Nostra Aetate Talk from October 27, 2015

Fifty years after Nostra Aetate and seventy years after the Holocaust, we meet this evening to celebrate what our two communities have been able to accomplish and to assert what we still have to accomplish. It is helpful today to remember what we have been arguing about and how far we have come.  In doing so, we ought not emphasize our disagreements at the risk of overshadowing those places where we can agree.  I say again, we have accomplished much, we still have much more to accomplish.

Look how far we have come.  For almost 2000 years Jews and Christians have been arguing over four main issues.  The first and maybe the most difficult argument between Jews and Christians has to do with the credentials of Jesus to be the messiah.  Religious Jews have for a long time expected that when the Messiah returns he will accomplish four tasks:  the temple will be rebuilt, Jews will return to live in the land of Israel, there will be peace across the world and non-Jews will travel to Israel to study Torah with Jews.  Christians have traditionally responded that God, in his freedom, has chosen to come to the world in Jesus Christ and to save the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus, Jewish expectations notwithstanding.  So where has that left us today?  While we can certainly agree to disagree on the matter of Jesus' credentials as messiah, we can agree that we are two communities committed to waiting for that time when God shall bring all things to their fit conclusion. We can and do unite around the expectation that God is not finished with God’s work and we wait together for that completion albeit with different accounts of what will occur at that time.

The second area of disagreement centers on the covenants. Religious Jews continue to hold on to the three covenants made with the Jewish people in the Bible, The Abrahamic, the Mosaic and the Davidic covenants.  For many religious Jews these covenants continue to have import.  For Christians, the New covenant established in and through Jesus has in some ways subsumed or fulfilled the Jewish covenants.  But we can celebrate because we have, by the year 2015, come to again respectfully agree to disagree and to recognize the legitimacy of each other’s traditions and each other’s covenants.

A third area is in the matter of doing Torah vs. the primacy of faith in Jesus Christ.  Religious Jews continue to believe that God so loved his people Israel that he gave them his only Torah (or teaching) that they might learn to serve God by living as people of character and courage.  While religious Jews are a people of faith, for many Jews the secret resides in the doing.  As the Talmud teaches us, “If I want to know the character of your faith, I will follow the feet rather than listen to the mouth.”  You see, the secret to a relationship with God for Jews resides in the doing.  Christians have continued to believe that faith in Christ is that which allows human beings to be related to God.  While Christians certainly care about doing the right thing, the tradition or faith they have, for the most part, emphasizes the importance of believing.  And yet, both Jews and Christians, and in particular Roman Catholics, have learned to respectfully acknowledge the importance of good works within each other’s traditions.

A fourth area where we have struggled is with the scriptures.  For Jews the Torah and the Talmud remain the authoritative scriptures along with all sorts of rabbinic midrashim and commentaries.  For Roman Catholics the scripture called the New Testament and the traditions of the Church hold the highest authority.  Again we have not only come to respect each other’s scriptures, we have learned to study each other’s bibles and sometimes realized that perhaps our own traditions have much to learn from the other side.

All this we should and do applaud.  We have come a long way since 1945.  From Pope John the 23rd to Pope Francis today, we have seen increasing respect for the Jewish people, for Jewish tradition and for the State of Israel.  And there have been a number of Jewish scholars who have rigorously studied the Christian and Roman Catholic tradition, including Paula Fredriksen, Amy Levine, Pamela Eisenbaum,  Jon Levenson and Paul Nanos.  There are also a number of Roman Catholic scholars studying Jewish traditional texts, working on the Holocaust and anti-semitism.  We have  all learned that the way other religions can help us deepen our relationship to and with our own religious tradition.  Jews and Roman Catholics, scholars and laity have come together a number of times to study the horrific events leading up to and during the Holocaust.  We have studied together the persecution of the Jews throughout the centuries and the Church has apologized for its own participation in those persecutions.  Papal visits to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem across the decades have demonstrated the commitment of the Church to oppose anti-Semitism in all its forms and remain vigilant that never again will there be a Holocaust of the Jewish people.  Rabbis and Priests teach at each other’s colleges and universities.  I, myself, am a Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at a Lutheran affiliated university. 

As I said we have accomplished much.  But there is much more we must accomplish.  A lot of our good will still needs to trickle down to the pews.  Too many of our fellow believers do not know and have not studied each other’s scriptures and traditions.  The more we engage each other’s traditions and learn from them, the more we will understand the virtues and limits of our own religion. While there have been some courses in Judaism and Christianity offered at our seminaries, more needs to be done to teach Priests and Rabbis how to educate their laity concerning the other’s traditions.  Much more needs to be done on the Roman Catholic side with regard to the State of Israel.  The complicated, difficult and tragic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians/Arabs will require a marked sensitivity to Israeli concerns for security as well as Palestinian desires for their own state.  When violence occurs in Jerusalem, we must not be too quick to blame Israel.  We must ask what has caused Israelis to be violent and what has caused Palestinians to use violence as a form of protest. 

I have lived among Christians, in the upper Midwest, for the last thirty five years.  I have found most people to be friendly and caring.  My Christian friends and neighbors are amiable and tolerant.  And yet many of them, week after week, attend Church services where texts which condemn the Jews are read out loud without explanation.  These texts condemn “the Jews” for not believing  and for betraying their Lord and savior Jesus Christ.  I am not asserting nor do I believe that Christians are sitting in their pews week after week listening to the words of their scriptures and thinking to themselves: “I despise the Jews.”  No, the words on Sunday morning are so familiar that most do not bother to analyze what they are hearing. The anti-Jewish words are embedded within the texts and liturgy of many Christian worship services.   Despite Roman Catholic remorse over the Holocaust during the past 70 years, the potential toxicity of the texts has not been corrected, lessened or removed.  The story remains the same.  It is the same story that Nazis made sure to include in their invective against “the Jews.”  Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, the Jewish Christ, came to his own people but as they rejected him, they are now rejected.  To be sure, and fair, since the Holocaust there have been many Roman Catholic theologians and Church officials who have apologized, and explained again and again how hatred of Jews is not part of the New Testament.  Many have declared that the Jewish people remain the people of God.  They have theologized as to how Jews and Christians have much to learn from each other. But this theological get-alongism has not really affected the problem as much as it should.   Week after week, the same texts keep being read out loud.  Sunday morning after Sunday morning, mass after mass, the words are proclaimed out loud by pastors and priests without most pastors, priests or lay people in the pews even realizing that what they have just said or heard is anti-Jewish. 

The problem has to do with the functional sense of scripture.  It is not so much what the Bible says or is even interpreted to say, as to how it functions generation after generation at the point of the Christian pew.  If the story keeps being told again and again and again the same way with no explanation week after week, the results have the inherent potential of once again functioning as a source for anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.
I have a close friend, a New Testament scholar., who does not think that the anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament are central to the Christian message.  He tells me that if there are Christians who read the New Testament and blame all Jews for the death of Jesus these people are misinterpreting the Biblical text.  He teaches an introductory religion course.  He structures his course on what he sees as a central common theme for Jews and Christians: hope after catastrophe.  His working assumption is: in the Bible both Jews and Christians have had to figure out a way to keep on  after catastrophe occurs.  For Jews the catastrophes were the destruction of the first and second temple.  For Christians it was the crucifixion of Christ.  And for all of his students, it is the catastrophes that happen all the time to them, their parents, their country, everyday in their world.  For my friend, the  challenge is to figure out a way to have hope despite the present day disasters.  God is not to be explained as much as to be addressed.  The question is more important than the answer to the question because the question itself is a sign of hope.  Hence, the question Jesus raises from the cross, “My God , My God, why have you abandoned me?” is a  form of prayer and hope.  For my friend this is the predicament of all people who have to live through craziness and still keep on keeping on.  The incarnation of God, he tells me, assures us that God is aware and has experienced the suffering we experience.  God becoming flesh allows and encourages us to protest to God about the danger of being flesh in this world. 

While I appreciate the theological acumen of my close friend, I have a few problems with his formulation.  First, I am not convinced that the New Testament does not contain a great deal of anti-Judaism.  Indeed my friend tells me that every Gospel in the New Testament subverts or is trying to subvert Judaism.  Throughout the New Testament if “the Jews” did not actually kill Jesus, they certainly are seen as accomplices to Jesus’ death.  I have sat through enough Christian passion plays and seen enough Pharisees dressed in black plotting to kill Jesus dressed in white to conclude that the anti-Judaism of the New Testament remains alive and well despite my friend’s best intentions. 

When I speak of “Christians”, I am aware that there are many different kinds of Christians and many different ways of being Christian.  And there are many different attitudes and interpretations among Christians.  All of that is irrelevant to my point.  Regardless of how sincerely and well disposed Roman Catholics are toward Jews, after the Holocaust, the problem remains that there is an inherent anti-Judaism embedded within Christian tradition that has not been removed.  Christianity is a religion which defines itself over and against  Judaism.  At the same time as it argues against Jewish tradition, it also proclaims that it is the fulfillment of that tradition.  Christianity exists and has always existed in the historical tension between its own continuity and discontinuity with Jewish tradition.  Jesus was Jewish.  His disciples were Jewish; his mother was Jewish.  For Christians to be Christian they must claim their radical origin from the Jewish tradition.  But, for Christianity to be Christian, it must distance itself from the Jewish rabbinic tradition.  Both must happen at the same time.  Christianity is an apocalyptic gentile religion that trusts that God has come in the flesh and was betrayed by his own people, the Jews. 

Having said all this, I do not believe that the traditional way of telling the Christian story can or will be altered.  Jewish betrayal is at the heart of Christian proclamation no matter how much it is denied.  The Catholic Eucharistic  liturgy declares, “On the night in which he was betrayed . . .”   Betrayal is central to the tradition.  Some Christians have argued that the words about betrayal mean to say that all people have and continue to betray or hand over Jesus.  They mean to say that “we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  This is very nice and I suppose true to Christian anthropology but that is not what the New Testament texts say.  Each gospel tells the story of how Jews and/or their representatives betrayed their own messiah.  “He came to his own and his own knew him not.” (John 1:11.) 

To be clear, I am not saying that all Christians are inherently anti-Jewish.  I am saying that the Christian textual tradition tells an anti-Jewish story.  And this story continues to be repeated again and again week in and week out.  And it was this narrative tradition that Nazis used in their scheme to destroy every living Jew and to create a Christianity without Judaism or Jewish roots.  The fact is that Christianity is infected with a disease I call anti-Judaism.  Is there an antidote for this poison?  Yes, but it will be very difficult.

It will involve Christians being self-critical of their tradition, taking time and energy to train their pastors, priests and people in the pews to recognize the damaging possibilities of the biblical texts.  Recognizing the disease is only half the battle, though a very important part.  Pastors, priests and lay people must be inoculated against the poison within the texts. This next step will require the courage, at each reading of the texts, to remind listeners not to assume that “the Jews” mentioned in the text are the same Jews we meet day to day.  Week in and week out pastors and priests will have to continually and constantly warn their hearers to be aware of the potential to misunderstand the text.  If this sounds idealistic and difficult, that's because it is.  And, many pastors, priests and lay people will not think it necessary.  They will not have the time, conviction or courage. 

