Building Interfaith Community
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Future Renewals: Looking Toward the Next Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship and Practice,” was co-edited by Andrew Wymer, vice-president of the Liturgical Conference board and professor of worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me.
We solicited essays from a range of members of the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) looking at what has changed in liturgical scholarship and liturgical practice in the years since NAAL was founded in response to the Second Vatican Council.
Here is an excerpt from an essay by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman entitled “Liturgy’s Ethical Dilemma.” Dr. Hoffman was one of the founders of the North American Academy of Liturgy in 1975 and for many years the only Jewish scholar among Roman Catholics and Protestants. He looks to past experiences of discord and harmony to name a future trajectory for people of faith. –– Melinda Quivik
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We should take enormous pride in the liturgical revolution that has characterized the last half century. I count myself blessed to have been born into such a period and to have chanced upon a time and calling that put me in the revolution’s center. Think just of the most obvious signs of ferment we have lived through: the demise of ethnically Catholic or Lutheran or Jewish or even Episcopalian cultures; the very possibility of prayer in the shadow of the Holocaust; the feminist critique of an androcentric liturgy and entire religious cultures that men alone control; the emergence of LGBTQ+ from the closet and the realization of gender’s fluidity; the steady advance of secularism and all those Pew reports on millennials and the “nones”; not to mention deconstructionism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and (by now) everyday ordinary globalism—too many “isms” to count.
Among my happiest moments are the many interchanges across faith lines with my Christian liturgical colleagues, as, together, we have defined, faced, or furthered these challenges. Two such moments stand out in my mind as examples of the path we have taken. Together, they illustrate an underlying ethical dilemma that still infects our liturgical project and beckons for our attention if the project is to reach fulfillment.
The first memory is drawn from the 1980s, when, for a year, several of us liturgists were hired by the United States Navy to design a continuing education course for chaplains. We had several planning meetings, including a final one in Newport, Rhode Island, where a group of senior chaplains had been summoned to determine whether our proposed course of study was “seaworthy,” and if not, to “find the holes in it before we launched it” in naval commands throughout the world. During a lunchtime break at one of those meetings, I went walking with Dick Vosko, who was already a recognized expert on liturgical spaces, and whom I knew very well as colleague and as friend.
When the conversation turned somehow to our personal stories, it turned out that we were both descended from families in Ukraine. Given that we were about the same age, it occurred to us that our grandparents or great grandparents there might, conceivably, have known one another. But they were not likely to have been best friends. My grandparents told stories of Ukrainian Christians being taught to despise Jews, and even to attack them, especially during Lent when Gospel readings (and sometimes sermons) painted Jews so negatively. Jews, for their part, returned the compliment, treating Christians with suspicion born of fear and Christianity as a woeful deviation from its Jewish roots. What a miracle that we, their Christian and Jewish descendants, had spent years meeting together, learning from one another, sharing meals together, and even worshiping side by side in mutual fondness and respect.
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The second story Rabbi Hoffman tells will be posted in this site in two weeks along with some conclusions.
The full essay with full references is available now in the digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 38, no. 1 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.
Lawrence A. Hoffman is professor emeritus of liturgy, worship, and ritual at Hebrew Union College, in New York. He is the author or editor of fifty books and past-president and Berakah Award recipient of the North American Academy of Liturgy to which he has belonged since 1975.
Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Liturgy’s Ethical Dilemma,” Liturgy 38, no. 1 (2023): 74–79.