|
|
March 21, 2003/Adar2 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 30
Controversial book revised by rabbi
RICHARD ALLEN GREENE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LONDON - You can't please all of the people all of the time.
That seems to be the lesson for Britain's Orthodox chief rabbi after he published the revised edition of a controversial book.
In the second edition of "The Dignity of Difference," Rabbi Jonathan Sacks removed statements suggesting that Christianity and Islam are as valid as Judaism.
The publication of the first edition in August 2002 sparked a storm of criticism from fervently Orthodox rabbis in Britain and Israel.
In his preface to the new edition, Sacks wrote that some people maintained "that certain passages could be understood in ways incompatible with Jewish belief.
"I believed I had guarded against this possibility by making it clear that I was writing as an Orthodox Jew, implying that any interpretation incompatible with the classic tenets of Jewish faith was misinterpretation.
"In the event, the caveat proved insufficient. Certain passages were misunderstood. I therefore decided to restate them in less problematic terms," he wrote.
Sacks' original book contained the passage, "God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to the Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims ... God is the God of all humanity, but no single faith is or should be the faith of all humanity."
The new edition, published March 1, substitutes: "God communicates in human language, but there are dimensions of the divine that must forever elude us. As Jews we believe that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures, and faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws.
"God is the God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end of days no single faith is the faith of all humanity."
|