Yet some have begun the long process of extracting the poisonous venom lying within the texts.  As we sit here, there are Catholic scholars, priests, nuns and a few lay people working to repair the anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism within their tradition.

On May 4, 2001, at the 17th meeting of the International Liaison Committee in New York, Church officials stated that they would change how Judaism is dealt with in Catholic seminaries and schools. In part, they stated:

"The curricula of Catholic seminaries and schools of theology should reflect the central importance of the Church's new understanding of its relationship to Jews....Courses on the Bible, developments by which both the Church and rabbinic Judaism emerged from early Judaism will establish a substantial foundation for ameliorating "the painful ignorance of the history and traditions of Judaism of which only negative aspects and often caricature seem to form part of the stock ideas of many Christians."

"Courses dealing with the biblical, historical and theological aspects of relations between Jews and Christians should be an integral part of the seminary and theological curriculum, and not merely electives. All who graduate from Catholic seminaries and theology schools should have studied the revolution in Catholic teaching on Jews and Judaism from Nostra aetate to the prayer of Pope John Paul II in Jerusalem at the Western Wall on March 26, 2000....For historic reasons, many Jews find it difficult to overcome generational memories of anti-Semitic oppression. Therefore: Lay and Religious Jewish leaders need to advocate and promote a program of education in our Jewish schools and seminaries – about the history of Catholic-Jewish relations and knowledge of Christianity and its relationship to Judaism....Encouragement of dialogue between the two faiths does involve recognition, understanding and respect for each other's beliefs, without having to accept them. It is particularly important that Jewish schools teach about the Second Vatican Council, and subsequent documents and attitudinal changes that opened new perspectives and possibilities for both faiths.
So, we are trying and we must continue to try."

As for me, I respect the Roman Catholic tradition for its insights into the nature of human nature.  I respect a tradition that teaches its followers to trust in God and to stand with the neighbor in pain.  I respect a tradition that knows that evil is real and insists that Christians must do what they can to do resist it.  I respect a tradition that speaks eloquently about the Grace of God.   And I respect a tradition that is trying to examine those places where its own teaching has in the past caused pain and persecution.  As we grow in respect and engagement with each other’s traditions, let us each do what we can do to make sure the process of healing continues.  We have accomplished much.  And we have much to accomplish.  Let us continue our good work 

Reading the Scriptures Without Throwing your Brains in the Toilet

Blind faith is stupid faith.  The notion that believing in God without asking questions or having doubts is the most virtuous kind of faith is absolutely false.  To trust in God and not wonder about the integrity of that trust is to take the religious parts of your brains and throw them in the toilet.  After all, the word faith means to trust without knowing for sure.  If you knew for sure, you wouldn’t have to have faith, you would know.  Faith means not knowing for sure and yet continuing to trust and hope despite, because, and through your questions and doubts.  Questions and doubts, belief and unbelief, trusting some days and not others are all part of the life of faith.  If Jesus, who Christians call the Christ, wrestled with God and died with a question on his lips, what makes you think that you can live this life and not be compelled to also wrestle with God? 

For many years I have  been a student of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures.  I am not sure how much of what is in the  scriptures actually happened.  But I have concluded that all the scriptures are trying to speak the truth about human nature and the truth about God.  I have also concluded that whether something has or has not really happened is not as important as we think.  And, I have concluded that some things that never happened can be very true.

But first, why did anyone bother to write these books? The scriptures are a set of writings written by human beings in response to their experience of God and human nature.   They wrote the words to tell the truth of what they had seen and heard.  Near as I can tell, the writers were not concerned with whether the events happened in an exact historical literal way.  They wrote what they wrote to bear witness to the truth that had confronted them and they had confronted in their lives.  They wrote the words down to convince and persuade others that what they had experienced  was true and wise.

Taking the scriptures seriously is not the same as reading them literally.  To read the scriptures seriously is to be forced to interpret what you read.   Ask yourself: Is what I am reading intended to be read literally or metaphorically, historically or devotionally?  Does it have to be either/or or can it be both and?  Can authorial intention be read from the text as it sits?   Is the text describing the culture back then or is the text prescribing what we need know to to live with wisdom today?  The people who wrote the scriptures lived in a different place, time and culture than we do.  The goal of their writings was not to turn us all into Middle Eastern speaking Jews. Christians or Arabs  Otherwise we would all speak Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic today.  But, we don’t think we need to speak those languages to be religious.  Why not?  Because, the point of the scripture writers was to pass on to us the wisdom and faith that they had discovered.  The writers were also convinced that what they wrote would help generations of us to stay sane.  So, when the scripture functions to keep us sane, healthy and honest, then we can say it is inspired and revealed by God.  It would seem the scriptures are intended keep you sane throughout your life.

The writers of the scriptures were also not convinced that they had the absolute truth but that they had a truth which they believed  would help their community to live.  For the writers the only one who actually knew the whole truth about life was God.  The writers had only caught a glimpse of what was true and by writing down their narratives, poems, and laws, they invited their readers to wrestle with what they had written.  If and when the writings contradicted each other, all to the better. The writers knew that they did not know all there was to know.  Religious communities in every generation were called upon to debate and argue over the veracity of the texts.  The writings were not infallible or inerrant.  They were  attempts to speak about the deeper things of which human beings wrestle with inherently.  The goal of the writers seems to have been to call their communities to discuss, argue and correct the texts.  Sometimes the texts were right.  Sometimes the texts were wrong.  Sometimes the texts were incomplete.  Sometimes the texts reflected the prejudices of the writer or his time.  Sometimes the texts were intended to raise questions not provide answers.  Answers tend to close off the discussion.  Questions open the discussion. 

The scriptures we read were intended to be a vector toward the truth about God and human beings.  In point of fact, the relationship between the readers and the biblical writings are reciprocal.  They correct us and we correct them.  They question us and we question them.  They can be wrong and we can be right.  They can be right and we can be wrong.  And sometimes it is all quite confusing.  How can we know?

The name Israel means to wrestle with God.  We, as communities, wrestle with God as we wrestle with the texts, as we have always wrestled with the texts. The inspiration and authority of the biblical writings lies in their engagement with us over the crucial questions of life . To wrestle in such a manner requires courage and wisdom.  Since these two are not easy to come by, we wrestle in community and across communities.  The truth is not something we possess.  It is something that possesses us.  It is something we wrestle towards.  And something that wrestles to reach us.  We never quite have it.  We can never be sure that we are completely right.  Our conclusions over the texts are at best tentative because the texts themselves are tentative attempts to speak the truth.

There are three large monotheistic communities, Jews, Christians and Muslims.  They each have their own scriptures which they believe are inspired and revealed by God.  The Jews have the Torah and the Talmud; the Christians have the Old and New Testaments and the Muslims have the Quran and the Hadith.  Instead of seeing these varying scriptures and their long traditions of interpretation as competitive revelations, we would be wise to study together with people of other and different traditions.  We may have something in our traditions that will teach them how to live more wisely and they in turn may have something to teach us about where we have been right and/or wrong.  Since each religious community is only the tentative recipient of truth, they would each be wise to learn from each other.  Jews, Christians and Muslims have much to teach each other and much to learn from each other.  This does not mean we should not affirm, each, our own tradition.  Each tradition should proclaim its truths with respectful stubbornness.  At the same time we should all respectfully and critically engage each other’s texts.  And, remember, true wisdom is to humbly recognize that you could be wrong. 

All the scriptures declare that we ought love God with all out heart, soul, and mind.  The mind is not an enemy of faith.  The mind compels us to take the word faith seriously and honestly.  So. don’t give up using your mind when it comes to God.  When it comes to matters of faith, don’t throw your brains in the toilet. Grasp for a faith that encourages you to open your eyes and wrestle with God and the texts of our scriptures.  The real question is  not what you will do with the texts but what they will do with you.  Therein lies the true meaning of an intelligent faith.

A Few Words for All Teachers

Beresheet bara Elohim et hashamayim vaet haaretz:  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  In Jewish, Christian and  Muslim tradition God creates the world by speaking a word.  The so called “people of the book”  Jews, Christians and Muslims are people who have tremendous confidence in the ability of “the word” to create and to communicate.  God created the world and you and me by speaking a word.  The power of chaos was and is held back and in check by the word.  We teachers understand this all too well. For we too are obsessed by words.  We trust that the word has power in it.  We open our mouths to speak and assume that the word is sufficient.  We choose one word and thereby reject another. We take care with our words.

But, last year in my Religion 110 class I came to doubt the sufficiency of the word.  I was giving a lecture on the prophet Amos.  And as I was making what I thought was my most important point I looked up to see three students yawning directly at me with wide open gaping mouths.  I left the class that day quite discouraged.  I know that some students are up late and come to class tired and that the yawns were not necessarily directed in a hostile manner toward me or the subject matter  And I know that even if some students are yawning it does not mean they are not listening.  And to tell the truth I have observed such yawning student gaping mouths for years.  But on that day it depressed me.  Maybe there are times, I thought, when the word is insufficient.  Maybe I am just not a good enough teacher.

My close friend, Steve Wohlfeil, a Lutheran Pastor and former Campus Pastor at Augustana College listened to my harangue and complaint.  He said, with his usual precise and insightful words, “You know Murray, maybe when you saw those three students yawning at you it was as if in that moment the whole universe was yawning at Murray Haar.”  Yes, there are times when words are insufficient for all sorts of reasons.

And this insufficiency of words is particularly aggravating and frustrating to the teachers among us.  For we teachers, we wrestle with what words to use so that our students will be to hear the questions that move us and ought to move them.  What words, we ask ourselves, can we use to penetrate the countless distractions floating around in their minds?  We, who have taught for a few years, know very well about the sufficiency and the insufficiency of words.  Some days they work.  Many days they fail. Yet, we keep at it.  We keep showing up.  Why?  Why do we bother? After all, let’s be honest with each other.  Words are fragile and they have failed.  They have failed to stop the misunderstandings, the confusion, the hating, the killing and the craziness.  All the millions upon millions of words that have been written and spoken failed to stop the Holocaust or 9/11.  True teachers know the deep sadness of looking into the eyes of their listeners and seeing some so distracted or broken, that they cannot hear and cannot be fixed by mere words, despite how well or how loud the words are spoken.  So, why do we continue to believe in the power of our words? Why do we keep on teaching if so few of our words are actually effective and so few hearers are actually listening?

It must be because we teachers are quite a religious bunch whether we want to admit it or not.  Like the God in our scriptures we keep on talking and talking and talking knowing that many times our words will fail to awaken or convince even ourselves.  All have ears to hear but only a few listen.  The tenaciousness of teachers like the tenaciousness of God is quite irrational.  We ought to give up. And some do.  But we, who keep on day after day, continue to speak our words despite . . . The great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides writes in his Guide to the Perplexed, “Ani maamin aaf al pi  . . . I believe despite man and despite God.  The God of the scriptures continues to make his appeal despite the fact that some have ears but do not hear and eyes but do not see.

