cover image Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History

Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History

Laura Bernstein, Ron Miller, . . SkyLight Paths, $18.99 (261pp) ISBN 978-1-59473-139-6

This book ambitiously aims to contribute "to a much needed healing of the two-thousand-year rift between Christians and Jews." To achieve that bold objective, Miller and Bernstein focus on analyzing the Gospel of Matthew, asserting that "it is paradoxically the most Jewish and the most anti-Jewish book in the Christian Testament." Miller, a former Jesuit priest who chairs the religion department at Lake Forest College in Illinois, uses his own translation of Matthew in 36 brief chapters. Bernstein, who spent five years in rabbinical studies, offers her commentary followed by Miller's discussion of her analysis as well as his own exegesis. Each chapter concludes with three questions, intended for use by small groups of Jews and Christians that the authors ask readers to organize. The topics range from messianism and the Lord's Prayer to sin, peace, identity, miraculous birth and Jewish renewal, among others. Bernstein's controversial conclusion calls for Jews to pay heed to Jeshu, as the authors call Jesus, and to welcome this "rebbe" as a revered teacher. While some may see the book's aim as grandiose, the authors tackle an enormous and bitter problem in a concrete, helpful way. (Nov.)