It was while I was giving a lecture on love to a predominantly Jewish audience in Jerusalem this February that I learned something important. The audience before me at Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus comprised professors, students, and some leading figures in Jewish-Christian dialogue. Professors can be intellectually competitive, students can have short attention spans, and protagonists in interreligious dialogue can grow weary and disenchanted. But on the 3rd of February something happened to change all that for a few precious moments. None of them expected a Roman Catholic priest to launch into a passionate defence of eros, especially a priest from Ireland; perhaps I did not anticipate this myself. Yet I ended up doing precisely that, and in the process, without even planning to, I disarmed them, and also won something over in myself.

This public lecture was the highlight of my four months (October 2008 to February 2009) as the Brenninkmeijer- Werhahn Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I would like to express my gratitude to the Brenninkmeijer family for making this visiting professorship possible. During the lecture, in a way I could not fully account for – “love has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (Pascal) – love itself came upon us all unexpectedly. It succeeded in captivating both me and my audience, penetrating our external shells and causing our outer masks to slip away. We were left with something wonderful in common: our humanity. That evening as I finished my lecture to a hushed auditorium, a leading professor at the Hebrew University stood up and spoke in a personal and moving way about love. His stirring testimony allied to the enthusiastic reaction of the rest of the audience suggested to me that however great the differences between Jews and Christians, love is something we can all cultivate in common.