This is all to say, that we teachers are not crazy to keep on, day after day, trying to find the right words that we might be heard.  We keep on keeping on for there is a mystery to teaching and learning and studying.  We are, after all, in divine company.  If God has to struggle to be heard and understood, what makes you think it should be any easier for you or me?  And if teaching were easy they would not need us to wrestle and struggle for words to speak. Anybody could do it.  After all, human beings are compared to sheep in the Bible.  Sheep are cute, fragile independent but not very bright or wise.  Our words are many times insufficient and many of our listeners are yawning, checking their phones, full of distractions; there are many who will not be able to hear despite the eloquence, simplicity or truth of our words, but let us persevere despite.  For we may yet discover that we have inside us a word that will move one or two of our listeners to wake up and to care about the questions that matter.  Keep looking and searching and wrestling for the right words. You may yet find a word lurking in your soul that will stem the boredom and distractions.  At least, we teachers, like God, must try.   In Jewish tradition teachers are called Rabbis and Rabbis are always teaching Torah.  And the word Torah means teaching  So, my fellow teachers, Rabbis and Pastors keep on day after day, again and again, despite the yawns. Do what you can do with the word and that will have to be sufficient.

Self Serving Redemptionism: Take Two

In Jewish tradition salvation never comes through death.  When the messiah comes, religious Jews expect him to rebuild the temple, create peace all over the world, bring all Jews to the land of Israel, and at that time non-Jews will flock to Jerusalem seeking the wisdom of  Torah.  For other Jews, the messiah is symbolically present when Jews study the Torah or stand with the stranger for justice.  The notion that a messiah has to die in order for people’s sins to be forgiven is very strange to Jewish ears.  And I think it should sound strange to Christian ears as well.  Yet, it doesn’t.  Quite the contrary. Christians all over the world profess and confess that Jesus died so their sins could be forgiven.  This view is ensconced within the traditions of the Christian Church.   It is also part and parcel of the way Jesus death is understood in much of the American Christian Church.

I am convinced this tradition about the virtue of the death of Jesus is wrong, unbiblical, and at worst, a kind of self-serving redemptionism.  The fact is Jesus did not die for your sins, and thank God he didn't!

My thesis is simple.  Much of  Western Christianity suffers from a rampant, individualistic, self-serving redemptionism.  Self-serving redemptionism is marked by a certain faith that sounds something like this: “ Jesus is my personal savior .  He died to save me from my sins.  I am a Christian because it benefits me.  My sins are forgiven.  God loves me and when I die I get to go to heaven.”  Essentially, Christians who believe this inherently believe Jesus died to benefit them.

And it's clear to these misunderstanding Christians that Christianity is a religion for which you should sign up.  Look at what you get!  When people talk about or “witness” to why they are Christian, they say it benefits them and it can also benefit the listener.  They say believing in Jesus gives them a “blessed assurance” of eternal life."  They say that hearing that their sins are forgiven through the death of Jesus gives them great comfort. And they say that they go to Church on Sundays because the Church “meets their spiritual needs.”   They stand up and witness to their faith, to what they get and to what you can also get if you will sign up and believe.

This is precisely the self-serving redemptionist sickness that is alive within many Christian Churches.  Most Christians, I suspect, are unconscious about their views of the spiritual life.  This is their religion.  It serves them well.  And this is the Christianity being presented to them most Sunday mornings.  It is smarmy and overly maudlin, but people like it.  Many clergy, more and more, treat their parishioners as religious consumers with varied spiritual needs.  American churches are busy meeting people’s needs, giving people choices and most ominously selling a “Jesus” that plays to individual and consumeristic needs.  No wonder so many of my students tell me “Jesus is boring.”  So my question is:  How did the church manage to take a passionate, courageous, charismatic Jewish prophet and make him boring?

Let’s be honest.  The Jesus one finds in most American Christian churches has become a product to be effectively marketed and made palatable to the masses, a bargain that one ought to latch onto if one is a wise spiritual shopper for religious experiences and security.  Very few sermons today call Christians to a discipleship which involves self-sacrifice or a radical reassessment of the way they live their lives as Americans.  The cross, the flag and the mall are not in contradiction.  There is no tension between being a good Christian, being a greedy consumer and being a loyal American.  It all blends into one well-mixed self-serving redemptionist philosophy with no contradiction from the Church.

Take the average sermon.  On the surface, most sermons either address a biblical text or a topic of concern to the congregation.  These sermons seem to be willing to deal with the difficult questions of faith.  But they really do not.  There is no need for the person in the pew to worry.  The problem of the text or subject at hand will be resolved within fifteen to twenty minutes.  Most parishioners can barely make it through those few minutes without feeling restless and/or bored.  Having reassured the flock that all the dilemmas of the text or of life itself are going to work out just fine, the minister then sends the people on their way with their personal Jesus, one who is committed exclusively to their spiritual happiness and welfare.  This Jesus is always with you, gives you “peace in your heart," a strong self-image, empowerment, health, wealth and happiness, relief from pain and suffering, and most importantly your own personal salvation from sin, death and evil.  Who wouldn’t want that?

In back of all this smarmy-spiritual consumeristic prattle lies the assertion that God came in Jesus to benefit “you.”  He died for “you.”  He is always with “you.”  He forgives “you.”  He loves “you.” He wants “you” to accept him as “your” personal savior. All of this emphasis on “you” and “your” needs sells well in a culture whose members are willing to purchase anything which offers more comfort and less pain.  And this self serving redemptionism seems to be rampant in the Christian churches of North America.

Self-serving redemptionism is rampant because it works.  It sells well. It fills the pews.  It creates a Jesus in our own image.  The Jesus many worship wants to make them happy.  Redemption has become self serving because it fits American notions of what it means to be religious and happy.  Self-serving redemptionism is marketable.  Traditional, confessional and doctrinal denominational commitments clearly are not.  Present day peddlers of church growth and self-serving redemptionism advise pastors to drop denominational name tags since they “put people off.”   A person who is “shopping”  for a church home, who may have grown up Methodist, then become Presbyterian, may be puzzled and disturbed by a church called Hope Lutheran Church.   The corporate hucksters say, “better not to confuse the spiritual consumer.”  Pastors are told if they want the Church to survive in the 21st century they will have to drop the traditional denominational designations.  After all, they are told, “it’s Jesus we are selling and not the Church.”  And so today we have all sorts of these neutrally named congregations, “Friendship Community Church, Joy Church,  and Peace in Your Heart Church.”  Following the advice of the religious hucksters and peddlers has resulted not only in a watering down of Jesus message but, in fact, drowning him completely and creating a new American Jesus eager to meet every consumer’s spiritual needs.

So, what is the real problem with self-serving redemptionism?  After all, it could be argued, it brings people to God and Jesus.  It may fill the pews.  People come to Church and to faith.  But at what price?  As a Jew who has an ongoing interest in Christians understanding what it means to be Christian, I  assert that Christianity ought not be about what you get but what you are freed to give. I suspect self serving redemptionism happened  because the  Jewish Jesus that spoke long ago in the Bible  was too disturbing to the way many Christians want to live and manage their lives.  Many of my students, whether they are religious or not, know the song, Jesus Love Me.  They assume this is central to Jesus message.  But it is not.  The Jesus of Biblical narrative rarely told people he loved them.  In point of fact, he was constantly arguing with religious people (which by the way is very Jewish) who were sure they were right and he was wrong.  The Jesus in the New Testament called people to be radically changed, to repent, to be freed from worrying and centering on what they could get for themselves.

The Jesus of biblical texts called into question people who were constantly in pursuit of their own happiness and pleasure.  And as I read the scripture, Jesus did not promise that following him meant an escape from pain and suffering.  Quite the contrary!  The Jesus in the Gospels says that those who follow him should be prepared for the sacrifice and chaos of standing with those in pain.  And Jesus himself is not able to evade evil.  He is murdered on a cross and with his last words accuses God of abandoning him.

This Jesus of the biblical stories did not come to meet people’s spiritual needs.  He was a Jewish prophet who came to free people to serve God and the neighbor.  All of Jesus' talk about forgiveness and the kingdom of heaven was intended to comfort a follower, not provide a pitch with which to snare would-be self-serving religious consumers.  The way it was supposed to work was this:  if people were forgiven by God, they no longer had to worry about whether or not God loved them.  They were now free to emulate God’s love and care  for the stranger.  And, as Jesus stood with the stranger and did what he could for the one who was bleeding, so too should his followers stand with the stranger and do what they can do for the one who is bleeding.

A person who believed that death was not the end but the opening to eternal life was thereby freed from constant obsession about disease, death and dying.  Freed from such spiritual self-absorption, the Christian was now redeemed or made new, freed to stand with the neighbor in pain.  This is what salvation is all about, being freed to do what you can do to stop craziness, evil and injustice wherever it is happening.  The death of Jesus was not a way for people to get their sins forgiven.  God forgave people their sins in the Hebrew Bible all the time. Jesus forgave all kinds of people their sins long before he died.

For the past two thousand years the Christian church has tried to explain why Jesus had to die.  Since the messiah had been killed, it was thought, it must have been part of God’s plan.  Various atonement theories were formulated, explained and debated.  And the truth is none of them really work very well.  One theory declares that God sent Jesus (or God himself) to die as a substitute for us so that God could take on himself the punishment we all deserved.  This substitutionary sacrifice theory assumes that God’s justice needs to have some body’s blood to be shed before he could forgive people.  The fact is that God is perfectly capable of forgiving people without resorting to self-murder.  There is also the victory theory, the notion that through the death and resurrection of Jesus, sin, suffering and evil have been defeated.  But they haven’t been!  After two thousand years, sin, suffering and evil are doing quite well.  After all, more people were killed in the twentieth century than all the other centuries combined.  Finally, there is the model theory that says the death of Jesus was a virtuous and moral example for us to follow.  The problem with this theory is that it gives the impression that Jesus wanted to die in order to show us what a good person would do. But, the biblical texts are clear.  Jesus did not want to die as an example for us.  He begged God to change the plan so that he would not have to die.

To tell the simple truth, Jesus was murdered.  His death was a scandal and an absurdity.  His death had nothing to do with the explanations found in the atonement theories. There was no good reason for him to be killed except that Rome felt threatened by him. And Jesus didn't die for anyone.   Salvation never comes through death.  Christians needs to stop trying to explain why the death of Jesus was a good thing because it simply was not.

For the past two thousand years, Jews have been persecuted and murdered because they have been seen as a threat.  During the Holocaust, six million Jews, a million and a half of which were children. were slaughtered  and burned in the ovens just because they were Jewish.  To me, as a Jew, Jesus death is tragic and sad, another Jew killed just because he was a Jew and a threat to those in power.  The destruction of six million Jews during World War II was a monstrous tragedy which no one who is sane tries to glorify, explain, or proclaim as being the will of God.  The same respect should be paid to Jesus himself whose death in some ways anticipates the meaninglessness and madness of the millions killed in the Holocaust.

