It is a great honor and a pleasure to be invited to speak to you here today. It is also with a deep sense of trembling that I approach a subject that is very delicate and perhaps even controversial. In any case, it cannot be exhausted in one lecture. When I offered to speak about the topic Espiritualidades judías y cristianas: ¿Caminos diferentes, metas semejantes? I had in mind to speak about the Christian origins of the term “spirituality,” about current usage of the term also in Jewish circles, about the difficulties and asymmetries in the usage and meanings of this term. As I went on preparing for this lecture, I realized how arduous this self-imposed task was and that a theoretical exposition at this time might not be satisfactory.

Therefore I have chosen a different approach, one that may be equally dangerous and difficult, but perhaps more fruitful. I have thought to let you participate in some aspects of my learning process in this area, a process that is by no means completed.

If you would like a more scholarly or more general exposition, I will be very happy to provide you with further bibliography. I can also indicate to you some of the 589.889 responses I found on the internet to the question “What is spirituality?” But supposing your permission, I will try to do something much more limited, something one might dare call narrative theology.

I was born into a Catholic family where daily Mass was something normal but where also all other aspects of life were deeply informed by religious convictions and where there was a sincere and serious attempt to live a Christian life. We never talked about spirituality. As far as I recall, I heard that word for the first time when I came in contact with the Focolare Movement as a teenager. A spirituality, as I understood it then, was one particular way among others to guide one’s search for a Christian life, in the case of the Focolare with special emphasis on unity. This unity was not understood as uniformity, but very much in the sense of ultimate unity of all the diverse human beings created in the image of God.

After graduating from high school in Germany, where I had taken optional courses in Biblical Hebrew, I immediately began studying at the University of Vienna, majoring in Jewish Studies, at the encouragement of the Focolare community which I had joined shortly before. Later I continued these studies in New York and here I had my first exposure to what I would now dare call Jewish spirituality. Through a student of mine – I had been given a temporary teaching position at a college of the City University of New York – I was introduced to a writer who had managed to immigrate to the United States during World War II. He had been a journalist for a socialist newspaper in Vienna, had been incarcerated in several concentration camps, but had managed to escape via Spain. Before the war he had written a series of poems, in German. All his manuscripts had been lost, but he still remembered these poems by heart. After settling in the United States he had avoided all contacts with Germans and even with the German language. Now, thirty years later, it was 1974, he wanted to recite those poems to someone whose mother tongue was German and who would give him some feedback whether the poems might still be publishable. Therefore I spent an evening at his home, listening for one hour to his poetry, brought up from the depths of his memory. Some of the poems were profoundly religious. I was very moved by the poems as well as by the circumstances, and I told him so. He invited me to a concert a few weeks later. Out of these first encounters a deep friendship grew that lasted for twelve years. Willy – that was his name – told me that he had lost his faith in God while in the concentration camps, yet religion remained for him a very significant moral and spiritual force.

We used to meet for dinner about once every other month. He would rarely tell me of his experiences during the Shoah, but he often turned to religious subjects. Although we also talked a lot about current affairs, there was every time a moment, where the miracle of this relationship became apparent to me: a Viennese Jew, a survivor, talking to a German Catholic, more than a generation younger than he, about matters that were often deeply personal and spiritual. Once he told me that when the two of us were together, he felt we were not alone. When I explained to him that the Mishnah speaks about the presence of the Shekhinah, the divine presence, among two who are engaged in Torah (m. Abot 3:2; cf. 3:6), he became very pensive.

Once his wife called me, asking me to come urgently, because Willy had expressed serious thoughts of suicide. At the time I did not know how frequent this phenomenon was among survivors, and I did not have any particular psychological training. But I tried to listen to him and to speak to him for several hours. At the end of a very intense afternoon I felt that suicide was a very real and understandable choice but he decided not to go through with it.

