Encore Archive
On this page, we present essays – profound or timely – culled from the CLAL literary archive. Most of the articles that appear here appeared originally in the pages of Sh'ma– A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, which was founded by Eugene Borowitz in 1970 and published by CLAL from 1994-1998.
For further information regarding Sh'ma today, click here.
(from
Sh’ma 13/260, October 28, 1983)
Jewish-Christian Relations in America
By Solomon S. Bernards
Some years ago, in the course of a long conversation with a Lubavich Chasid, a Holocaust
survivor, he asked what I did for a living. I
replied that I was working full-time to improve relations between Christians and Jews, to
develop attitudes of mutual respect and trust and even friendship -- so that what happened
during the Holocaust would not happen again. He
reacted, "You're wasting your time. Anti-Semitism
is inseparable from Christianity. It's
impossible for a Christian not to be an anti-Semite."
I have the impression that the attitude of this survivor is not atypical,
and that this bitter, irreversibly hostile feeling has transmitted itself not only to
family, but has provided strong reinforcement of the regrettably deep anti-gentile
prejudices regnant in some sectors of the Jewish community.
On the other hand, those survivors who owe their lives to the acts of
"righteous gentiles," or observed acts of righteousness by Christians, identify
with efforts seeking Christian-Jewish reconciliation.
Is
anti-Semitism really inseparable from Christianity?
I think not. Even so, the
tenacity with which ingrained disparagements, distortions, and hostilities have persisted
in church teachings and in Christian society generally over the past 1900 years has made
the task of bridge-building enormously difficult. This
labor requires patience, tact, scholarship and, above all, credibility and
trustworthiness. Progress has been slow,
often painfully slow, but it is now possible to see improved relations between Christians
and Jews in America in fundamental ways.
Judaism
Was Not Taken Seriously
Twenty-one
years ago, when I began my work, we were in many respects in an elementary stage. We attracted Christian ministers through midrashic tales, rabbinic homilies, chasidic stories.
We described Jewish holy days in depth.
We provided "kits" of Jewish religious articles (i.e., a miniature
Torah scroll, a junior tallit, a Chanukah
menorah, etc.) to illustrate the life of Jesus. If
you brought up the subject of Christian sources of anti-Semitism to ministers and
educators, they backed off, despite the fact that in the previous three decades Sunday
School texts had been examined by scholars and found to contain many derogations and
misrepresentations of Jews and Judaism. A few
Protestant denominations, such as the Methodists, United Church (Congregationalists) and
Presbyterians, took the lead in trying to cleanse their teaching materials of serious
malignments of Judaism. But the majority of
Protestant text publishers and virtually all Catholic text publishers wouldn't touch the
subject -- it was too "controversial."
In
college sociology classes, some headway could be discerned, since Gordon Alport's classic,
The Nature of Prejudice, had helped remove the
taboo of discussing prejudice and bigotry in general, and anti-Semitism in particular. When one attended religion courses, particularly
in church- affiliated institutions, it was taken for granted that Jews and Judaism had
ceased to exist after the beginning of the Christian centuries; therefore, there was no
point in studying this "fossilized remnant of Syriac civilization."
Jewish
Pride Promoted Dialogue
At theological schools, the situation was much
worse. The anti-Jewish theological constructs
of the classical Christian theologians reigned supreme.
The tragic relations between the Christian churches and the Jews from the
time of Constantine, when Christianity became the official religion of the Holy Roman
Empire, were a "best kept secret" insofar as teachers and students were
concerned. Only years later did some
Christian clergy and academicians discover how much they had been short-changed in their
training for the ministry by the withholding of this information from them. Doors of theological classes were closed to Jewish
interfaith workers -- what could a Jew, who had rejected the Christian Saviour, tell
Christian faculty, much less students, that was insightful and significant?
Closed
to the perceptions of all but a few sensitive religion teachers and seminary faculty was
the phenomenon of the State of Israel, and its connection with the spiritual and
community life of the Jewish people. To be
sure, Jewish community and defense agencies were similarly confused and conflicted on the
subject of Israel in the early 1960s. It is no longer so. The 1967 war changed
everything. All the indifferent and lukewarm
Jewish leaders jumped on the Israel bandwagon and became 250-percenters of the "my
country, right or wrong" type. Before
1967, Israel hardly reached the agenda of Jewish-Christian conversations -- after 1967,
it was never kept out, whether in formal presentations or in informal exchanges of
viewpoint. Moreover, the period of the 1960s
saw only the modest beginnings of introducing American Christians to the Holocaust, its
enormity, its all-over implications for Christians and Jews alike, and the role of the
Christian "teaching of contempt" in preparing the ground for the colossal
assault of the Final Solution. A decade was
to elapse before the Holocaust was to gain legitimacy and acceptance in American
academic circles. The contributions of a
number of keenly sensitive Christian scholars accelerated this important achievement,
and were crucial to its realization. There
were dramatic changes in the zeitgeist -- from the mid-1960s to the 1980s -- which changed
the course of Jewish-Christian relations, and propelled it with vibrant force into a new
path.
(1)
Vatican Council II, 1962-1965, opened the windows of the Catholic Church to the air of
modernity and contemporary realities. Under
the extraordinary guidance of the unforgettable Pope John XXIII, and with the energetic involvement of a number
of Jewish scholars, leaders and interfaith workers, the Council produced the Declaration on the Jews -- to be sure, a watered-down, compromised version
of its original forthright statement -- which constituted a watershed in Catholic-Jewish
relations, and had an enormous ripple effect on Protestant attitudes toward Judaism and
Jews. It exorcised, for all time to come, the
infamous deicide charge. The American Conference of Catholic Bishops produced further
statements and declarations which articulated with specificity the implications of the
Vatican document.
(2)
The statements on relations with the Jewish people, including the charge of
deicide, which came from the Protestant denominations and umbrella groups, at about the
time of the Vatican Council and subsequent to it, involved the other half of Christendom
in a turning point in its attitudes towards Jews and Judaism. Especially moving and
epochal was the Lutheran statement which labeled Christian anti-Semitism a sin both
against the Jewish people and against Christianity itself, and asked the pardon of the
Jewish people for the hurt it had suffered as a result.
(3)
The publication of a number of controversial, against-the-grain books on Christian
attitudes towards Jews, by Christians, had a mind-blowing impact on scholars, ministers
and laity. The Glock-Stark volume, Christian
Beliefs and Anti-Semitism, was a sociological study of the beliefs and perceptions of
a sampling of 4,000 churchgoers which pointed to a shocking ten to forty percent of
Christians in the pew who held extremely damaging perceptions about Jews, including
their continuing guilt and complicity in the crucifixion of Jesus. Rosemary Ruether's study Faith and Fratricide, The Theological Roots of
Anti-Semitism examined the ideological anti-Judaism venom in the New Testament and
in the writings of the Church fathers (2nd – 8th centuries)
which, today's Christians have to understand, poisoned Christian attitudes toward Jews. In no other previous work had a Christian scholar
faced this grim reality with such honesty. Its
translation into German had the effect of rousing German New Testament scholars from their
complacency and indifference to anti-Semitism in post-war Germany, and it moved many of
them to rethink and reexamine their positions on Jews and Judaism for the first time.
There
are many, many unfinished items on the Jewish-Christian agenda, including matters which
have barely been touched upon in the realm of Christian ideology/theology, which only Christians can deal with. These matters will have to await explanation and
examination at another time. Suffice it to say: Jewish-Christian relations in the past
half-century have undergone vast and permanent improvement, but it would be foolish and
untrue to say that in this short span of time we have been able totally to reshape
eighteen centuries of a tragic and anguished relationship.
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