I say again: Salvation never comes through death!  It comes through trusting God and standing with the neighbor in pain.  This is the message and transformation that is at the heart of the Gospel and at the center of Jesus death and resurrection.











                    

God, Suffering and Evil: Part Five and Conclusion

Part Five

The Future:  In this particular view  unjust suffering and evil are happening all the time. They are part of life and will always be a part of life.  But, this view asserts:  One day, in the future, God will come and defeat the power of evil.  When this will happen is known only to God.  In the Jewish tradition some Jews hold that a messiah (anointed one) will come to inaugurate a time of peace throughout the world.  They hope that time will be soon.  Until that time arrives we are called upon to do Torah each and every day and to wait with patient impatience for God to act.  For some, a part of this hope in the future is that while evil is real in our time, in the afterlife, that is in heaven and in hell, everyone will get what they deserve.  The advantage of this response to undeserved suffering/evil is that it gives people hope that the pain they are presently experiencing, regardless of what it is, will not last forever.  God is real and one day soon God will come and deliver his people and radically change the way the world works.  One day the people who have done evil will get their just rewards.

The problem with this view is that while God delays, people pay everyday with the hours and days of their lives.  The fact is, some will say, it is too late for Messiahs.  Too much unjustified, pain, suffering and evil has occurred in the past two thousand years.  These people argue that there is no such thing as a Messiah.  No one is coming to save us and waiting around for such a person is a waste of time.  Waiting for justice in the afterlife is wishful thinking.  We are each better off getting to work and doing what we can where we are to resist suffering and evil.  To the extent we do that, we will be the Messiah wherever we live.  I am reminded of a comment by Elie Wiesel when he visited Augustana some years ago, that the greatest enemy of the Jews in the concentration camps was hope.  They hoped that God would never allow them and their children to be burned in the ovens by the Nazis.  They were wrong.  The hope for the future works and it does not work.

Strength and Company:  This response asserts that unjust absurd suffering and evil are part of life.  There is moral and natural evil.  The first is caused by human beings. The latter is part of the nature of nature.  When God decided to create a world of matter, this world is what you get.  God is not able or willing to extricate us from the injustice of our situation.  And extrication or salvation is not what God does.  What does God do?  God gives us strength and courage to endure whatever life brings us.  Not only that, God accompanies us through all we have to go through.  We are not alone.  God is with us. Many people speak of having survived all sorts of suffering and evil because God gave them the wherewithal to walk through the pain and survive. To listen to these stories is to believe the sincerity of the tales.  To these people God is real and a present reality.  The problem with this view is that there are many persons who go through terrible tragic suffering and either do not survive, or are so damaged by what has happened to them that the rest of their lives are a tortured existence.  Many Jews in the concentration camps when asked how they happened to survive will testify that they survived by luck or chance alone.  These people even those who were religious, speak of experiencing the silence or hiddeness of God.  Many did not have the strength or courage to keep going and they did not feel accompanied.  In fact, they questioned and accused God of being indifferent.  It appears then that this experience of God is at best inconsistent for some mysterious reason or at worst,wishful thinking.  Either way, speaking of God in any reasonable way is problematic.  Being accompanied and strengthened by God works and does not work.

Conclusion

There are certainly many variations and modifications for each of these responses but none that has resolved the tension.  There are two temptations I struggle to avoid in this situation.  I diligently try not to retreat back into my religious tradition in order to hide from the questions.  The fact is: God has become problematic.  Maybe God was always problematic but we ought not run away from the truth.  Whatever God is about is the truth.  Faith, prayer and devotion are fine but they are not a medication that reduces the importance of the questions.  On the other hand, I am trying to not reject my tradition and capitulate to the cultural notion that there is no God. 
So, where to from here.?  From a Jewish perspective,  we will need to realize that all human language  is insufficient.  Why so?  Because the word, “God”  points to that which we cannot control or define.  Of course, we will use language but all our words, as the words of our various Bibles, are inevitably inadequate.  When we recognize this fact we will be eager to examine and listen to each other’s religious traditions  and explanations with humility, in the hope of gleaning some wisdom. 

Having said all this it needs to be asserted that for most people it is not easy to live in the tension between modernity and their religious tradition.  It has certainly not been easy for me. I have to admit that I continue to “hope against hope”  there is a God who in some way is monitoring and interacting with what happens on this earth.  And I ask myself why?  Why do you  so badly want there to be a God?  Maybe it is ultimately fear.  To think of the world as it is, with all its daily suffering, evil and craziness, being under the purposeful gaze of a God is frightening.  To think about such a world without a God is even more frightening. 

God, Suffering and Evil: Part Four

The Test:  There are any number of texts that speak of God as someone who tests people’s faith by bringing suffering or evil into their lives to see how they will respond and/or to make their faith stronger.  This response is built on the notion that the true sign and strength of faith lies when it is challenged and perseveres despite.  As is said by so many, “No pain, no gain.” People who go through these tests of faith testify to how much their faith has been strengthened by having endured their pain and yet continued to believe.  Martyrs of the faith are seen by many as having endured suffering, evil and even death for the sake of maintaining their trust in God.  We must concur that for some people “the test” works.  But not for everyone.  First of all, how can we tell when we are being tested and when we are suffering for another reason?  And why is it that some who are tested do not come through well, but rather lose their faith?  Finally, why do some seem to be tested constantly while other s live most of their lives with very few if any tests? “The test” seems to be a contrived explanation that excuses God from taking care of indiscriminate  and unjustified suffering and evil.  The test works and it does not work.

The Plan:  This may be the most popular response given in the Biblical text.  The impression given is that everything that happens, happens for a reason.  It is part of the plan of God.  This response goes on to explain that we may not understand why a particular pain, suffering or evil is occurring but we should be assured that it is all part of God’s mysterious plan.  We are further assured that our thoughts are not God’s thoughts.  We cannot understand the greater, larger, deeper, more wonderful meaning  of the event but rest assured God is in control.  Many people believe in this response because they believe that God is a mystery and acts in mysterious ways that we, with our smaller minds, cannot understand.  We must admit that this response works for some.  Human beings are comforted by the sense that whatever is happening to them, be it cancer,  a heart attack, war, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc . . .is somehow  ordained by a mysterious deity and there is nothing they can  do.  They should surrender and endure because after all, it is the will of God and his will be done.  And the Biblical text itself seems to live in the tension between, on the one hand, depicting human beings as creatures with free will and at the very same time, depicting God as in control of history. 

The problem with “the plan” comforting as it may be,  is that it makes God into an arbitrary monster.  Under “the plan”  God sits in the sky handing out diseases and accidents of all sorts, wars, natural disasters, broken legs, and absurd suffering and evil.  God supposedly does this because God has the plan which supposedly will eventuate in some grand outcome we cannot perceive nor understand.   But, why should we worship a God who, as part of his plan, decides that millions of people must be killed?  A God who commits evil in the name of a secret plan no longer deserves our worship.

The far more serious problem with “the plan” is that ultimately it is not true to the Biblical text.  In the Bible, everything that happens is not the will of God.  God is pictured as fighting against evil and suffering.  God is pictured as being frustrated by human decisions.  God, sometimes, has to modify his plans because humans have made certain decisions.  Death, suffering and evil are part of life but they are, for the most part, not depicted as being the will of God.  People who are sick and suffering are healed of their diseases.  Yes, it may be that God has a purpose but he is not pictured as having planned out every bit of suffering and evil that befalls us.  The Plan works and it does not work.

God, Suffering and Evil: Part Three

Since I am a student of the Bible, I study  its texts for clues.  The Biblical texts provide a variety of responses to the question of the justice of God.  These responses work and do not work.  By “work” I mean that these explanations make sense to our experience.  Of course, this statement immediately raises the question, does it matter if it makes sense to our senses? But, let’s examine the responses anyway.  By the way, a new book just out from Fortress Press by Mark S. M. Scott, Pathways in Theodicy, does a nice job of covering the varying theodicies (theodicy=the justice of God, justifying God in the face of suffering and evil) including their strengths and weaknesses.

Free will defense:  The Biblical stories give us the impression that human beings were created by God with the freedom to make moral choices,  to obey or disobey the commandments of God.  Not only do people have this freedom, but they use it to do what they want to do and what they think is right.  If they do what is wrong, that is certainly not God’s fault.  When they do what is wrong, humans are the responsible party since they have free will.  Parts of this response make some sense to our modern ears.  Each and every day we see people make choices and by the choices they make they decide what their lives will be about.  If an automobile driver has been drinking too much, crashes his vehicle into another car, killing a number of people, we think this is tragic but we certainly would not blame God.  We understand that the man driving drunk is responsible.  He had free will and chose to drink and drive.  On the other hand, the young student at the beginning of this essay, who concluded that his life was not worth living also made a choice.  But was it a free choice?  Was he completely free or in some way mentally ill?  Given his tortured state of mind, wasn’t God morally obligated to interfere despite God’s commitment to free will?  Another problematic example:  A mother is walking with her seven year old child on the street.  She has brought up the child to be independent and responsible.  She believes that every child has free will.  As they are walking on the street one day, some boys are playing ball and the child sees the ball fall into the street.  Instinctively, the child darts into the street to retrieve the ball.  The mother quickly notices that the child is about to be hit by a passing car.  What should she do?  Should she say, I see that my child is about to be hit by that car but I believe in free and responsible will , so I cannot interfere?  Or does she run into the street and save her child?  Most of us know what she should do.  Free will is fine but is it a legitimate reason that should  prevent God from acting in the world?  To my mind, limited and self serving as it is, God is morally obligated to act on behalf of those incapable of acting on their own. The free will defense of God works and does not work.

Retribution:  The Biblical text, particularly in the Book of Deuteronomy declares that those that follow the commandments of God will prosper and those who do not obey God’s laws will be cursed.  This response or explanation of the way God works in the world seems to be true.  You shall reap what you sow.  What goes around comes around.  Indeed it seems today to be true that many who do wrong are found out and visited by punishment in all sorts of forms.   And those who do right succeed in life.   This response seems to work.  But, it is not always so.  And the Biblical text in the Book of Job argues with this retribution explanation.  Job is an innocent man who is made to suffer terrible calamities.  He protests, questions and accuses his God of wrongdoing.  Job is eventually told by that God that he is right to question and accuse and his religious friends are wrong to defend their notion of retribution.  The fact is: there are many in the world who suffer evil who have not done anything to merit the pain and suffering they are forced to undergo.  In point of fact there are many innocent victims throughout history that bear witness to the inadequacy of the retribution response.  Retribution works and  it does not work.

