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.