Enabling Dialogue about the Land: A Resource Book for Jews and Christians ed. by Phillip A. Cunningham, Ruth Langer, and Jesper Svartvik (review)

For Jews, there are two essential aspects of our relationship to the Land, Erets Yisrael. First, Jews are a people, not merely a faith community. We display all the characteristics of a people: common language, heritage, literature, history, holidays, calendar, and ethnic solidarity. As such, the Jewish people have both a need and a right to a homeland. Second, for Jews the repeated biblical promise of the Land is an essential part of their covenantal relation with God, not merely a Jewish political interest. This critical element runs counter to Palestinian liberation theology, which has written Jews out of the divine land promise. In order to reject the Jewish right to the Land, Christian theology had to deny the validity of God’s ongoing covenant with the Jewish people. While hard supersessionism is unpopular among U.S. theologians today, it is alive and well among many Middle East Christian theologians. There are also essentials for Palestinian Christians, who legitimately point to the absence of what is essential for them in some Jewish and Evangelical narratives about the Land and Zionism. In these accounts there is scant consideration of Palestinian Christian presence, self-understanding, experience, or theology. Much Jewish-Christian conversation about the Land has been not dialogue but monologue aimed at either conquering or erasing the other.

Enabling Dialogue about the Land offers theological, academic, and practical material to resource constructive Jewish-Christian dialogue on Israeli-Palestinian issues. It stresses the necessity for Christians and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians to understand each other and promotes the need to listen to, not deny, the other in this dialogue. Most of the essays strive to acknowledge and come to grips with the essentials. The work is the fruit of an International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ) 2011–16 project, “Promise, Land, and Hope,” by Christian and Jewish interfaith scholars. Part I contains topical essays divided into “scriptural overviews,” “the meaning of the Land [in Jewish, Christian-Palestinian, and Muslim thought],” “challenges,” “personal reflections,” and “creative approaches to the Land in Christian theology.” Part II offers a curriculum and guidelines for dialogue about Israel-Palestine. The book is a rich reservoir of scholarship, theology, personal narrative, and practical steps to advance a productive approach to this contentious subject.

Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Michael Trainor, and J. Cornelis de Vos detail references to the Land in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament. Langer ably offers a schematic overview of Jewish theological views of the Land and the State of Israel. While a few nineteenth-century Jewish Reform thinkers denied Jewish peoplehood and a restoration of a Jewish state on the Land, she notes that these ideas never took root. The age-old yearning to return to Zion sustained the overwhelming majority of European Jews and Jews in Arab lands (“edot ha-mizrach”). Even contemporary ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists insist on the Jewish connection and return to the Land, rejecting only the political entity of Israel as the proper means for that return.

Jamal Khader (the only native Palestinian represented in the book) details a Palestinian Christian theology of the Land. His essay is an example of traditional hard supersessionism. He sees Christians as the indigenous people of the Land. In his spiritual reading of the Bible, Christians have Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as forebears and are the heirs to the covenantal promises that continue through Jesus Christ. After Jesus, Christians are the people of God. His theology obliterates from scripture and sacred history both today’s Jewish people and post-Second Temple rabbinic Judaism.

Deborah Weissman and Richard Neuhaus offer important personal reflections on life on the Land today, reminding us that the subject is a deeply human reality, not an academic or theoretical exercise. For Weissman, Jewish sovereignty in Israel is rebirth and...