God, Suffering and Evil: Part Two

As a Jew, I am certainly not alone in my wrestling with and about God.   Thousands of years ago the writers of the Jewish Bible also wrestled with these questions.  I studied these stories: Abraham questioning the justice of  God, Jacob wrestling with the God in the middle of the night, Moses puzzled about God’s methodology, Job questioning and accusing God of wrongdoing, Jeremiah disputing with God about the ethics of his calling. I immersed myself in the laments of the Psalter.  Over one third of these prayers are  made up of questions addressed to God.  I even wrote a doctoral dissertation on these laments.  But there was a difference  For all of their questions, the biblical writers would not or could not conclude that there was no God.  As the text asserts, “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) The writers of the Bible looked at and experienced  the nature of the world and trusted in God despite. And right there was the real difference.  They experienced the world and trusted despite.  So many Rabbis throughout Jewish tradition were able to trust God despite, in spite and even to spite God.  

I experience the world today as a modern person  and sometimes conclude that there is no God.  Am I wise or a fool?  

News!

There are three new things on my blog this morning. To the right there is a link to subscribe my email if you wish. At the top is a new tab called 'Ask Dr. Haar' where I invite you to post your burning questions about  religious topics and I will respond to the best of my ability. There is also a new post below, which is the first in a five part series about God, Suffering and Evil. As always, I welcome your comments and questions. Thanks for reading and thinking with me. Stay sane out there!

God, Suffering and Evil: Part One

Today I'm posting the first of a five part series on God, Suffering and Evil. As always, I welcome your comments and questions. 

As I write these words on a December afternoon in 2014, I am aware that one of my students has committed suicide this morning.  This has happened before and it is always very sad.  A student overdoses, drinks too much, becomes so overwhelmed with his life, his mind, his memories, his depression, and decides there is no other way out.  It is sad indeed.  As a religious person who wants to believe that there is a God, I wonder what goes on inside the divine mind when a young man so full of promise kills himself.  I know all about the free will defense of God (how God has given people free will and so can no longer interfere in their decisions).  But I still cannot help but ask: How can a God, who in any shape, way or form speaks about loving his people, not be moved to act?

Growing up in New York, my parents always encouraged me to be a good Jew and a good American.  But they did not tell me how to do that.  Today, as a 66 year old man I continue to wrestle with their admonition, particularly when it comes to God. When I was 10 years old, I attended YMHA (Young Mens Hebrew Association) day camp.  On the bus ride to the camp in New Jersey we heartily sang the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”   I close my eyes today and I am on the bus, going to camp singing the song.  I was Jewish and American and it all held together quite well. But today, that is  no longer true.

I understand myself to be a modern Jew.  What that means is that I am immersed in both the traditions of modernity and Judaism and trying to figure out what that means.  As a modern person, I primarily see and hear myself as an “I” who walks around with my own reason deciding day in and day out what I think is true and right and what is false and wrong.  As an American,  I believe that I have the right to think as I would like and do what I think is right within the bounds of the law.  And as a thinking modern individual, a part of my brain has concluded that God does not seem to be a reality in my life or in the world.  I experience daily all sorts of joys and pains, no less, no more than anyone else.  

My parents, both Holocaust survivors, died of pancreatic cancer with all the pain and misery that goes with that.  If there is a God at work in my life, it is difficult to discern where and how that God operates.  The word coincidence easily trumps or explains away any notions of divine design. in my own life  Religious traditions seem to be human creations or constructions that speak more about human hopes and fantasies than any real divine reality. I am encouraged to think this way by my education, my technological and scientific culture, my historical study of events, particularly the Holocaust and my own day to day experience of the world.  I am a walking and floating “I” alone in an absurd, random and meaningless world or so it seems.

But, I also understand myself to be a Jew who lives in the modern world.  As a boy, for about six years, I attended a Yeshiva (Jewish parochial school) where I was taught God is real and becomes real to us through the Torah.  I was also taught that Jews are not merely individuals, but they are part of a community, the Jewish people.  When I was 13 years old I became a Bar-Mitzvah, a son of the commandment, a responsible member of the community.  I was taught that “we do not know who God is but we do know what God wants.”  And God wants us to follow the laws of the Torah.  God was pictured to us in Yeshiva as a holy mystery whose name was so mysterious that it could not even be spoken out loud.  In fact, my Rabbis called him Ha Shem, the Name.  We could not say much about who he was in himself but we could and did study and argue about how to best live out God’s laws.  God was beyond human comprehension.  God was the mystery of mysteries.  God inscrutably worked in human history.  The main message was: God is God and  you are not!  Obey the Torah and you will be doing what God wants you to do.

It was only a matter of time before there was a collision between these two ways of looking at the world.   For me the collision came when I first read Elie Wiesel’s book, Night.  Here was a religious Jew who captured the spiritual madness or craziness of being modern and religious.  Wiesel was a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp who believed that God was the protector of the Jewish people.  Soon, he hoped, God would come to vanquish the Nazis.  Soon, God would remember his promises to the Jewish people.  In a few moments the Jewish children would be set free from the camps.  But it was not to be.  And Wiesel courageously, I thought, raised  his voice with terrible and frightening questions I had not heard in my synagogue or my yeshiva.  Wiesel’s questions became my questions.  His questions were the right questions.  If God was real and had promised to care for the Jewish people, where was he now?  Why had he remained silent or absent?  What was one to make of the hiddeness of God?  My Jewish world was crumbling and I prayed everyday to God with questions.  But God remained silent.  I became a college teacher of Religion and Jewish studies.  I studied and taught my  Christian students about the Holocaust.  I traveled to Israel, visited and spoke at a conference at Yad Vashem.  I read and I read and I struggled with God.  And the more I studied, the more the collision between being modern and being Jewish became a terrible tension from which I have not be able to escape to this day.  At a certain point I even became a Christian, entered deeply into that faith for a number of years and studied their responses to the problem of evil, but that tradition could not answer my questions nor stop my struggle.  The Christian scripture and tradition does recognize that even after Jesus the world remains a dangerous and uncertain place.  It asserts that regardless of what suffering, pain or evil we are living through, “nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  I understood and tried to believe what they were saying: we are accompanied through our experience, and as Jesus died and was raised so we too would die and be raised.  Some even asserted that justice would be taken care of in the afterlife.  But it seemed and seems terribly insufficient given all the suffering and evil of this world.   And I called to mind the haunting words of Rabbi Irving Greenberg :  No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.

Notes from The Door

The door to my office at Augustana is covered with quotes, sayings, poems and an assortment of other things I find helpful, interesting or meaningful. Throughout the years, a number of you have mentioned how these quotes have been helpful, interesting or meaningful to you as well. So, once a week or so, I will be posting something from my door on this blog in the section entitled "Notes from The Door."   Stay sane out there!

Jews, Christians and the Holocaust

For the past thirty five years I have lived in two worlds.  I grew up a Conservative  Jew in New York City, became a Christian and a Lutheran Pastor, and some years later, left the Church to return to my Jewish tradition. While I do regret my conversion to Christianity, living among Christians has taught me much.  It is in the nature of regrets to give you insights into who you are and why you do what you do and most importantly, what you ought not do again.  What can I say?  It has been quite a journey!  Today, I teach at  a Lutheran Church affiliated college as a Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies. The two worlds, Jewish and Christian, live in my soul and I have learned much  about these two religion traditions on this rather strange journey. During these years I have immersed myself in reading about the Holocaust.  My parents were survivors and most of my relatives were killed over there in those days.  What I have discovered is that the Holocaust means something different to Jews than it does to the Christians I have met, and this is what I want to talk about.

For most Christians the Holocaust  is a terrible tragedy that happened to Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe about 70 years ago.  For these Christians the Holocaust is an historical event to be studied in the hope that it will never happen again.  For some years now I have taught a college class entitled: After Auschwitz: The Holocaust and the Christian Faith.  My students, mostly Christians,  junior and seniors, are eager to learn about what happened, why it happened, and what makes human beings want to kill each other in large numbers. 

My students are genuinely moved by the stories of survivors, they tell me  they find it difficult to sleep after watching some of the videos of the concentration camps, feel sad and weep as we speak about what happened in those days.  And I ask myself why the  Holocaust moves them so?  Why do they care?  Near as I can tell the answer is not very complicated.  They feel guilty.  They read in their books that Germany in 1933 was approximately half Roman Catholic and half Lutheran.  They study and are surprised by the long history of Christian anti-Judaism.  They read about the Nazi propaganda that accused and castigated the Jews in those days.  They read the poetry of the survivors and they stare at the pictures of the victims, the killers, and most importantly, the many bystanders.  Ultimately, they  realize that they have not so much been studying an historical event as they have been studying themselves.  They come to think that had they been there as German citizens in that time, age and culture that they too could have been the killers or at best the onlookers.  And they feel guilty.

Most of my students tend to be either Lutheran or Roman Catholic.  Some of them go to Church on Sunday mornings and listen to the way the New Testament scriptures are read out loud.  They hear how “the Jews”  are still depicted as the ones who wanted Jesus to be crucified.  Even more , most of my students, when asked who killed Jesus, will automatically and without much thought declare: “the Jews.”   They declare this, despite the fact that all of the Gospels in the New Testament declare that it was the Romans that crucified Jesus.  When I point it out they realize their mistake they again feel guilty. 

Should my Christian students feel guilty?  No and yes.   No, they were not alive at that time and place.  They are not responsible for what the Nazis did  between 1933 and 1945.  They are not, for the most part, anti-Jewish or anti-semitic.  Many of them have never even met anyone Jewish.  They are  mostly “nice” upper midwestern young people who shy away from direct conflict and are desperate to get along.  So, why should they feel guilty?  Because in so many ways they continue to be part of a tradition, Western and Christian, that continues to think and speak of Jews as the ones who have around their necks the onus of  being the outsider, the “betrayer” and the unbeliever in our midst. When my students feel guilty they are expressing a sense that what the Nazis proclaimed is not something past and buried but alive and still breathing in our midst.  They discover that anti-Judaism and anti-semitism are not merely part of the past.  Anti-Judaism is present in subtle and not so subtle ways in most every Christian Church service. The guilt of my students is not without substance and cause and seems to me appropriate.

I have lived among Christians, in the upper midwest, for the last thirty five years.  I have found most people to be friendly and caring.  My Christian friends and neighbors are amiable and tolerant.  And yet many of them, week after week, attend Church services where texts are read out loud without explanation.  These texts condemn “the Jews” for not believing  and for betraying their Lord and savior Jesus Christ.  I am not asserting nor do I believe that Christians are sitting in their pews week after week listening to the words of their scriptures and thinking to themselves: “I despise the Jews.”  No, the words on Sunday morning are so familiar that most do not bother to analyze what they are hearing. The anti-Jewish words are embedded within the texts and liturgy of many Christian worship services.   Despite Christian remorse over the Holocaust during the past 70 years, the potential toxicity of the texts has not been corrected, lessened or removed.  The story remains the same.  It is the same story that Nazis made sure to include in their invective against “the Jews.”  Jesus, the Jewish Christ came to his own but they rejected him and hence they are now rejected.  To be sure, and fair, since the Holocaust there have been many Christian theologians and Churches who have apologized, and explained again and again how hatred of Jews is not part of the New Testament.  Many have declared that the Jewish people remain the people of God.  They have theologized as to how Jews and Christians have much to learn from each other. But this theological get-alongism has not really affected the problem.   Week after week, the same texts keep being read out loud.  Sunday morning after Sunday morning the words are proclaimed out loud without most pastors or people in the pews even realizing that what they have just said or heard is anti-Jewish. 

