Back in May, the Chief Rabbinate criticized Jewish participation in a Christian women's conference organized in Jerusalem by the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus. The issue generated controversy in the pages of The Jerusalem Post. Isi Leibler wrote an op-ed which argued that the Chief Rabbinate was wrong in its approach to the Evangelicals (June 12), while Ellen Horowitz's warned that participation in such events, where some of the organizations involved may be active in missionary work, was crossing theological red lines (June 20).

As a rabbi who entered the rabbinate in June 1963 with a strong bias against any inter-faith dialogue and cooperation, and who is now so passionate about the importance of inter-religious communication and study that I have established an Institute for the furtherance of Jewish - Christian Understanding in Efrat (where many Christians have been studying the Jewish roots of their faith), I want to state clearly the reasons for the sea-change in my outlook.

TO PARAPHRASE Charles Dickens in the beginning of his Tale of Two Cities: These are the best of times, and the worst of times. On the one hand, after almost 2,000 years of exile and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, we have returned to our homeland, to Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem, to a Jewish army and a Jewish police force, and to the miracle of the ingathering of exiles, from the Ethiopian Beta Yisrael to the Indian Bnei Menashe.

But, on the other hand, we face the existential threat of Iran's Ahmadinejad soon to be in control of atomic weaponry; we are threatened by Hamas in the South, and by Hizbullah in the North. Moreover, our staunchest ally, the United States of America, is being neutralized by what appears to be a hopeless imbroglio in Iraq. Europe is quickly becoming transformed into a pro-Muslim bastion, and Islam itself seems poised for world domination following a line of jihad-inspired Wahhabi fanaticism.

Yes, I truly have faith that to be alone with God is to be with a majority of One; but from a practical perspective, how can roughly 5.5 million Israelis plus another seven million Jews world-wide stand up to more than a billion Muslims?

NOW IT seems that thankfully God had provided the cure even before we diagnosed the disease. For the first time since the advent of Christianity, mainstream Christian leaders - Catholic, Evangelical and Protestant - have extended a hand to us Jews in friendship, a friendship with far-reaching theological and political ramifications.

And there are more than a billion Christians in the world. What is now happening on the worldwide geopolitical scene is much more than "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

In this case, the enemy (Christianity) of my enemy (radical Islam) is my cousin, if not my brother. After all, Christianity emerged from the matrix of Judaism, and the founder of Christianity was a Jewish teacher who - it would certainly appear from the Gospels - lived a Jewish life-style, replete with the Sabbath, festivals and kashrut. Hence there is every logical, historical and religious reason for there to be a rapprochement between us.

I cannot blame many of my co-religionists for being skeptical. Often those who are closest to each other - and yet differ in many fundamental areas of theology and belief - become the most implacable of enemies. (Witness the Catholic-Protestant bloodshed in Ireland until a very short time ago, and the often petty infighting between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews).

And the past 2,000 years of Christian-Jewish relations have been characterized by inquisitions, forced conversions and deicide-inspired pogroms, which set the stage for the European Holocaust (See Malcolm Hay's The Foot of Pride).

Perhaps the present-day Christian outpouring of friendship is merely a more sophisticated, Laban-like attempt at missionary activity to coopt the Jews for Christianity, and therefore we must respond with "thanks, but no thanks"?

I think not.
My reasoning is based on the fact that the very time-honored theological positions of Christianity that made immediate conversion of the Jews so necessary for the Church have been publicly and officially contravened and nullified by leading Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical spokesmen and institutions.

HISTORICALLY, virtually all Christian denominations believed in "supersessionism," that the ancient covenant between God and Israel had been superseded, taken over, by the Christians, and that therefore non salus extra ecclesiam - there can be no salvation outside of the Church."

Hence, for Jews to be "saved" eternally, they must convert (or be converted) to Christianity. Moreover, Christianity maintained that Jews deserve to be hated, reviled, persecuted, homeless and stateless as long as they reject Jesus the Messiah; indeed, that Jews bear collective and historic guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus because the Gospels record that the Jewish "rabble" cried out to Pontius Pilate that Jesus must be crucified, declaring that Jesus' "blood will be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25).

These past fundamental Christian beliefs are no longer held to be true by much of the mainstream Christian establishment leadership. Largely in the aftermath of the horrors of the Holocaust, which many responsible Christian leaders understood to have been fueled by Christian anti-Semitism throughout the ages, as well as the emergence of the State of Israel, which rendered meaningless the Christian charge that Jews were doomed to exile and wandering so long as they rejected Jesus, the Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical Churches profoundly revised their earlier doctrines regarding the Jews.

THAT CHANGE began on October 28, 1965, when Pope John XXIII delivered his historic encyclical, Nostra Aetate, which dealt frontally with these very issues: "The church cannot forget that she 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 unto which have been grafted the wild-shoots, the Gentiles… God does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues…