Bergoglio and Skorka in Hebrew

When Pope Francis was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he worked with Jews and Muslims and members of other religions in order to promote dialogue, understanding and collaboration. He enjoyed a close friendship with Conservative Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary. Their conversations were filmed for Argentine television and eventually became a book, published in Spanish in 2010 with the title “On Heaven and Earth”. The book is composed of twenty nine short chapters, each one dealing with a particular theme. Among the chapters, the two religious leaders speak about: God, the Devil, atheism, prayer, death, homosexuality, money, the Holocaust, interreligious dialogue, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the future of religion.

It is particularly relevant that the book now appears in Hebrew, published by Toby Press (see their page here). Israeli readers can be exposed to the thought of the man who became Pope Francis as he dialogues with an Argentine Jew. In fact, the Jew in question, Rabbi Skorka, will be accompanying Pope Francis to the Holy Land along with another one of their old time collaborators, Omar Abboud, former secretary general of the Islamic Center in Buenos Aires.

The Hebrew edition is entitled “About Rome and Jerusalem: The conversations between a Pope and a Rabbi”. It is beautifully translated, attractively presented and has a series of footnotes to help the Jewish reader negotiate the Christian passages in the text. It is good preparatory reading for the upcoming pilgrimage of the Pope. President of Israel Shimon Peres endorsed the book with the words: “Their conversations forge confidence, arouse inspiration and bestow hope for peace”.

A word of caution: the Hebrew translation names the Catholic participant in the conversation “Francis” although it should be pointed out that he was not yet Francis when the book was recorded and published in Spanish… he was then Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

As a footnote, we, as Hebrew speaking Catholics can express a certain disappointment with the volume. Despite considerable progress in dialogue between Jews and Christians, the publishers chose to maintain a traditional vocabulary about Christianity, using the word “Yeshu” to translate Jesus and the word ‘komer” to translate the word “priest”.* Both these words are the product of centuries of polemics that we hopefully can begin to leave behind us.

At a time that Israel witnesses a series of hate crimes against Christians, the book bears witness though to the friendship, intimate conversation, mutual respect and collaboration that have developed between Jews and Catholics in the more recent past.

* “Yeshu” instead of “Yeshu’a” is a perversion of the name of Jesus in Hebrew and was used as a polemical curse, an acronym short for “May his name and memory be erased”. The word “komer” is used in the Old Testament only for priests that worship idols. The neutral word for priest is “kohen”.