The problem has to do with the functional sense of scripture.  It is not so much what the Bible says or is even interpreted to say,  as to how it functions generation after generation at the point of the Christian pew.  If the story keeps being told again and again and again the same way with no explanation week after week the results have the inherent potential of once again functioning as a source for anti-Judaism and anti-semitism

I have a close friend, a New Testament scholar, who does not think that the anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament are central to the message.  He tells me that if there are Christians who read the New Testament and blame all Jews for the death of Jesus these people are misinterpreting the Biblical text.  He teaches an introductory religion course.  He structures his course on what he sees as a central common theme for Jews and Christians: hope after catastrophe.  His working assumption is: in the Bible both Jews and Christians have had to figure out a way to keep on  after catastrophe occurs.  For Jews the catastrophes were the destruction of the first and second temple.  For Christians it was the crucifixion of Christ.  And for all of his students it is the catastrophes that happen all the time to them,their parents, their country, everyday in their world.  For my friend, the  challenge is to figure out a way to have hope despite the present day disasters.  God is not to be explained as much as to be addressed.  The question is more important than the answer to the question because the question itself is a sign of hope.  Hence, the question Jesus raises from the cross, “My God , My God, why have you abandoned me?” is a  form of prayer and hope.  For my friend this is the predicament of all people who have to live through craziness and still keep on keeping on.  The incarnation of God, he tells me, assures us that God is aware and has experienced the suffering we experience.  God becoming flesh allows and encourages us to protest to God about the danger of being flesh in this world. 

While I appreciate the theological acumen of my friend, I have a few problems with his formulation.  First, I am not convinced that the  New Testament does not contain a great deal of anti-Judaism.  Indeed my friend tells me that every Gospel in the New Testament subverts or is trying to subvert Judaism.  Throughout the New Testament, if “the Jews” did not actually kill Jesus, they certainly are seen as accomplices to Jesus’ death.  I have sat through enough Christian passion plays, seen enough Pharisees dressed in black plotting to kill Jesus dressed in white to conclude that the anti-Judaism of the New Testament remains alive and well despite my friend’s best intentions. 

Secondly, Jews are not so much searching for hope in the midst of catastrophe.  They are searching for what to do and how to act given the apparent absence of hope.  After the Holocaust, many Jews have concluded that there is no God and no hope except to carve out a place where Jews can live and protect themselves and their communities from those who want to kill them.  God is at best for these Jews a non-actor.  These Jews have to figure out how to have hope not because of or through God but despite the fact that there is no God.

Certainly, there are Jews, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform who continue to believe in God as an active if mysterious  presence in history.  But, even for these Jews, the problem is not hope.  The problem is God!  They confess that they do not know who God is or what God is doing in history.  But they do know what God wants them to do.  And that is to follow the commandments and to live a life of character. 

For many Jews, after The Holocaust, God has become problematic.  A Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, speaking at our college, was asked whether he believed in the coming of the messiah, answered the question in this way, "It is too late for the messiah.  If the murder of a million and a half children did not move him to come, it is too late.”  Christian theological and philosophical gymnastics to the side, God remains  problematic for many Jews.  Despite all that, God is not the main problem after the Holocaust.  The central concern of so many Jews today is the ongoing anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of the world.  Seventy years after the Holocaust, hatred of Jews continues unabated.  Seventy years after those days, hatred of the State of Israel is growing each and every day.  The Holocaust has demonstrated the silence and absence of God.  It has also made it clear that hatred of Jews remains a presence in the world. 

Jews do not feel responsible for the Holocaust.  Many Christians do!  That is the key difference.  To be clear, I am not saying that Christianity caused the killing of six million Jews in the middle of the twentieth century.  This was the work of Hitler and the Nazis.  But hundreds and hundreds of years of Christian anti-Judaism was a terrible tool that Nazis could and did employ and manipulate within their propaganda machine in order to convince the German people of the correctness of their actions toward the Jews.  For all sorts of reasons, when the Nazis came to power, most Germans who were Christian, did not step forward to protest.  Some may not have liked the Nazis but they were predisposed to not care for Jews.  Most Germans may not have wanted to kill their Jewish neighbors or to have them killed but they did not, for the most part, object when their Jewish neighbors began to disappear. 

When I speak of “Christians,” I am aware that there are many different kinds of Christians and many different ways of being Christian.  And there are many different attitudes and interpretations among Christians.  All of that is irrelevant to my point.  Regardless of how sincerely and well disposed Christians are toward Jews, after the Holocaust the problem remains that there is an inherent anti-Judaism embedded within Christian tradition that has not been removed.  Christianity is a religion which defines itself over and against  Judaism.  At the same time as it argues against Jewish tradition, it also proclaims that it is the fulfillment of that tradition.  Christianity exists and has always existed in the historical tension between its own continuity and discontinuity with Jewish tradition.  Jesus was Jewish.  His disciples were Jewish; his mother was Jewish.  For Christians to be Christian they must claim their radical origin from the Jewish tradition.  But, for Christianity to be Christian, it must distance itself from the Jewish rabbinic tradition.  Both must happen at the same time.  Christianity is an apocalyptic gentile religion that trusts that God has come in the flesh and was betrayed by his own people, the Jews. 

Having said all this, I am not convinced that the traditional way of telling the Christian story can or will be altered.  Jewish betrayal is at the heart of Christian proclamation no matter how much it is denied.  The Christian Communion liturgy declares, “On the night in which he was betrayed . . .”   Betrayal is central to the tradition.  Some Christians have argued that the words about betrayal mean to say that all people have and continue to betray or hand over Jesus.  They mean to say that “we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  This is very nice and I suppose true to Christian anthropology but that is not what the New Testament texts say.  Each gospel tells the story of how Jews and/or their representatives betrayed their own messiah: “He came to his own and his own knew him not.” (John 1:11.) 

To be clear, I am not saying that all Christians are inherently anti-Jewish.  I am saying that the Christian textual tradition tells an anti-Jewish story.  And this story continues to be repeated again and again week in and week out.  And it was this narrative tradition that Nazis used in their scheme to destroy every living Jew and to create a Christianity without Judaism or Jewish roots.  The fact is that Christianity is infected with a disease  I call anti-Judaism.  Is there an antidote for this poison?  Yes, but it will be very difficult.

It will involve Christians being self-critical of their tradition, taking time and energy to train their pastors and people in the pews to recognize the damaging possibilities of the biblical texts.  Pastors and lay people can be inoculated against the poison within the texts.  Recognizing the disease is only half the battle, tough a very important part.  The next step will require the courage, at each reading of the texts, to remind listeners to not assume that “the Jews” mentioned in the text are the same Jews we meet everyday today.  Week in and week out pastors will have to continually and ongoingly warn their hearers to be aware of the potential to misunderstand the text.  This sounds rather idealistic and difficult and it is.  Many pastors and lay people will not think it necessary.  They will not have the time, conviction or courage.  And yet, maybe, a few will begin the long process of extracting the poisonous venom lying within the texts. 

Why is this removal of toxicity so difficult?  Because religions, in general, and Christianity in particular, are not set up to point out publicly in a worship service, the places where their scriptures are potentially dangerous.  Christians are not so much concerned or worried about Jews as they are about proclaiming the Gospel.  And most pastors are not being trained in their seminaries to know how to caution their parishioners.  Let’s be honest.  Most pastors are not trained to think.  They are trained to transmit.  That does not mean that they cannot think for themselves.  But, pastors are institutional proclaimers and not courageous reformers. 

Over the years I have become close friends with a number of Lutheran pastors.  We speak frequently about the relations between Jews and Christians.  They understand the issues.  They care deeply about the integrity of what they say on Sunday mornings.  Again and again, they tell me that the anti Jewish words of the gospels are so much a part of their tradition that on any given Sunday morning, they are, for the most part,  not able to hear what they are actually proclaiming.  They tell me that if I were standing right behind them, cautioning them to be careful about this or that part of the story, they would be able to caution their listeners.  But they say, they cannot pay attention to texts they cannot hear.  The problem remains that the anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament are so embedded, so much a part of the Christian tradition, so normal, so central to the faith of believers, that removing or correcting the anti-Jewish elements is going to be very difficult.

When I discuss these matters with my students, those who attend Church and are quite religious, they are quite surprised and even shocked that the Christian tradition is so inherently and ambiguously anti-Jewish.  They are not sure where to go from here.  Questions abound.  Should they leave this toxic tradition?  Should they try to fix it?  Can it be fixed?  Does it really need fixing?  Is there really a problem or has the professor created the problem?  It is one thing to learn about the Nazis and what they did during the Holocaust.  It is quite another to accept that your own religious tradition was culpable in the event. And I must confess that even when I teach my students most carefully and diligently that in the New Testament Gospels it was the Romans that killed Jesus, on the final exam, when I ask this question:  The  _________killed Jesus,  a number of my students still put down that it was “The Jews” who killed Jesus.

Let us be honest about religions in general.  All religions were created by human beings.  Each religion has the strengths and weaknesses, the light and darkness inherent in every human being.  When religions are sufficiently introspective they are able to face their own traditions with courage and integrity.  All religions, including Christianity, contain certain parts which  are so ingrained and injurious that they will need to be extricated or excised.  This process will be very difficult if not impossible.  But all any religion can do is to try to educate its members so that the darkness within each religion will not prevail.  There are Christian scholars, pastors, priests, nuns and some lay people that are working this day to repair the anti-Judaism and anti-semitism within their tradition.  I urge them to keep on.

As for me, I respect the Christian tradition for its insights into the nature of human nature.  I respect a tradition that teaches its followers to trust in God and to stand with the neighbor in pain.  I respect a tradition that knows that evil is real and that Christians must do what they can to do resist it.  I respect a tradition that speaks eloquently about the Grace of God.  But, I could not remain in this tradition.  I understand the ambiguity concerning Jews and Jewish tradition within Christian theology.   But in so many  biblical texts, in too many sermons, in yearly Holy Week passion plays, and Sunday worship services I felt as if I and the Jewish people were constantly  being attacked and humiliated.  I am not optimistic that Christians will be able to fix what is broken in their tradition.  I hope they will continue to try.

Wrestling with Jewish Identity

I used to think the real Jews in America were the Hasidim or the ultra-orthodox or perhaps the modern orthodox. I thought they really knew what it meant to be Jewish and therefore were the only ones who were willing to discipline themselves enough to strictly keep the Torah and adhere to the Rabbinic tradition. They were the real Jews and the rest of us were just playing games or  lacked the gumption or the  commitment to be or act Jewish. Whenever I saw the ultra religious I felt like an inadequate Jew. And I believed they also thought I was inadequate Jew. Was I? Am I?

