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Jan. 20, 2012
Scriptural antisemitism endures
In most interfaith encounters, superficiality seems to outweigh any real discussions.
EUGENE KAELLIS
For many years, as my family moved around North America, my late wife and I (mostly she) organized interfaith meetings in every community in which we lived. The first, and largest, one was in New York City. It was inspired by Pope John XXIII’s 1962 encyclical Pacem in terris, the outstanding document of the aggioronamento (“modernizing” of the Catholic Church) that, since his death, fizzled and now, under Benedict XVI, has not only been extinguished, but significantly reversed.
We lived in Brooklyn and the bishop of that diocese never allowed his priests to engage publicly with non-Catholics on any subject other than obscenity, so we had to “import” a more sympathetic Benedictine monk from Westchester County. Before a large and enthusiastic audience, a rabbi, a Protestant minister and the monk discussed the encyclical and its probable consequence for Catholics and others. It was altogether an educational, uplifting event.
For Jews, Pacem was particularly important, because, theoretically, it relieved them of the guilt of hereditary deicide based, in part, on Matthew 27:25 – “His blood be on us and on our children,” allegedly uttered by a Jewish onlooker observing Jesus on the way to Calvary. That sentence, undoubtedly an invention by an evangelist trying to curry favor with Rome by making Pilate innocent, became part of the traditional Good Friday liturgy and it has been responsible for innumerable pogroms throughout history, crowds of incensed worshippers storming out of churches and streaming towards the local ghetto, picking up cudgels and stones along the way, to give palpable demonstration of their piety.
My mother, who came from what is now Lithuania, told me that, in anticipation of violence, in the days before Good Friday, Jews routinely boarded up their windows and prepared bandages for the eventual bloodshed. Pope John, aware of this, made a significant change in the Good Friday liturgy, leaving out a reference to “perfidious Jews,” a change ignored by many Protestants (and, since John’s death, by Catholic priests). Years later, when I attended a Good Friday tenebrae service conducted by a Presbyterian minister and friend, the same inciting and dreadful words from Matthew were still used. He was surprised when I revealed to him the history of violence following them. One supposes that he believed that his congregants were, by then, beyond all that, but I am certain he would still have objected to a Stepin Fetchit-type caricature of Balthasar, one of the Magi (Three Wise Men).
More recently, whenever I broached this subject with Christian theologians and clergy, they were sympathetic but assured me that Scripture, once canonized, cannot be changed, which, of course, is not true. Canonization was not derived from presumed revelation but after heavily debated redactions and council decisions, and can be selectively remedied by other councils making other decisions. But, of course, there has to be the will.
Later, when I became the education director for a multicultural society, I frequently organized interfaith meetings. While they attracted significant audiences and perhaps made people (at least temporarily) feel more kindly toward one another, in my retrospective opinion, they were ineffective because, by being non-historical and, moreover, invariably “polite,” they deliberately avoided consideration of the often-tragic chronicles of religious persecutions, thereby generating neglect of still outstanding and serious issues and the illusion of accommodation. As an example, in what is unquestionably the longest-running case of religious parricide, the Christian Testament and the Koran are laden with anti-Jewishness. Under the “benignity” of these meetings, historical (even contemporary) religious violence, instigations and hate preachments vanished, unseen by eyes clouded over by deliberate neglect.
Later, I read John Murray Cuddihy’s book No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste, on the superficial “niceness” of North American religions toward one another, and it became clear that established religions, when interfacing, are guided by a bland interfaith etiquette that simply does not permit any historicity, seriousness, depth or the possibility of, at least post facto, redress, all absolutely essential for real change. Conflicts between contending faiths have been extraordinarily bloody and the doctrinal differences that have chronically instigated such mass violence have not disappeared or even diminished; rather, they have been canonized. “Nice” people pretend that these are merely relics, rendered irrelevant in our contemporary presumed enlightenment. Perhaps it is simply that, with the decline of religious zeal, they are no longer (with some obvious exceptions) worth killing for and are, consequently, deemed unworthy of acknowledgement, examination and redress.
Almost everyone is put more at ease by such an attitude, clearly demonstrating that the goal of Western contemporary religion is precisely that – making adherents more comfortable in this world and the presumed next, comparable to heating, air-conditioning and a firm mattress. “Jeremiahs” – obstreperous, incensed prophets – need not apply.
Well, perhaps all of us should be more congenial, more relaxed and less polemical. After all, what is the alternative? Can we really dispute with one another and still retain genuine mutual respect and, if need be, forgiveness and forbearance, instead of bathing in the warm but shallow waters of superficiality and neglect, which can, under the proper confluence of circumstance, once more become scalding, toxic and deep enough to drown?
Superficiality and its contemporary handmaiden, toleration, may be safer, but are they real? Are they durable? Are they profound? Moreover, especially for Jews, how reliable can they be?
Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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