In deciding among theological views, one should be something of a consequentialist: the choice of one theological position over another should be, if not actually determined, at least heavily conditioned by the fact that it implies a better ethical outcome than the alternatives.
All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.
At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
One cannot accept Christ and still be part of the normative Jewish community; one cannot live by Torah and still be part of the Church.
Because Judaism and Christianity are both covenantal religions, the relationship of the individual Jew or Christian to God is always within covenanted community.
The community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.
Religious traditions are in a constant state of development and renewed self-understanding.
The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition.
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.
Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone.
Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.
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.
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.
It has always been inevitable that, living as a small minority among a Christian majority, some Jews would convert to Christianity.
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.
The relation between Judaism, Zionism, and Messianism is one that is often hard for Jews to get straight. Needless to say, it is even harder for non-Jews.
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.
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.
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.