Our relationship continued to grow even when I moved to Los Angeles and could see him only occasionally during brief visits back in New York. One time when I came for a weekend, his wife told me that he was in the hospital and that his condition was serious. At the first opportunity I went to visit him. He did recognize me but was almost unable to speak. The next day I had to leave again. The hospital was on the way to the airport. So I asked the person accompanying me if we could stop there for a few moments. When I arrived in his room, Willy was breathing very heavily, with the support of a respirator. After a few moments the doctor asked me to leave the room. She returned, only to tell me that Willy had passed away. When I was again at his bedside I wanted to pray but I did not know how to. I instinctively did not want to use a Christian prayer, but I did not know how to say Kaddish (and did not remember that a community of ten is needed to say it properly). Yet, perhaps I have rarely prayed, in silence, as intensely as in that moment.

Since the doctor realized that I had been very close to Willy she asked me to inform the relatives, none of whom was in his room at the moment. When I called his wife she told me how glad she was that I had been with Willy in his last moment, since I had been his best friend. When I offered to postpone my return to Los Angeles in order to attend the funeral she told me that I had done my part and that it was good for me to leave and do whatever other things I had to do. So after a brief silent visit to the Catholic chapel I left the hospital to return to the car where my friend had been waiting for half an hour, ready to drive me to the airport. [During my stay in New York I had learned that I was to leave Los Angeles in order to join the Focolare Community in Texas. During the return flight my own departure, painful though it was, paled into insignificance before Willy’s final departure.] It [also] seemed to me that this last encounter with Willy was a sign of God’s love for him as well as for me.

Probably Willy would never have spoken about Jewish spirituality, but through him I learned how in Judaism even if one is not at peace with God, this does not necessarily mean a turning away from him. Whereas in Christian spirituality very often unconditional acceptance of God’s will is considered essential, in Judaism arguing with God, questioning his ways, is quite common.¹ Sometimes Willy claimed to be an atheist, but this was the one point on which I never believed him.

Someone who has taught me a lot about Jewish spirituality, through his writings, his words, his teaching, and his being is Rabbi Leon Klenicki – whom many of you may know. I met him soon after he arrived in New York, from Argentina, via Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. We have had numerous occasions to meet at lectures, conferences, for long discussions over lunch, working together on different programs. [he has written me a note even the day before I came to Argentina last week.] One unforgettable moment was when during a break in a conference in Princeton I drove him to the nearby cemetery where his daughter who died in a tragic car accident was buried. Together with another friend we stood silently at the grave and deposited a little stone on the tombstone. Tears were in our eyes. Not to try to give explanations but to be present to the other in silence is perhaps one thing I learned from this experience.

In 1989, shortly after moving to Rome I was asked to teach a course on Jewish Spirituality in an Institute of Spirituality run by the Carmelite Order, [the Teresianum, named after S. Therese of Avila]. I was quite worried that the terminology and perhaps even the topic would not be adequate to Judaism and its various expressions. Already at that time, however, I did find a popular textbook and anthology by a Jewish author, entitled La spiritualità ebraica,² a work that was very helpful to me because it put together many texts I knew and gave me access to others I did not know, with very different approaches to spiritual quests. One among the latter were two pages from the diary of Etty Hillesum, [to which I would like to return later on.]

I did not wish, however, to base this course only on books. Therefore I asked myself and others where I could find contemporary expressions of Jewish spirituality. I knew of course of the renewed growth of Hasidic groups. [Hasidism, from the Hebrew word jasid or “pious” is a movement for spiritual renewal that originated in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. Today it is represented by different groups, of which Jabad (also known by the name of Lubavitch) is currently the largest and most active]. Partly connected with Hasidism, there is also a revival of the study of Kabbalah, the most prominent, yet difficult to understand, form of Jewish mysticism. I also knew that Jewish spirituality is often equated with these two phenomena. Yet I was aware that many very committed Jews are not attracted to and even less represented by these trends.

