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5 - Can Another Religion Be Seen as the Other?
- from PART II - JUDAISM AND THE OTHER
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- By Stanisław Krajewski, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw
- Edited by Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Eugene Korn
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- Book:
- Jewish Theology and World Religions
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 27 November 2019
- Print publication:
- 05 April 2012, pp 137-148
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Summary
THE OTHER
WHO IS the Other? A basic understanding of the term ‘other’ is shared by the man in the street and the philosopher: the other is an individual human being. But the philosopher sometimes uses a capital ‘O’: the Other. The typographical modification is used to express an important idea: the Other is so fundamentally important, so basic an ingredient of the world, so unique, and so inexhaustibly deep that the Otherness of a human person is of a different quality than the otherness of things, and it opens a specific dimension of being.
While this Otherness is a philosophical notion, it has a theological flavour. Indeed, I think it is equally a theological concept. After all, the idea of the uniqueness of another person is close to the concept of the soul and to the vision of being created in God's image.
With that Otherness in mind, the basic question within the framework of interfaith dialogue is whether the other religion can be perceived as having a similar dimension of otherness, one that deserves the capital ‘O’. The experience with the concepts of philosophers of dialogue such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, and of those in the phenomenological, hermeneutical, existentialist traditions suggests at least this: if the naive view of another person has proved to be an introduction to deeper insights, perhaps the same may be the case with religions. We can ask, therefore: ‘Can we reach beyond the naive view of the other religion?’This chapter offers comments on possible attitudes to other religions, suggested by insights derived from both modern philosophy and Jewish tradition.
THE PLURAL ‘YOU’
One way of using the philosophy of the Other as an inspiration for the shaping of the vision of other religions is to transfer discoveries from the realm of individual persons to the realm of religions. Whatever religions are—and this is far from clear—it is certain that they entail understanding individuals as belonging to a supra-individual entity. When we direct our attention to another religion we encounter not only individuals but also a group. Facing a religion, we both face a person and relate to a group. Hence the idea of transferring the insights used to describe the other individual, the Thou, to the plural other, the You.
Fr. Tadeusz Sroka Dziennik izraelski czyli religijny wymiar ludzkiego losu (An Israeli Diary, or the Religious Dimension of Man's Fate)
- from BOOK REVIEWS
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- By Stanisław Krajewski, Warsaw
- Edited by Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Poles and Jews: Renewing the Dialogue
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 28 November 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2004, pp 411-415
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Summary
In Poland the attitude towards Jews has never been indifference. Today when there are hardly any Jews in Poland the fascination persists, being latent for some and open, even close to the point of obsession, for others. One can discern four manifestations of this attitude. First, there is antisemitism: mariy are suspicious of the presence of Jews, assimilated, fully Polonized Jews included. Second, there is a conviction that Jews were well off in Poland - too well off, some think-which goes together with rejecting all suggestions that Jews could suffer because of Poles. This is why blaming Poles for anti-semitism provokes so much outrage. On the other hand, I believe that reproaching Poles for particular acute, let alone specifically Polish anti-semitism is unjustified, and the phenomenon of Jewish creativity on this very soil deserves to be better appreciated by Jews.
While negative attitudes towards Jews were widely known, it is only by perceiving the positive ones that a full picture emerges. The third type of current Polish attitude towards Jews is philo-semitism, a sympathetic interest in Jewish culture corn bined with nostalgia for the former presence of Jews in Poland. As a rule, the intelligentsia condemns anti-semitism, at least verbally. Being against anti-semitism is also considered a test of one's acceptance of pluralism, and even the criterion of one's decency. Furthermore, an opinion recurs, among young people as well, that Poland suffered a vital loss with the disappearance of Jews. This feeling results from the awareness that today's homogeneous Poland is too dull, and the Jews personify the pluralism and vividness of old Poland.
The interest in things Jewish was illustrated by the exceptionally wide response to the recent (November 1985) exhibition ‘The Last Ones', a photograhic reportage by Tomasz Tomaszewski about the Jews now living in Poland. Also popular, though narrower in subject, was another exhibition held in the same Warsaw photographers’ gallery back in 1981 - a panorama of Jewish cemeteries in Poland by Monika Krajewska. In the meantime a number of books on Jewish subjects immediately sold out. In the visitors’ book of ’ The Last Ones', among many entries expressing sympathy and concern, the wish appears that the world of Polish Jews should not die, that the people on the photographs should not be ‘the last ones’, and that Poland should not be without Jews.