One of the greatest joys and blessings in my life has been my thirty years of relationship with my irrepressible and brilliant friend Michael Signer. For more than a decade, I was privileged to be his faculty colleague at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, and not a single day passed during those years that Michael and I did not speak with—often for hours—and learn from one another about intellectual, spiritual, and personal matters. While I felt his departure from HUC-JIR to become the Abrams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame as a great loss, I remain grateful that the chord that links us has remained unbroken. I take such pride in all he has accomplished in his current position and am thankful that the Jewish community has such a learned, passionate, and committed scholar-rabbi in the highest international and national circles of Catholic-Jewish dialogue and academic discourse.

Michael has modeled so many things for me, foremost among them that profound scholarship is linked to the deepest existential commitments that a person possesses. I will review some of those commitments as a way of introducing the present essay [ ] in honor of Michael. Raised as I was with so many traditional teachers, the Jewish voice as contained in the legal tradition of my people continues to inform my soul at some very deep level. I continue to be attracted to the genre of Jewish legal literature labeled “responsa” and this genre continues to represent for me—all the issues raised by post-modernism regarding “essentialist postures” notwithstanding—a powerfully authentic Jewish language to which I have devoted many hours of research.

For the uninitiated in this literature, responsa can best be understood as technical legal documents—case discussions and their “holdings,” in modern Western jurisprudential nomenclature—that rabbis throughout the centuries have used to apply the insights, meanings, norms, and precedents provided by the literary and legal texts of the Jewish past (namely, Bible, Talmud, codes of law, and other responsa) to the issues of the age. Simply put, for over a thousand years leading rabbinic jurist-legislators have employed responsa to issue authoritative renderings of Jewish law to rabbinic colleagues for application in particular cases. A single responsum must be seen as part of a vast body of Jewish case law that stretches over the centuries. It is the crossroads where text and context meet in the ongoing tradition of Jewish legal hermeneutics. Responsa constitute a distinctively idiomatic mode of Jewish discourse.

I have always loved discussing this literature with Michael and have profited immeasurably from the empathic yet critical insights his conversations and observations on this material have yielded. It is therefore with a great sense of gratitude to Michael for our ongoing friendship and ties that I here provide an analysis of a legal writing authored by Rabbi Hayim David Halevi (1924–1998) on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Rabbi Halevi was the outstanding pupil of the famed Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel Ben Zion Meir Hai Ouziel and studied with his mentor for many years at the prestigious Yeshivat Porat Yosef in Jerusalem. He later served as Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Tel Aviv–Jaffa and he was one of the most prolific and famous rabbinic authorities in Israel during his lifetime.

The above was excerpted from Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer edited by Franklin T. Harkins