You forced me to read the article. I was only responding to ZC's posts regarding the church's position on Jerusalem.
While the author's attempt at reaching out is commendable and decent (as was John Paul's), many of the points he makes are sophomoric or disingenuous. For example:
Judaism is not about suffering. It is, in the final analysis, about spreading knowledge of the God of Israel to the world.
That is by no means what Judaism is "about" and never was.
He does make some good points in that we can work together in a pragmatic way to do God's will. Sign me up. I'm all for finding common ground for doing good works.
"Judaism is not about suffering. It is, in the final analysis, about spreading knowledge of the God of Israel to the world.
That is by no means what Judaism is "about" and never was."
That may not be what it was like in Jesus' time and it may not be what Judaism is like now, however, the point is that this is what Judaism was always meant to be, and the story of the OT really revolves around their failure to achieve this.
Rather than the Jews evangelising the gentiles, for the main part they kept being reverse-evangelised and ended up chasing after the gentile gods rather than remaining faithful to Yahweh. The solution that the Pharisees ultimately found to this problem was one of ethnic and ritual separation both from gentiles and even from Jews who mixed with gentiles - if they remained aloof and separate then they couldn't be tempted by the gentile gods and customs. But at the same time this meant that the Pharisees (and consequently modern Judaism) abandoned their mission from God, and cut themselves off from the very people that God wanted them to evangelise - they wanted to keep God and His law for themselves, keep it perfectly, but not take it to those who needed it.
This is one of the main reasons why Jesus was so angry with the Pharisees - their mission was meant to be universal, but they did everything they could to frustrate its universality and remain insular and separate instead.
This intended universal mission of the Jews is revealed all the way back in Genesis when God makes His promises to Abraham - "All nations shall be blessed through your seed."