Acta Benedicti Pp. XVI 353

NUNTIUS

Ad Hebraeos occasione annuae festivitatis dictae « Pesah ».

To the Jewish Community on the Feast of Pesah

My visit to the United States offers me the occasion to extend a warm and

heartfelt greeting to my Jewish brothers and sisters in this country and

throughout the world. A greeting that is all the more spiritually intense

because the great feast of Pesah is approaching. ''This day shall be for you

a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your

generations you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever''.1 While the Chris-

tian celebration of Easter differs in many ways from your celebration of

Pesah, we understand and experience it in continuation with the biblical

narrative of the mighty works which the Lord accomplished for his people.

At this time of your most solemn celebration, I feel particularly close,

precisely because of what Nostra Aetate calls Christians to remember always:

that the Church ''received the revelation of the Old Testament through the

people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient

Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of

that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots,

the Gentiles''.2 In addressing myself to you I wish to re-affirm the Second

Vatican Council's teaching on Catholic-Jewish relations and reiterate the

Church's commitment to the dialogue that in the past forty years has fun-

damentally changed our relationship for the better.

Because of that growth in trust and friendship, Christians and Jews can

rejoice together in the deep spiritual ethos of the Passover, a memorial

(zikkarôn) of freedom and redemption. Each year, when we listen to the

Passover story we return to that blessed night of liberation. This holy time

of the year should be a call to both our communities to pursue justice, mercy,

solidarity with the stranger in the land, with the widow and orphan, as Moses

commanded: ''But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the

Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this''.3

1 Exodus 12:14. 2 Nostra Aetate, 4. 3 Deuteronomy 24:18.