 The Rabbinic tradition asserts that a Jew is someone whose mother is Jewish or who converts into the Jewish religion.  In addition, contemporary Reform Jews believe that if the father is Jewish and the child is brought up Jewish, then the child is Jewish. My mother and my father were Jewish. They survived Hitler’s Holocaust and came to America in 1947. I was born shortly thereafter and grew up in a Jewish home in New York. At home my parents spoke only Yiddish. Until I was 7 years old my parents told me I did not speak English, just Yiddish. I attended a yeshiva from the ages of 5-12. I said my prayers every day. I went to synagogue most every Saturday morning. I was a bar mitzvah and laid tefillin. My parents kept a kosher home. Based on these facts, I was and am certainly Jewish.

But what about this question of whether or not I’m an adequate Jew?  Is this a question with which I should be concerned?  The question seems to be inherent within the Jewish religion and community.  Some Jews argue that parental heritage is only part of the answer. To really be a Jew, they believe, one must live in strict obedience to the commandments as interpreted by the Rabbinic tradition. If strict adherence to Rabbinic tradition is required to be Jewish and I no longer keep a kosher home, does that mean I’m not Jewish? Or am I simply an inadequate Jew? What makes me a Jew, adequate or otherwise? What makes me part of the Jewish community? Why do I think I need to ask and answer these questions? Am I Jewish because my mother was Jewish? That is certainly the legal Jewish definition . Maybe there are better questions that would be more helpful: How should a Jew live? Does being Jewish deserve a moral definition? Or is being Jewish best given a ritual definition? Or could it be an existential, self-definitional subjective decision, that is, I feel that I am a Jew therefore, I am. Does being Jewish mean that I am compelled to live inside Rabbinic tradition and follow those laws strictly? And how does one understand the authority of that tradition? Which interpretation of that tradition is the authoritative one? And what does it mean to stand under and be surrounded by that tradition? Do I get to pick and choose what parts of that tradition are relevant to me? And if I, as an individual, am compelled to choose, how will I know that I have chosen correctly so I can be sure that I am a real Jew?

 Jewish tradition teaches that questions have more power than answers. But as I had plenty of questions and needed some answers, I needed to wrestle with two different historically perennial communal questions. First, what really makes someone a Jew? And second, how should a Jew live in order to actually be Jewish? Or to ask these questions personally, am I really a Jew and if so, how then should I live?

One morning, when I was about 15, in our small apartment in the Bronx, I was praying my morning prayers, wearing my tefillin. I noticed my father watching me rather closely. After I had concluded my prayers he said words I have never forgotten. “Your prayers are very nice. You daven well. Better you should be a mensch.” He went on. “Religion is good but only if it teaches you to be a mensch.”

 For my father being Jewish meant that you were a person of character. My father was a good man but not terribly observant. He would often work on the Sabbath as a machine operator at a clothing factory. When I asked him why he worked on the Sabbath, he answered that he had to earn money for the family to have food to eat. My father respected the ritualistic or quantitative part of the Rabbinic tradition but he thought that the qualitative part was more important. He said, “If you want to find out what is in a man’s heart, do not listen to the mouth, but follow the feet.” He thought that being frum or religious is fine but being a mensch was vital and at the center of  the Jewish tradition. As I think about his words today I wonder, does it have to be a matter of either/or could it be both? What do his words mean for the way I am Jewish today?

Baruch Spinoza is credited with opening up the door 350 years ago that allowed and required each and every individual Jew to make a conscious choice or decision as to whether and how he or she will be a Jew. In the small shtetls of Europe before Spinoza, Jews were born Jews, remained Jews, and died as Jews without ever thinking that they had or even wanted to make a choice to be or not to be Jewish. It never even occurred to them. But thanks to Spinoza and the “Enlightenment” that followed him, it has become increasingly unclear what it means to be a Jew. Today, we American Jews watch our children as they feel free to make decisions about how to be or not be Jewish. In our world, there is an implicit and explicit compulsion to choose from a multitude of options about what it means for each individual Jew to be Jewish. The Hasidic Jew is Hasidic today because he or she has consciously chosen to be so. The Conservative Jew is Conservative because that option seemed appealing and fit the way he or she wanted to be Jewish. This is also true for the ultra Orthodox Jew and for the Reconstructionist Jew, the secular Jew, the Reform Jew, and every other kind of contemporary Jew. After Spinoza the criterion for what kind of Jew one ought to be seems to be “what sort of Judaism fits well for me?” And even though some Jews don’t seem to make conscious choices but are simply Jewish in the same way their parents were or were not, even though it appears the decision, how to be/act Jewish, was made generations ago and then passed on to the children who accept it gladly, they are still choosing. All of us are Jews that have to make choices.  And by the choices we make we determine what it means to be Jewish today.

 The contemporary notion of being free to choose how or whether one will be religious means that anyone who thinks he is Jewish can decide how he or she chooses to be Jewish. Autonomy trumps any religious tradition or authority since freedom and toleration are the central beliefs of American society not to mention all of Western culture. The radicalness of this freedom to choose is most evident in those particular Jews who have decided that they can be both Jewish and Christian or Jewish and Buddhist at the same time. Again, it is the hallmark of our age, time, and culture that, not only Jews, but all people feel free to pick, choose and combine different parts of different religions, whatever they feel like combining as long as they find it spiritually beneficial to themselves. The established right to be syncretistic owes its privilege to Spinoza and those who followed him in holding up the privatization of religion. That “ideal” has been achieved and is part of the air we breathe each and every day. 

I understand and have experienced this freedom first hand. As a young man I concluded  that it made no difference what religion I was as long as I worshipped God and cared for the neighbor. For all sorts of personal reasons which seemed reasonable at the time, I left the Jewish tradition to become a Christian. For many years I tried to live in the Christian tradition, to understand and adapt to Christian beliefs. But I found that the longer I lived among Christians the more Jewish I remained. I found I could not be a Christian because I, constitutionally, was a Jew. I did not and could not recognize the authority of the Christian tradition in my life, and could not define my life under the umbrella of that tradition, try as I might.

Accordingly, I decided to return to the Jewish tradition. In doing so, I felt as if I had returned home for the first time. I felt alive and I could sleep through the night for the first time in many, many years. I was finally at peace with myself and at peace with my soul. But that lasted only a short time because I was soon confronted with a predicament. Having returned to the Jewish tradition, I now had to decide what kind of Jew I should be. I had grown up as a Conservative Jew but what sort of Jew should I be now? I presently live in a city that has only one synagogue and it is a Reform temple. Is that the kind of Jew I should be? The more I investigated all of the ways of being a contemporary Jew, the more I realized how varied the options were. I discovered that for many Jews, being Jewish does not have to do with scrupulously saying prayers and doing commandments though that can certainly be a part of being Jewish. I discovered that there are and have always been many different ways to be Jewish. There are some Jews who believe their way of being Jewish is the only way to be Jewish and other Jews who claim that each Jew has to decide for him or herself what being Jewish means for them. There are many Jews who live their lives ignoring the tradition all together. There are people who are Jewish because their mother or father was Jewish. There are Jews who are Jews because they have converted into one of the different Jewish religious groups. There are people who self-identify as Jews simply because they say so. They think they have the right to choose to be Jewish.

Of course this is not new. Part of our heritage is that we Jews wrestle with our identity. We argue incessantly about what it means to be Jewish. This is part and parcel of what makes us Jewish. Being Jewish has always been complicated and convoluted. It involves negotiation with ourselves and sometimes with other Jews. Indeed, being Jewish involves living in the unavoidable tension between the quantitative and the qualitative sides of Jewish tradition. For some Jews the quantity of commandments you obey each day is the key to being Jewish. For others the quality of one’s life is the way you can tell if someone is really Jewish.

This is the conundrum of the contemporary person who would be Jewish. If being Jewish can mean anything then perhaps it actually means nothing. I know Jews who are quite proud to be Jewish but they do not believe in God, do not know Hebrew, do not keep kosher, do not study Torah, and do not follow any of the traditional commandments. Are they Jewish? And am I any better or worse than them? I pray the Shema day and night, do not eat pork, study Torah, and care deeply for the State of Israel. Yet, I do not keep a kosher home, I enjoy meals in all sorts of unkosher restaurants, I drive on the Sabbath and I use my cell phone (although I do not read my email). I believe that I rest on the Sabbath but I allow myself the right to define what I mean by the word rest. Am I living like a “true” Jew?

A helpful midrash: A Jewish man who owned a shop came to his Rabbi and confessed that on the previous Shabbat he had kept his shop open for six hours in order to make a little extra money for his wife and family. The man felt terribly guilty and with much remorse he cries to the Rabbi, “Rabbi, what kind of awful Jew am I? I ignored the Torah, I shamed my family, what an awful man am I.” The Rabbi told the man to calm down. He asked the man a few questions, “You kept your shop open on the Sabbath for six hours, yes?” The sad and contrite man, his head down answered , “Yes.” But, the Rabbi asked him, “What did you do for the remaining eighteen hours of the Sabbath? The man replied, “For those eighteen hours I kept the Sabbath.” The Rabbi answered, “Go home, my friend, you are a true Jew. Maybe next week you will do better.”

What can this Midrash teach us? First, there is the Rabbi, the teacher who teaches what we need to hear if we are to be Jewish. To be Jewish is to know that you may not know and that you must rely on a teacher to teach you what you need to know. The good teacher not only knows the tradition; he or she knows how to engage the tradition. The word “tradition” refers to that wisdom necessary for life which has been passed on from generation to generation. And what is the wisdom that the Rabbi conveys to his student, the shopkeeper? He teaches him that being Jewish is not a matter of believing certain truths or performing certain rituals with the utmost fidelity. Being Jewish has to do with doing what you can do, given who you are in the place where you live. The shopkeeper did what he could do. He ignored a portion of the law but not the whole law. Perhaps next week he will be able to do more. Perhaps not. He, the shopkeeper, obviously loves the tradition and feels guilty for ignoring that tradition but the Rabbi reproves him. His actions do not call for guilt but for celebration of the eighteen hours of right and just behavior. The rabbi tells him to go and try again, to surely do better.

So, what makes the shopkeeper “a true Jew?” What is it in this person that convinces the Rabbi that in front of him stands someone who is Jewish? Could it be his guilt? But the Rabbi does not applaud or sanction the guilt. For the Rabbi it seems sufficient that the man knows himself to be part of a community that lives under the umbrella of the Jewish Rabbinic tradition. So first he assumes the authority of the legal part of the tradition: A Jew is a Jew if his or her mother is Jewish or he or she converts into the tradition. And second comes the ritual part of the tradition. In essence the Rabbi tells the shopkeeper to continue to live with respect for the ritual portion of the tradition and that will be sufficient. But what does the word “respect” mean in this context? It means that the shopkeeper’s existence is defined by living his life under the authority and wisdom of this tradition even though he sometimes ignores it. Once the Rabbi sees this commitment in the man standing before him, the breaking of the Sabbath laws, while certainly not ideal, is no reason to feel guilty since it is clear that the shopkeeper is bound by the discipline of the Torah as interpreted by the Rabbis. Standing under the traditional Jewish umbrella makes the shopkeeper a member of the community and that is sufficient. His indiscretions are tolerable because he ultimately lives under the umbrella of the Jewish tradition. He is living like a Jew, his lack of strict obedience notwithstanding, is sufficient, “dayenu.” And yet sufficient for whom? For God?? For the Rabbi? For the shopkeeper? For the Hasidim, for the Reform Jews? For whom exactly is it sufficient?

