Personal Remarks.

          Let me begin with some personal statements about the presuppositions of my presentation. I am not here to debate or negotiate issues of ultimate value related to transcendent claims of my faith. I am here to seek clarification and understanding; to let the light of truth build trust in such a way that pure freedom and mutual respect will develop between Christian and Jew. My Jewish colleague and I, dealing with our specific topic, walk down a beautiful seashore, as it were, witnessing to the treasures of each other’s faith without the slightest desire to manipulate the other to one’s own position. That is what I call good faith. In Romans 14:23, Saint Paul writes, “for whatever does not proceed from faith (or faithfulness) is sin” before God and before humanity.

What is the thesis of my paper? That it is possible for two peoples such as Jews and Orthodox Christians to hold on with faithfulness to their convictions, their ultimate beliefs, their transcendent values, and still foster mutual respect and friendship. I do not say merely tolerance, but positive tolerance and friendship. I seek not only to state the thesis but to provide as well a theological construction for its actualization. Yet, I have another purpose in mind, a hidden agenda, if you like, and that is to expose as clearly as I can the diabolical abuse of religion, if not directly, then indirectly through culture. The abuse of religion is to marginalize, oppress, hurt, and even to destroy others in the name of religion. In this connection, I have several stories to tell, some which have long defined my thinking, and some which have moved me deeply as recently as last night visiting the Jewish museum in Athens.

        When I was a child living in the town of Gargalianoi in the southwestern Peloponnese, we used to have an annual celebration in honor of an ethnic martyr who had died battling the Bulgarians in the early twentieth century. As the Ottoman Empire was weakening and losing its grip on its Balkan holdings, Greeks and Bulgarians themselves, although partners against the Turks, conflicted over boundary claims. History lessons in school had taught us to hate not only the Turks but the Bulgarians as well. My personal animosity toward the latter, without ever having seen a single Bulgarian, intensified one day when I saw in our history book a picture of Bulgarians literally holding Greek heads by the hair but separated from their bodies. Our local hero had died in such confrontations. We had a statue of him in our town and celebrated his memory with religious ceremonies each year.

        Then suddenly one day I discovered, to my great shock, that Bulgarians were Orthodox Christians! Another picture in the same book featured Bulgarian Orthodox priests together with Bulgarian soldiers in full weaponry! “Are the Bulgarians Orthodox?” I asked my father. “Yes! Don’t you know?” he replied somewhat impatiently. I did not say anything more, not even to my father whom I deeply respected, but that occasion was my first religious scandal and revelation showing how skin deep Orthodox Christianity was for Orthodox Christians themselves. If our Orthodox faith is so embracing and precious, I said to my self, why is it that Greeks and Bulgarians could not settle their affairs peacefully instead of killing each other? From then on I decided to do my own thinking about what is true and right rather than absorb what everybody else was telling me.

        The second story comes from a friend who lived out the events of the Asia Minor “catastrophe” in the early 1920s. After an unwise and futile attempt by the mainland Greek army to reconquer Byzantine territory in Turkey following World War I, two million Greeks native to Asia Minor were driven from their ancestral homes by the Turks in horrific ways. My friend, only ten years of age at that time, lingered behind as Smyrna was being emptied by fleeing Greeks. He and a friend went into a house to find something of value to take with them, when suddenly two Turkish soldiers burst into the house. The boys froze in their tracks. One soldier said: “Let’s kill them!” The other replied, “No, they are only children.” The lives of the two Christian boys were spared on that day because one of the Turkish soldiers, like the biblical Good Samaritan, was of a noble character.

  The last story is of a Jewish widow in Greece during the German occupation. It comes from a pamphlet, published by the museum we visited yesterday, which I read last night virtually in tears. The woman lived in Thessalonike and, sensing the danger of the Germans, moved her family to Athens, but then returned home alone to fetch her belongings. There she was captured and imprisoned, her only crime being that she was a Jew. From prison she wrote the following words in part to her children:

Dear Children,

    In spite of my trying not to upset you, I see that the last hour is near. I do not find

comfort being separated from dear children that I wish with all my heart to see, and

in these last days to have the unique joy of my life.

    For two nights we sat on the bed dressed, waiting for the knock at the door to wake us

and to take us away. Everyone is selling their things in the street. The cries, the moans,

the tragedy cannot be described. . . We are living a bad dream, day and night in

indescribable anguish. God, who sees my tears, should pity you and keep you alive.

Live happily if you can. May God preserve you from evil. This is my prayer every night.

The children survived but the woman was taken away and eventually killed. Is it possible to read to read this poignant story of this widow and not be moved with deep compassion? What is it about religious misconceptions and prejudice, as well as the mixture of religion and culture, that has led people to commit acts of unspeakable injustice and cruelty against those of different faiths? What is our responsibility as religious leaders and theologians in this matter as we look into the past and face the future? At the first international meeting in Lucerne (1977) Shemaryahu Talmon had already proposed that even academic discussions are inevitably concerned with the life of individuals and of society and that they should aim at clarifying principles, rules, and attitudes which help regulate everyday life. To quote him: “Every debate among sages. . . must have as its end not the mere elucidation of theories in the form of a scholastic exercise, but should — at any rate ideally — lead to practical conclusions.”^[134] Let us hope and pray that continued dialogue, on the one hand, will expose the pernicious use of religion as what it actually is, a denial of both religion and our common humanity, and, on the other hand, will encourage a renewed sense of positive and respectful relations between all religious communities.