Therefore, on the one hand, I started attending Friday night services in different synagogues in Rome and elsewhere, at first understanding very little, although I knew Hebrew and had some basic knowledge of the Siddur, the Jewish prayer book on which the liturgy is based. The first times I went by myself, later, after I started to get to know the flow of the liturgy and its parts, I went with two or three students at a time. Little by little I learned to appreciate the service with its relatively unchanging rhythms. The set character of the prayers did not automatically lead to the heights of spiritual experience, yet the song Lejá Dodí and the entire brief service for receiving the Sabbath as a bride taught me something of the meaning of the Sabbath, a sacred time so different from my experience of the Christian Sunday. Later I would appreciate the Sabbath even more through reading Abraham Joshua Heschel, who calls it “a cathedral in time.”³ It was also important for me to experience such sacred time, spending the entire Sabbath or at least Friday night with Jewish friends. Most of this knowledge I acquired not in academic studies but in personal initiatives and encounters, although my studies helped me to understand and evaluate what I experienced. Such exposure to the reality of living Judaism became an invaluable foundation also for courses on Jewish Liturgy I was asked to teach at a Liturgical Institute of the Benedictine Order [at S. Anselmo in Rome].

Yet, beyond the dimension of “regular” Jewish religious practice I wanted to get to know some new forms of living Jewish spirituality. Through a rabbi friend I was introduced to the Havurah Movement, a Jewish renewal movement, that was started in Washington and other parts of the United States in the tumultuous 1960s. It organizes regular weeklong summer institutes. I was invited to participate, even though I would practically be the only Christian among about three hundred Jewish participants. I was told that I was free to participate in any and all activities, except that if during communal prayer there would be a question whether ten adults were present, I should make it known that I should not be counted [certain prayers, such as the Kaddish I mentioned earlier, require the presence of ten adult Jews, who in the orthodox tradition have to be male]. The occasion never occurred, but this request was for me a reminder of the special importance of community in prayer, or as it has been stated elsewhere “Jewish spirituality cannot be attained by the individual apart from the community.”⁴

This week was a profoundly spiritual experience for me. I used to go to Mass early every morning, and this was important to me, but for the rest of the day I would be immersed in an entirely Jewish environment. Many of the participants were on a spiritual quest and we learned that our questions were often similar, although some of the answers were quite different. Deep friendships developed that have lasted for years. After my first participation I was able to return several more times (and hope to return again next year). I will always remember the year when the last day of the institute, usually a day of exuberant celebrations, fell on the ninth of Av, the day of remembrance for the destruction of the Temple and for other tragedies experienced by the Jewish people. I will never forget reading together in small groups the entire Book of Lamentations. There was a profound sense of mourning, and yet an unquenchable faith in this that is not easy to communicate.

After a while, I too was invited to teach courses at the Havurah Institute. Once I taught a course, together with a rabbi friend of mine, on “How to deal with the hard parts of tradition.” I addressed texts in the New Testament that are or have been interpreted as anti-Jewish, while he worked with texts from the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition that might be considered anti-Gentile. Another time I taught about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Regardless of the subject I taught or the classes I attended I found that there was a sense of spiritual and not only intellectual involvement. Very often people would in one way or other ask me about the roots of my own spiritual life. Therefore I took the courage, and was encouraged by others, to teach a class on spirituality.

This I did the last time I attended the Havurah Institute two years ago, immediately after my stay in Argentina. I taught a six-hour course on the theme that I also chose as the topic for today’s lecture. Although the number of participants was limited to twenty, I had twenty-eight, among them a few rabbis, several community leaders, writers, and university professors. Unlike a one-hour lecture, we had the time to get to know each other, to read Jewish and Christian texts relevant to the topic, to ask sometimes challenging questions, and to discuss them during and after class. I also showed some videotapes, one a famous interview with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the other part of a talk which Chiara Lubich, the foundress of the Focolare Movement, gave here in Buenos Aires at the B’nai B’rith headquarters. Chiara Lubich and her work, including that in interfaith relations, may be known to many of you here, whereas you may not be acquainted with Rabbi Heschel.

