Beyond the Walls

Joseph Palmisano explores the interreligious significance of empathy for Jewish-Christian understanding. Drawing on the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) and Edith Stein (1891-1942) he develops a phenomenological category of empathy defined as a way of ''''re-membering'''' oneself with the religious other.Palmisano follows Heschel''s and Stein''s personal and spiritual journeys through the darkest years of Nazi Germany. He shows that Heschel''s call to Christian interlocutors for a return to God is an ecumenical call to humanity to embrace perceived others: a call to live life as a response to God''s pathos. This call finds a prophetic answer in Edith Stein''s witness of empathy with regard to the Holocaust. Stein a Catholic creates a dialectical bridge with the Jewish ''other'' neither distancing herself nor denying her Jewish roots. Stein''s simultaneously Jewish and Christian fidelity is a model for interreligious relations. It is also a challenge to Catholics to remember their religion''s Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with others.Beyond the Walls is a critical contribution to the fostering of interreligious understanding offering both a model of the ideal Jewish-Christian relationship in Heschel and Stein and criteria with which to evaluate contemporary initiatives and controversies concerning interreligious dialogue.