Rabbi Neusner has used the opening joke in a previous article about the Pope, but otherwise, this piece is completely new - and appears under the rabbi's rubric in the Huffington Post.
Lessons from Pope Benedict
July 14, 2010
The best joke I ever made up was when I told someone at the gym where I work out, who had challenged my opinion about the New York Yankees versus the New York Mets, "Don't try to argue with me. I'm a professor -- I'm always right!" Unfortunately, he didn't laugh; he snapped a towel at me.
When you elect a highly accomplished scholar and intellectual to a position that bestows the status of infallibility, you are buying trouble. A scholar doesn't need to be told he is infallible. He knows. That is what he is paid to be. A scholar's calling values integrity, rationality, and forthrightness.
The first five years of the papacy of Cardinal Ratzinger have revealed these traits along with abundant humility and kindness and love. But the world will take some time to get used to its scholar-Pope, who speaks forthrightly about fundamental issues and lets the chips fall where they may.
The Muslims learned that fact in Regensburg, when the Pope in a profound lecture called into question the contribution of Islam to civilization.
The Anglicans learned that fact when the Pope in a gesture of honesty invited the [traditional] Anglican priesthood[and faithful] to join the Church.
The Jews learned that fact when the Pope reverted to a liturgy that called into question the faith of Judaism.
In all three cases the breach was restored, cooler heads prevailed. So Islam was pacified, the Anglicans and the Jews conciliated.
But the scholar-Pope had told the truth as Catholic Christianity at heart sees it: Islam cannot compete with Christianity for moral insight, the Anglicans will be welcome home, and the Jews would be better off in the Church.
Pope Benedict spoke like a scholar and pronounced Christian truth as the infallible Bishop of Rome. A scholar could do no less.
The current issue that troubles the peace is [exemplified by] Cardinal Ratzinger's prior disposition of the case of a priest guilty of sexually abusing children [the late Fr. Murphy in Wisconsin].
Christian charity called for forgiveness of the priest, a broken dying penitent. Justice demanded excommunication. Cardinal Ratzinger withheld the rites of humiliation that formed the just penalty. The man died in the bosom of the Church. Benedict VI showed the meaning of repentance and Christian love.
When I met the Pope in Rome last January, I asked him what he planned to do when the second volume of his
Jesus of Nazareth was done, in about half a year. With a sad smile he said, "Nothing more, this is my last book. I have other things to do."*
A scholar who ceases to write books does not long outlive his last title. He did not have to add, "After all, I'm the Pope." But the scholar in me whispered, "At what cost!"
What the world has learned in five years about a scholar-Pope is the price that academia pays for truth-telling and integrity.
Infallibility exacts costs. People prefer conciliatory politicians over contentious critics. Those are the lessons taught by the generic scholar-popes.
The Holy Father, as the Catholics call him, is a lovely, loving man; the world benefits from his truth-telling.
What I learn from this particular scholar-Pope is something more.
The world has a heavy stake in the proven integrity of this man and in his power to speak truth to all humanity.
So the Muslims, the Anglicans, and we Jews too have to prepare for scholarly debates about reason and shared rationality and meet head-on the conflicts that await over who is right and who is wrong, and what Scripture and tradition demand of us all.
*
In his blog today, Paolo Rodari says that the previously speculated 'third book' in the JON series will come as an appendix to the first two volumes and not really as a separate book. I will translate Rodari's entry later.
I did not see the following article by Neusner before, but then maybe I was not looking at the time because both the OR and Il Foglio published an account of Neusner's meeting with the Pope last January based on inerviews given by Neusner. This accoutn is in his own words, and has a few more details.
Meeting Benedict:
A rabbi talks with the Pope
By Jacob Neusner
January 27, 2010
The walk through the papal apartments led through several long rooms, each richly decorated in antiques and hangings and paved with marble.
My journey to the heart of Catholic Christianity might have been expected to have precipitated long thoughts on history and family: What would the first Jacob Neusner, my grandfather from the town of Koretz in the Pale of Settlement and Beverly, Mass., who died 77 years ago, a few months before I was born, have thought?
How many Jewish scholars have had occasion to walk through those palatial rooms, and what brought them to call on the Pope? As guard after guard saluted me and my wife, I might have wondered how often kippah-wearing visitors had received the Swiss Guards’ salute.
If you assumed that it was these thoughts of who and where I was that raced through my mind, you’d be mistaken. Midway through the walk from room to room, I had the awful thought that my fly was open. I checked.
My wife and I had been invited to visit to Pope Benedict XVI for a private audience in his Vatican office on January 18, the day after his high-profile visit to Rome’s main synagogue.
He and I had had an occasional scholarly correspondence before he had been Pope, as we shared an interest in the historical study of first-century Judaism and Christianity.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he generously wrote an endorsement of my 1993 book
A Rabbi Talks With Jesus. Then, much to my surprise, a decade-and-a-half later, when Benedict’s book
Jesus of Nazareth was published, a good portion of one of its chapters was spent discussing my book - a sincere and, I believe, unprecedented theological engagement with a rabbi’s work on the part of a sitting Pope.
Yet until my most recent visit to Rome, the Pope and I had only met once, and then only very briefly at a 2008 inter-religious gathering in Washington, so I was particularly excited to get to spend a bit of time with him.
Waiting outside the papal office, my wife and I wondered what the Pope would want to discuss. We need not have worried. The Pope and I have in common and talked about what professors always discuss: What are you working on, and what will you do next?
So when my wife and I spent our 25 minutes with Benedict, I asked him how he was progressing with volume two of
Jesus of Nazareth, and he asked me whether I’m still publishing a book a month.
He told me that the second volume would come out soon and that it would be the last book he would write. But, he explained, he has other work that will keep him busy. That’s the price exacted from a major scholar who is elected Pope.
And that was before we even sat down. The news that he was writing his last book struck me as sad. I said so, and he reminded me that he is older than me — as it happens, by five years. That his book-writing days are coming to an end precluded any discussion of the book I had hoped to someday convince him to write with me — a dialogue on the apostle Paul’s theology of Israel in Romans — and I didn’t bring it up.
He asked me what I’m working on, and I started to explain: “Form analysis of the rabbinic canon…” His eyes seemed to glaze over, so I broke off that line of discussion and took the occasion to give him a copy of my new book introducing the Talmud, published just now in Italian, and the German translation of
A Rabbi Talks With Jesus.
He appreciated receiving the book in his native German and said he was thankful that the Talmud book was not too long for the time he had for reading. He told my wife that reading
A Rabbi Talks With Jesus gave him comfort after his sister died.
I left with a vivid picture of a humble and good-natured man wholly devoted to the service of God. He is generous in his appreciation of others and does not take for granted others’ appreciation.
I leave it to others to speak for the Jewish people in discussions that will engage us over issues of common concern — and contention — between Judaism and Catholicism.
Myself, I will cherish the memory of the fellow scholar I had the pleasure of getting to know in Rome.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/07/2010 23:51]