Quotes from David Novak

Jewish status is defined by the divine election of Israel and his descendants. One does not become a Jew by one's own volition.

Roots can live without branches, although truncated; branches cannot live without roots.

A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.

The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone.

All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community's revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation.

For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.

A traditional rabbi is the man to whom the community and its members turn to rule on what Jewish law requires of them, particularly in cases of doubt.

As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern with Jews and Judaism.

The shortcoming of purely political discourse between Christians and Jews arises from the fact that it is largely built upon the perception of a common enemy.

God chose us to live both in body and in soul, but the body functions for the sake of the soul more than the soul functions for the body.

We Jews who willingly and happily confirm our covenantal status and its attendant rights and duties must take the question of mission seriously: either to accept it or reject it knowingly and with conviction.

It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level.

The rabbi is often the regular preacher in the synagogue, the man whose sermons offer his community more general theological and moral guidance.

I first came to Jewish-Catholic relations in 1963, while studying for the rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms.

Theological reflection takes place within history, but the history within which it takes place is an ongoing, open-ended process.

Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.

Theology always has moral implications, and morality is always undergirded by theology.

All the questions discussed in the Talmud and related rabbinic literature are normative questions: either they are questions of what one is to think or what one is to do. Every prescribed thought has some practical implication; every prescribed act has some theoretical implication.

Every individual is a person necessarily imbedded in a range of multiple relations, and therefore, no one is really independent in anything but a relative sense; no one is truly autonomous.

Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.