trial by megaphone, we would not need faculties of law or courts, let alone courses in ethics, history, politics, religion, gender, media or much else.

This interview was originally published by UBC News/University of British Columbia. It is reprinted with permission.