Therefore let me say a few words about this extraordinary person. He was born in Warsaw in 1907 into an illustrious Hasidic family. But instead of remaining in the protective and somewhat secluded Hasidic world, he went to the University of Berlin where he wrote a dissertation on the biblical prophets that was published in 1936. He remained in Germany until 1938, when along with most Polish Jews he was expelled by the Nazi authorities. In 1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II, he was able to leave Poland and eventually reached the United States where he first taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. His own and other people’s efforts to obtain visa for members of his family were unsuccessful. Thus his mother and three of his sisters were killed by the Nazis. After the war he taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the parent institution of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, until his untimely death in 1972. Besides teaching, however, he became very active in dealing with social and political issues. He worked and marched with Martin Luther King for the Civil Rights Movement [on behalf of Afro-Americans] and participated in protests against the Vietnam War. On the day before he died he had stood for hours in the freezing snow in front of a prison, waiting for the release of a fellow anti-war activist, a Catholic priest. Heschel’s incisive writings have found a very broad audience of Jews as well as Christians. Pope Paul VI whom he met on several occasions during and after Vatican II told Heschel that he had read several of his books and that he recommended them to Catholics, especially to young people.

Both videos left a deep impression on the Havurah group. In such a supportive environment, all of us, including of course myself, were able to become learners. We could appreciate the different views of spirituality. If you don’t mind I would like to introduce you to some of the texts we studied, even though here we do not have as much time to discuss them.

After several texts dealing with definitions of Christian and Jewish spirituality,⁵ we moved to some texts that emphasized the diversity of spiritual paths. The first one is an early Hasidic story:

Rabbi Baer once said to his teacher, the Seer of Lublin, “Show me a general way to the service of God.” The [teacher] replied: “It is impossible to tell a person what way to take. For one way to serve God is through learning, another through prayer, another through fasting, and still another through eating. We should carefully observe what way our heart draws us to, and then choose this way with all our strength.”⁶

In a similar vein, though in a very different language and shaped by a definitely Christian perspective, about fifty years ago Chiara Lubich wrote a brief meditation text. This was long before Vatican II and she was not thinking about interreligious dialogue. Yet, the group found this text to be pertinent. It starts with a quote of Jesus’ words in Luke 22:42:

“Que no se haga mi voluntad, sino la tuya”.

Esfuérzate por permanece en su voluntad y que su voluntad permanezca en ti. Cuando la voluntad de Dios se haya hecho en la tierra como en el cielo, entonces se cumplirá el testamento de Jesús.

Mira el sol y sus rayos.

El sol es símbolo de la voluntad divina, que es el mismo Dios.

Los rayos son esta divina voluntad sobre cada uno de nosotros.

Camina hacia el sol en la luz de tu rayo, distinto de todos los demás, y cumple el maravilloso y particular designio que Dios quiere de ti.

Infinito número de rayos, todos procedentes del mismo sol... Voluntad única, particular sobre cada uno.

Los rayos, cuanto más se aproximan al sol, tanto más se aproximan entre sí. También nosotros, cuanto más nos acercamos a Dios, con el cumplimiento cada vez más perfecto de la divina voluntad, tanto más nos acercamos entre nosotros mismos.

Hasta que todos seamos uno.⁷

Thus our task is not to pull the other to our side or to our particular path, but to help him or her to find their own way. In this, we can be of assistance to each other, without leaving our own path, and coming closer to each other as we each go our distinct ways. This is not just an utopian vision but this is what I experienced at the Havurah Institute and elsewhere, with Jewish and non-Jewish friends.

While Chiara Lubich bases her longing for unity on the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John, Rabbi Heschel bases an analogous aspiration for unity on the account of creation in Genesis:

Unity of God is power for unity of God with all things. He is one in Himself and striving to be one with the world. Rabbi Samuel ben Ammi remarked that the Biblical narrative of creation proclaims: “One day ... a second day ... a third day,” and so on. If it is a matter of time reckoning, we would expect the Bible to say: “One day ... two days ... three days” or: “The first day ... the second day ... the third day,” but surely not one, second, third!

