Jon Levenson is the Alfred List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School. He has contributed to Commonweal, and is, in my view, one of the most insightful commentators both on the Hebrew Bible and on Jewish-Christian dialogue.

In the recent issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, he makes a number of challenging (and, I think, helpful) observations.

He suggests:

It should be no surprise that the new focus on the literary character of the Hebrew Bible that has emerged over the past three decades has gone hand in hand with a new appreciation of midrash, including the midrashim that appear in the Bible itselfnot only the Hebrew Bible but also the New Testament. One of the most welcome developments of recent years has been the increased awareness of how deeply rooted in the scriptural interpretation of Second Temple Judaism both early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are. If we look at Judaism and Christianity from that historical perspective, we see them not as mother and daughter but as two siblings, descended from the common parent that was the Judaism that preceded them both and, more distantly, from the Hebrew Bible, which their common parent had long been reworking, rewriting, and reinterpreting. That insight, which derives from historical criticism but has important implications for the present, is one that I have found to be highly productive. As yet, neither Jews nor Christians have, for the most part, reckoned sufficiently with it.

He then ponders impediments to an in-depth dialogue:

On the Jewish side, the danger lies in a major difference between the purposes for which Christians and Jews go into the dialogue in the first place. If I may generalize (with due allowances for the exceptions), Christians go into it because of religious motives, whereas Jews go into the dialogue because of motives of communal self-defense and in pursuit of better intergroup relationsto prevent defamation, persecution, pogroms, and Holocausts. In my judgment, this altogether worthwhile motivation often leads the Jewish participants to minimize too readily the importance of theology, including the theological core of their own tradition, as if the difference between truth claims were no more significant than the difference between "eye-ther" and "ee-ther" or between "tomayto" and "tomahto." The logical end point is a religious relativism that undermines the whole idea of Jewish-Christian dialogue and ultimately can undermine as well the moral claims on which good intergroup relations depend. Whether the subject is biblical interpretation or interreligious conversation, in my judgment it is imperative to remember how important what we say and do really is.