DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM Jonathan Webber, dressed in his prayer shawl, is a Jewish cantor from England serving Congregation Sof Ma'arav during this year's High Holy Days. Below, the congregation's Paul Adler and Robert Krigelman hold the "sifrei torah" (scrolls of the law), the Old Testament texts used by the congregation.

Conversations between religions
are a peacetime activity and
fall apart during wartime, a scholar says

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By Mary Adamski
madamski@starbulletin.com

An internationally known Jewish studies professor is here to lead the holy day services at Congregation Sof Ma'arav this month, bringing a scholarly dimension to sermons and commentaries as well as leading the Hebrew-language liturgy of song and prayer.

Jonathan Webber holds the UNESCO chair in Jewish and interfaith studies at the University of Birmingham, England, and has taught Jewish studies at Oxford University for 20 years.

He lectures at Cracow University in Poland, where he helped establish an Institute for Holocaust Studies. He serves on the board of the museum at Auschwitz, site of a Nazi death camp, as an appointee of the Polish government. He just completed a six-month stint as lecturer in Budapest, Hungary.

"Interfaith dialogue is a peacetime activity," said Webber in an interview. "It collapses when there is war or violence. My friends in Israel tell me neither side is interested in talking at all."

Webber said he is particularly interested in the relationship between interfaith dialogue and genocide. "When a campaign of genocide occurs, it is in a place where the different people have lived together, are familiar on a daily basis with each other."

"I am interested in events in the Middle East," he said, but for his text during the Holy Days services, he avoids Jewish current affairs. "I think what people want is the spirituality, rather than the politics."

"Judaism is religion of duties rather than a religion of rights," he said. The liturgy for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins tomorrow evening, brings the participants through a potentially uncomfortable assessment of "how do we deal with our unsavory past."

COURTESY PHOTO

"These are God's visiting hours, and God is looking for us to account for ourselves," he said. "A good Jew is one who is getting better."

Webber said that in the West European tradition that was brought to the United States, "the custom is for rabbis to rant and rave and tell everybody they've sinned and they need to jolly well look out for themselves or all hell will break loose. In some respects, people like to get shouted at," he said, but it's not his style.

On Rosh Hashana he talked about arrogance and humility, and, he said, it is a theme he will revisit in a Monday sermon. "Humility is the best virtue. It's the importance of not taking one's own material self too seriously. Judaism does not discourage us from enjoying the good things in life. But one needs to distance self from one's materialism and develop humility for oneself."

The seasonal services are a nostalgic trip for people who "appreciate old melodies which they recognize from childhood." Webber has come here for services several times in the past 24 years. He finds that Hawaii Jews are interested in other traditions than their own, probably European, roots. "They welcome that I can bring in the different traditions. I try to blend Spanish, Portuguese, German and so forth."

Most of the recitation is in Hebrew, which most Jews may be able to read but don't understand what they are reading, he said. "Today, Hebrew literacy has collapsed," and only 15 percent of Jews who are in the strictest, or Orthodox, tradition who are likely to know the language at a high level of understanding.

The Holy Days format being followed this month is a link with history. The liturgy "is mentioned in the Mishnah, the first literary accounts after the biblical canons, 1,800 years ago. It has been added to over the years.

"There's a centerpiece prayer about how God knows who will live and who will die. We know it was written in medieval times by a rabbi in Germany who was tortured by a Christian bishop trying to convert him. We know their names. After he was released, minus both hands, he created the prayer and died. It got into the prayer books."

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