Yom ehad, one day really means that day which God desired to be one with man. “From the beginning of creation the Holy One, blessed be He, longed to enter into partnership with the terrestrial world” (Genesis Rabba chap. 3.9) . The unity of God is a concern for the unity of the world.⁸

Heschel’s spiritual writings are unique in that they are deeply rooted in rabbinic as well as hasidic tradition, yet they speak to the heart of Jews and Christians who either have never had or have lost the connection with those traditions. Heschel often spoke of the necessity of Jews and Christians to work together, not only at a humanitarian level, but at the level of each one’s religious commitment. In this he was going against opinions expressed by Orthodox Jewish leaders, most prominently Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who had advocated that Jewish-Christian dialogue should limit itself to social and humanitarian concerns, excluding all specifically religious questions. Resistance against entering into dialogue with Jews existed, and exist, of course also in many Christian quarters. Against this background, Heschel expressed his conviction most forcefully in an essay entitled “No Religion Is an Island.”⁹ He asked himself “Is it not safer for us to remain in isolation and to refrain from sharing perplexities and certainties with Christians?” He gave himself this answer:

No religion is an island. We are all involved with one another. Spiritual betrayal on the part of one of us affects the faith of all of us. Views adopted in one community have an impact on other communities. Today religious isolationism is a myth. For all the profound differences in perspective and substance, Judaism is sooner or later affected by the intellectual, moral, and spiritual events within the Christian society, and vice versa. ...

We fail to recognize that while different exponents of faith in the world of religion continue to be wary of the ecumenical movement, there is another ecumenical movement, worldwide in extent and influence: nihilism. We must choose between interfaith and internihilism. Cynicism is not parochial. Should religions insist upon the illusion of complete isolation? Should we refuse to be on speaking terms with one another and hope for each other’s failure? Or should we pray for each other’s health and help one another in preserving one’s respective legacy, in preserving a common legacy?¹⁰

Heschel further asked: “On what basis do we people of different religious commitments meet one another?” In part his answer is as follows:

To meet a human being is an opportunity to sense the image of God, the presence of God. According to a rabbinical interpretation, the Lord said to Moses: “Wherever you see the trace of man there I stand before you...”

When engaged in a conversation with a person of different religious commitment, if I discover that we disagree in matters sacred to us, does the image of God I face disappear? Does God cease to stand before me? Does the difference in commitment destroy the kinship of being human? Does the fact that we differ in our conceptions of God cancel what we have in common: the image of God?¹¹

Thus, according to Heschel, it is crucial to try to recognize the image of God in the other, whoever he or she may be. The most extreme example of this attitude I found in a letter by Etty Hillesum. She was born into an assimilated [secular?] Jewish family in Holland. At the age of twenty-seven, in 1941, she began to write a diary which she continued even while in the transit [concentration] camp of Westerbork. A few weeks before she herself was deported to Auschwitz, where she died in November of 1943, she wrote to some friends about the departure of a train of deportees:

There was a moment when I felt in all seriousness that after this night, it would be a sin ever to laugh again. But then I reminded myself that some of those who had gone away had been laughing, even if only a handful of them this time ... There will be some who will laugh now and then in Poland, too, though not many of them from this transport, I think.

When I think of the faces of the squad of armed green-uniformed guards – my God, those faces! I looked at them, each in turn, from behind the safety of a window, and I have never been so frightened of anything in my life as I was of those faces. I have run into trouble with the word that is the leitmotif of my life: “And God created man after His likeness” [Genesis 1:27]. That passage spent a difficult morning with me.

I have told you often enough that no words or images are adequate to describe nights like these. But still I must try to convey something of it to you. One always has the feeling here of being eyes and ears of a piece of Jewish history, but there is also the need sometimes to be a still, small voice.¹²

Etty Hillesum remains “a still, small voice”. Her writings have reached and touched hundreds of thousands of people.¹³

Any interpersonal encounter has a profoundly religious dimension, if it is true encounter. Along similar lines as Rabbi Heschel, the well-known Jewish philosopher Martin Buber had expressed an analogous idea, with reference to an encounter with a Christian theologian. He stated “Where two are truly together, they are together in the name of God.”¹⁴ These words seem to echo the statement of Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradyon in the Mishnah “If two sit together and the words between them are not of Torah, then that is a session of scorners..., but if two sit together and the words between them are of Torah, then the Shekhinah [the divine presence] is in their midst.”¹⁵ Christians will hear in this also an echo of Jesus’ words “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst” (Mt 18:20). There are obvious and profound differences between the saying of the Mishnah and that of Jesus. Yet, as I have tried to show elsewhere,¹⁶ I do not think that the two stand in polemical contrast, as has sometimes been asserted. Rather the Gospel of Matthew wants to explain that the divine presence is also presence of Jesus. Looking at our unequivocal differences, at all the misunderstandings and injustices of the past, and at the recurring difficulties in Jewish-Christian relations, it seems extraordinary that we can be together in the name of God.