It is sufficient for the Jewish community. Contemporary Jews live in an inherent tension within the Jewish tradition between the quantitative and the qualitative parts of the tradition, between the part of the tradition that says that to be Jewish one must adhere to the commandments as defined by the Rabbis as strictly as possible and the part that says the Jewish community or the Jewish individual can decide which Rabbinic laws or rituals are to be followed in order that the person live a “quality” life as a “mensch.” The qualitative Jews say that it is more important to be a person of character than to carry out all the rituals. This unavoidable tension between the moral and the ceremonial is an inherent part of Jewish tradition. The tension has become in our days more pointed and difficult to decipher. This inherent tension means that Jews may respect the authority of the Jewish tradition even when they disagree with it, rebel against it or disobey that tradition. The tradition remains the center around which all sorts and kinds of Jews revolve, make decisions and live their lives. Some Jews are closer to the periphery; others closer to the center, some eccentric, some secular, some Zionist, some humanist, and some who do not even know that they are standing under the umbrella of Jewish tradition. And, importantly, where a Jew stands in that circle may change throughout his or her life.

This past week representatives of Chabad came to my town in order to convert Jews to the Hasidic Chabad way of being Jewish. The problem is that this way of operating, coming to a city for a few days, acting as if you and only you know what it means to be Jewish, sounding like only your group really understands what it means to be Jewish, is not Jewish. This is not what Jews have done in the past. Chabad is using certain Christian evangelistic methods in the belief that it is thereby saving Judaism from Jews. In acting this way, Chabad is an historical novum placing it on the periphery of Jewish tradition.

Whether you or I or Chabad like it or not, there have always been a variety of ways to live out one’s life as a Jew. In many ways, this was so even before Spinoza, before Rashi, before Maimonides, and certainly within the Talmud and the Torah. The umbrella has been wide and inclusive. Being Jewish has always been a matter of respect for the authority of the tradition, without assuming strict compliance with that tradition. Being Jewish has to do with living one’s life with respect and in an engaged tension with the tradition.  When a Jew decides to leave that tradition and converts to another religion he or she, technically speaking, remains a Jew.

So let me return to my question. “Am I a Jew?” Yes! My mother was Jewish and I live within the inherent modern tension of being Jewish. Yet I fear that my attempt at defining what constitutes a Jew and how he or she should live, may be seen as evasive or vague. “Negotiating with the tradition” sounds pretty wishy washy. I confess that it is so but I see no other choice. There is no hard and fast list about how a Jew should live. There may have been a time when Jews were born, lived and died in an inextricable geographical triangular relation between the individual, the community and God. If those places ever existed they were lived out in geographical isolation and not urban freedom. I find myself to be a Jewish American, an isolated floating individual with options and choices that are strictly my own. This negotiation is quite complicated in that the Jew who grows up under the Jewish umbrella is also at the same time growing up under another larger umbrella, that of Western civilization. The negotiation between the different umbrellas is complicated by the fact that so many others around us are negotiating living under these umbrellas in so many different ways. I find myself surrounded by individualized floating Jews who make their own isolated choices without consulting anyone other than their own reason and their own sense of what it means to be Jewish. I would argue that consciously or not, what unites all these individual Jews is a respect, albeit in many varied ways, for the authority of the tradition, whether that authority stems from God, the Rabbis, or one’s own sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself. Being a Jew, inherently makes you part of a community whether you know it or not. How so?

Respecting the authority of a tradition means that in thinking about how I live my life as a Jew, I negotiate explicitly or implicitly, overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously under, over and against my religious tradition. Some Jews submit to the tradition. Some tolerate but pay scant attention to the tradition. And some are Jewish because of nostalgia for remembered traditions at their home. Others engage the tradition, argue with it and push back against it. I find myself in this category. Still others do their best to do good deeds and understand their deeds to be “mitzvot.” The fact is that Jews are Jews and act Jewishly for all sorts of reasons apart from strict obedience to the halacha or conscious adherence to the Jewish tradition.

Is it really necessary, then. to ask the question: “Am I a Jew?” Yes. This question is important, especially in a society like ours, which is rich, entitled and self absorbed, it is important to demarcate and know who you are and why you act the way you do. In that way, I am certainly an example of a Jewish modern American. I care deeply that I am a Jew and that I live as a Jew in the world. But everyday, I do have options and choices and am compelled to make such choices and to select my options as best I can. This is also true for all other Jews; we are -- all of us -- whether we admit it or not, making choices about the way we will be religious. We Jews are deciding all the time and every day how Jewish we will or will not be and what that means in every moment and every decision. This is true for the secular humanist Jew, the atheist Jew, as well as those who decide to be Hasidic or orthodox, or whatever. The very notion that I, as an individual, can decide how I will be religious or can decide whether I think there is or is not a God, all of this is quite modern. But, this is the bargain we or our parents and grandparents made 350 years after Spinoza. Perhaps it is fair to say that there may always have been a negotiation between the larger umbrella civilization and the smaller but powerful religious traditions living under that umbrella be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian or whatever.

But in all this choosing that goes on, where is the line between negotiation and capitulation? Let’s be honest and practical. If I go out to a restaurant that is not kosher, eat a cheeseburger with fries, am I thereby negotiating with the tradition or just plain ignoring it, not even thinking about it, capitulating to whatever I feel like doing in the moment?  I think that is the wrong question. The tradition teaches that if your mother is Jewish or if you have completed the formal conversion process, you are Jewish. At least for me, that part of the tradition is not debatable. The heart of the tradition is the negotiating process by which each Jew determines how he or she will live out his or her Jewishness. Once you allow for individuals to negotiate and reinterpret you inevitably run the risk that the negotiation will, at times, become capitulation, but such is the risk with which we must live. We American Jews are caught in the tension between individual autonomy and the communal tradition of obedience. We feel the inextricable pull. We live and breathe that tension. I am not comfortable with the tension but feel compelled to live within it.

It then seems clear that no particular negotiation of what it means to be Jewish can be the absolutely correct one. The tradition teaches us that the Reform Jew and the Hasidic Jew and the Conservative Jew and any other kinds of Jews have no authority to judge whether someone whose mother is Jewish or has completed the conversion process of any of the Jewish traditions, is more or less Jewish.  Being Jewish is a negotiating process at which some Jews will do well and others not so well and still others will reject or ignore the whole process. But the process of negotiation will not go away. And Jews can respectfully, even stubbornly, negotiate with other Jews about the best way to be Jewish and how to engage the contemporary culture. 

Every religion has to figure out how to deal with difference within its community.  In this essay I am arguing for a limited pluralistic approach. I am advocating a broad umbrella that allows all sorts of Jews to stand under it.  However, there is an important distinction between discussing and even arguing with other Jews about what it means to be Jewish and arrogantly accusing other Jews of not being Jewish. Jews can no longer be commanded to observe; they must be persuaded, not once but repeatedly.  This is a problem for Jews on the right and the left. Many Jews tend to think that their way of being Jewish or the way they grew up Jewish is the right way and all other ways are illegitimate. The secret lies in the negotiation. And that necessary negotiation is a good thing. The tradition compels and commends Jews to argue with each other in order to discover the truth. It compels Jews to be awake and alive toward their tradition.  Indeed, it may be that the existential dilemma of contemporary Jews is precisely what makes being Jewish so dramatic, mysterious. and life giving. In any event the Jewish community should be a place where Jews can feel safe to be Jews.

My mother and father left me a religious legacy with at least four distinct tensions. As a Jew, I am caught in the interrelated tensions, between being an individual and yet part of a community, between my autonomy and the authority of the tradition, between being Jewish and modern, between being Jewish and American at the same time. They told me again and again “Be a good Jew and be a good American.” But they did not tell me how to do that, and the older I become, the more clear it is that being all of these things at the same time is not easy. 

 For good or for bad, it is established and given in American culture that religion is private, personal, individual and voluntary. And the key to all this choosing lies in Spinoza’s central belief that “freedom” was the mark of a reasonable society.  This is our legacy and as modern Jews we must look at it straight in the face and come to terms with it.

Because I am a modern Jew my identity is complicated by the fact that I am also an American. Each Jew may, and more than likely will, wrestle with the tradition and modernity differently at different times in their lives and that is what makes that person Jewish. “Am I a Jew?” Absolutely. The secret resides in the wrestling. Having left and returned to Jewish tradition I feel a particular kind of grieving and angst. But, leaving and returning are also an important part of being Jewish. Having returned it has taken me awhile to work through what kind of Jew I will be. And the ongoing question for me is no longer, “Am I a Jew?, but “What kind of Jew am I?” I am a Jew who tried to run away from the tradition but could never leave it. I am a Jew who loves the Jewish community, the Torah and the tradition. I am a Jew who loves being an American. And so I am compelled to wrestle with the tradition for the rest of my life. 

And, therein lies the response to my question 'Am I a Jew?" Yes. I am a Jew. I am a Jew legally and traditionally because my mother was Jewish. My parents came here from Europe and spent their lives wrestling with being good Jews and good Americans. They never tired of instructing me to do the same and in doing so, passed that legacy of wrestling onto me. I am a Jew because I respect the authority of the tradition, and only because I respect the authority of the tradition am I able to wrestle and negotiate with it. I am a Jew because I wrestle with that tradition in the context of my family history, my local, national and international community. 

Note:  I have not mentioned God up to this point. It is hard to say whether there is a necessary connection between being Jewish and believing in God. For most religious Jews who daily invoke the name of God it seems that they believe there actually is someone “out there” or “right here” to whom they are addressing their prayers. For some Jews, praying the Shema may be an expression of their connectedness to the Jewish people more than their connectedness to God. For many contemporary Jews, after the Holocaust, the word “God” has at best become unclear or confusing and at worst, an imaginary being created by the imagination of the Rabbis or the tradition. The eclipse of God has also been an intricate part of Zionism.   The fact is for many Jews God is not an important part of their being Jewish and that seems fine with them. As for me, the word “God” is a mysterious ineffable enigmatic word. The more I know, the less I know.  The word, God, is a metaphor for what is at the heat and soul of the universe.  As the name “Israel” suggests, we Jews are compelled to wrestle with God or against God or live without God before God. I finally adhere to the old Jewish cliché: ‘We do not know who God is but we know what God wants us to do.”

For Jews there will be no end to this wrestling with our identity. The wrestling may be self-serving, incomplete or inadequate. As you wrestle with the tradition and your identity as a Jew in your way and I in mine, we together continue, L'dor Va'dor, to be the Jewish community. And that, in itself, is and will have to be sufficient. Dayenu!

Murray Haar
Augustana College
Sioux Falls, South Dakota