Jews, Christians, and Mr. Hegel

Quin Hillyer over at Southern Appeal has posted a link to an editorial using The Passion as a vehicle to discuss modern Jewish-Christian relations. He asked for constructive criticism (let me repeat, he asked for it), and I figured it was better to eat up my own bandwidth than be a comment hog. If you read carefully, you'll find my take on the furor over The Passion, and more.

Quin,

I can tell you put a lot of thought into the article, and I for one appreciate it. Comments:

Jews, made understandably sensitive to hatred by millennia of torture, pogroms and Holocaust, might be reassured if they knew just how foreign it would be for most Christians to see, in a few corrupt Jewish leaders, sins attributable to the whole Jewish people rather than attributable to Christians ourselves

But don't you see that it is these very milennia of history that create a collective consciousness among Jews of fear and, if you want to call it this, paranoia, at trusting in Gentiles' benign views about Jews?

I truly believe, and it is not without some sorrow, that a significant part of the Jewish perspective, if such a thing exists, is aptly characterized by Woody Allen: just because you're paranoid does not mean everyone is not out to get you. Henry Kissinger said that "Even a paranoid can have enemies."

The centrality of the belief you describe is small assurance to a people who have experienced the milennia of hatred and torture at the hands of people who profess to practice the same religion of the historical oppressors.

You even make this point yourself, by implication:

What should be a puzzle is why so few Christians understand those Jewish fears.

I agree.

Furthermore, nothing Gibson portrays is much worse than what the Old Testament, the Jews' own sacred literature, repeatedly says about various generations of Jewish leaders.

For the record, I steer clear of the Passion debate, b/c if Jews have a beef, as my brother and I agreed, it's with the Gospels, not with Gibson's faithful depiction of those Gospels.

But I think there is a big, big difference between Jews calling themselves out and non-Jews calling them out. Yes, Jesus was Jewish, but the authors of the Gospels wrote them with the intention of differentiating their 'new' religion from Judaism. It's all Hegelian dialectic: thesis + antithesis = synthesis, but it does matter who is furthering the antithesis (i.e., Jews vs. Gentiles), especially given the practical realities of the history of Jewish-Christian relations.

But Christians, by logic and by religious heritage, are all in some sense Jews.

Whoa, slow down. I understand the spirit with which you write this, but it is a statement that is going to be very provocative to most Jews, IMO. First, though I'm not a giant fan of critical theory, it does have some important contributions to make about traditionally oppressed minority cultures, and among them is the harmfulness of a majority group's subsuming of a minority group's experiences.

I don't know what it is like to be African-American. Their experiences are not mine. Christians are not Jews. They do not know what it is like to be Jewish. I do not like hearing a Christian tell me, that in any sense he/she is Jewish.

Furthermore, the Jewish belief that has rained more horror upon our heads than any other, IMO, is that of tikkun olam, or 'light of the world,' referencing the concept of the Jews as the Chosen People. This is a controversial topic in some senses among modern Jewry, IMO, but it is not inaccurate to say that both the theological and actual history of Judaism and the Jewish people has been deeply linked with a notion of 'otherness,' or 'separateness.'

Jews have always believed, rightly or wrongly, that they are unique from every other nation or religion. We have paid for this belief in the blood of my ancestors and their children who are nevermore, but it remains an important, if controversial part of what I deem to be a Jewish identity.

Last on this point is the inescapable conclusion that Xpity is perceived as the continuation, the superceding of, Judaism. Of course the antithesis incorporates elements of the thesis; that's the whole point of the dialectic. But what results--the synthesis--is simply not an extension of the thesis. Again, the authors of the Gospels took pains to emphasize their differences with Judaism, and one political reason they had to do so, of course, was to win over the Romans. There's just no accurate sense to the notion that Xpity is "Judaism + Plus," IMO.

Therefore, few Jews are going to accept your proposition that Christians are in any sense Jews, and some are going to be offended by it.

Now, I think your following statement is both a more nuanced and a more accurate expression of what I'm guessing you were trying to say above:

The Christian experience devoid of its Jewishness is so lacking in context as to be almost meaningless.

This point seems to focus on those elements of the Christian experience that are rooted in Judaic themes and history (i.e., Jesus was a rabbi), which is completely consistent with the dialectical approach I've mentioned above, but does not purport to subsume Judaism within the bounds of modern Xpity. In other words, I like this statement because it recognizes the similarities of the thesis and antithesis without asserting the lack of differences.

Otherwise, I think the article is an earnest, thoughtful piece, and I appreciate it.