I remember a visit in Rome by a rabbi, during a very difficult moment in Jewish-Christian relations. He took out a few hours from his busy schedule of official meetings to spend some time with a small group of members of the Focolare. We tried to understand and empathize with the difficulties, to find ways that might assist in overcoming them, above all to receive him and love him as a person. Before leaving he said that here he had felt God’s presence. If we Jews and Christians can be together in the name of God and in his presence, this does not leave us untouched.

Yet, often our experience is that of not finding God, or of feeling abandoned by him, of him not intervening in the hour of need.

One classical expression of this is the beginning of the 22^nd Psalm “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me....” For Christians, these words are known especially as the unfathomable words of Jesus on the cross. They may be understood as an expression of the most terrible suffering and at the same time as an expression of a love that is ready to give up everything, even the most essential relationship. For Christians, in this love that in the end overcomes even death, is the root of the answer to their most basic questions about God and humanity. Through my contact with Jewish friends and Jewish texts I have been made more and more aware that the answer does not eliminate the question.

In Jewish tradition, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, the emphasis very often is more on the questions than on the answers. This is expressed in many Psalms, not only Psalm 22. We read “My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day, where is your God?” (Ps 42:4) “Where are all His marvelous works which our fathers told us of” (cf. Ps 44:2). “How long, O Lord, will you hide yourself perpetually?” (Ps 89:47). The idea of God hiding his face (hester panim) is found frequently in the Hebrew Bible and in rabbinic tradition. More than the real absence of God it expresses his non-intervention and perceived absence, and ultimately his imperceptible presence. A rabbinic tradition that is apparently not widely known even asserts that “to whomever the hiding of the face does not apply is not one of them [of the Jewish people]” but in the same passage another rabbi continues “Although I hide my face from them, I shall speak with them in a dream” and another rabbi adds “His hand is stretched over us, as it is said, ‘and I have covered thee in the shadow of My hand’(Is 51:16).”¹⁷ Thus the hiding of the face, while seen in all its tragic consequences, is not God’s final word.

In Jewish tradition, much is attributed to human responsibility. A Hasidic story makes this plain even concerning the idea of God hiding his face:

Rabbi Barukh’s grandson Yehiel was once playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. When he had waited for a long time, he came out of his hiding-place, but the other was nowhere to be seen. Now Yehiel realized that he had not looked for him from the very beginning. This made him cry, and crying he ran to his grandfather and complained of his faithless friend. Then tears brimmed in Rabbi Barukh’s eyes and he said: “God says the same thing: ‘I hide, but no one wants to seek me.’”¹⁸

This story of God’s unfulfilled longing for human beings to seek him is a playful but poignant reminder of human responsibility. Even if and precisely when God hides his face he wants to be sought and found. As many of you know, the Priestly Blessing remains the only prerogative of the kohanim, the priests, in the synagogues after the destruction of the Temple. As Rabbi Carucci points out, it should be understood as a goal and not as a present reality. According to him, the threefold blessing represents the hidden God’s gradual self-revelation: “The Lord bless you and keep you! The Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you! The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and grant you peace” (Num 6:24-26). Carucci notes that at first to God’s ever present protection the blessing is added. In the following verse, the Lord’s face shines and illuminates. Lastly, God turns his face, ending the hiding of his face and gives shalom, peace, wholeness.¹⁹

I was not aware of this interpretation of the Priestly Blessing when I said my first Mass almost exactly one year ago, but I decided to use this form of solemn blessing at the end of Mass. And I said it in Hebrew, with a thought for a couple of Jewish friends who had come all the way from Paris to be present for this occasion. For them, but also for me and for the other people present, this was a moment of special spiritual depth. Even though this was a small gesture, I had never felt as strongly that Jews and Christians can be a blessing for one another, and for the world.