No Permanent Lessons: Guest Entry by Dexter Van Zile
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Introduction: As most visitors to UCCtruths.com know, I have spent most of the past four years detailing how mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. have broadcast an unfair and dishonest narrative about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I started this work in 2005 when he joined the David Project in 2005 and continued while working for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America -- (www.camera.org).
Over the next few weeks, I will be posting essays on UCCtruths to members of mainline churches with some background about how peacemaking and human rights activism in the progressive church community was used as a vehicle for anti-Zionism in American society. James Hutchins has agreed to let me post these essays here given that the United Church of Christ played a significant role in this phenomenon and will feature prominently in these essays. While I am relying on insight gained while working for CAMERA, my opinions are my own. I ask readers of UCCtruths.com forbearance for the length of this post. Hopefully, in the future, it will be possible to “hide” most of the text to a jump, but for now, it will display in its entirety on the front page.
Below is the introductory essay.
No Permanent Lessons
On a Sunday morning sometime in the mid-1990s, my fiancé (who is now my wife) and I sat through a children’s service at Allin Congregational Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, where I was baptized and confirmed into the Christian faith. The children’s service is an annual rite at Allin Church in which the congregation’s youth conduct all, (or at least most), of the worship service on a Sunday morning sometime between Easter and the end of the school year. The way I remember it, the older kids greet people as they come in the door and hand them their bulletins. The Children’s Choir gives the adult choir the day off and the students in the Sunday school read the scripture, give the sermon, and generally run the show.
At one point during the children’s service, the director of the Sunday school, a well-meaning woman known for reading the bible and taking her faith seriously, offered a brief message to the congregation, the content of which I have long since forgotten, with the exception of one brief passage – words to the effect that “Sometimes we rebel against God, like when the Jews killed Jesus.”
I winced. I was no expert on Christian theology, scripture or Christian-Jewish relations, but I thought that referring to Jews as Christ killers was taboo, or at least considered bad form in most quarters, especially in liberal or progressive churches like ours. And yet here I was listening to a brief homily from the nice lady in charge of the Sunday school offering a medieval reference to Jews killing Jesus. To be sure, this woman was no antisemite, she just didn’t know what she was doing.
Just to make sure that I actually heard what I thought I heard, I looked to my fiancé and asked “Did you hear that?” She looked at me gravely and nodded yes. Later I spoke to the pastor, told him that I was bothered by the Sunday school director’s remarks about the Jews.
“You heard that too? I’m glad someone else heard it. My wife and I were bothered by it too.” The pastor went onto explain that the point of the Gospels was not to show how the Jews opposed Christ teachings. The point was to show how entrenched religious leaders, the establishment, protect their own interest and thwart the purposes of God. The takeaway message was that Christians should read the Gospels as a story about human – not Jewish – sin. It was a reassuring message, but in the years since, I’ve learned not everybody has gotten the memo and that some people who have read the memo have forgotten the message.
About a decade later, about nearly three years after I started my work in the Israel advocacy community, I sat in the pew at Allston-Brighton Congregational Church – the church I joined after I moved from the suburbs of Boston into the city. At the start of the service when the pastor asked for petitions to be included in prayers for the people, I raised my hand and asked the pastor to include a petition for forgiveness for the church’s sins against the Jewish people. To her credit, the pastor had put an acknowledgement of Holocaust Remembrance Day at the top of the order of service.
A few minutes after the pastor gathered all the petitions she read from the lectionary passage from the book of John, chapter 20 verses 19-31 which describe the Savior’s closed-door appearance to the disciples during which Thomas insists on seeing the Christ’s wounds.
As she read the first verse of the passage the tone of her voice revealed a certain uneasiness, as if she were making an on-the-spot emendation to the text while at the lectern, prompting me to reach for my RSV pocket bible which includes the New Testament and the Psalms and read the passage for myself.
The first verse of the passage read as follows: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”
Ah, this was the source of uneasiness! What an unhappy coincidence! Here we were on Holocaust Remembrance Day reading from our holy scriptures only to stumble across a nasty bit of polemic against Jesus’ Jewish adversaries.
As she read from the rest of the passage, I opened the pew bible – another RSV – just to make sure and it included the same phrase – “fear of the Jews” which my pastor had emended, midstream, to read “for fear of the religious authorities.” I offered a silent prayer of thanks that my pastor knew what she was doing. This was one of the benefits of the UCC’s commitment to an educated clergy.
Still, reading such a jarring text on Holocaust Remembrance Day was a sad reminder that no matter how much Christians may want to avoid the issue, contempt for Jesus’ Jewish adversaries – and for those Jews who refused to accept Christ’s divinity – was written into the Christianity’s sacred texts, which spoke of the Jews as sons of the devil responsible for Christ's murder and an embodiment of all of humanity's worst traits.
Yes, Jesus was a Jew. And yes, Paul’s letters and the Gospels were written by Jews who still felt some connection to Judaism and to the Jewish people. But because belief in Christ’s divinity was regarded as a heresy to Jewish leaders, Christ’s followers were sometimes thrown violently out of the synagogues to which they had belonged, prompting the creation of a new religion whose future was among gentile communities that had no connection to Judaism or the Jewish people.
The resulting change in the “reading community” proved crucial because the most powerful scriptural expressions of Christianity’s offer of peace and salvation were oftentimes coupled with expressions of disdain toward the Jews who did not accept Christ’s divinity, resurrection or status as the Christ. As Christianity went from being an obscure Jewish sect into a different religion in its own right, harsh intra-Jewish polemic targeted at familiar and intimate adversaries evolved into harsh anti-Jewish polemic used to demonize an alien other. In the centuries to come, contempt for flesh-and-blood Jews, rooted in intra-Jewish polemic recorded in the New Testament, became part of the package of Christianity’s offer of salvation – a demonic two-for-one offer.
The history of Christian anti-Judaism – contempt for the Jewish religion – and its transformation into anti-Semitism – contempt for the Jewish people – is a long and torturous one, told more expertly in a number of texts, including Faith and Fratricide by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll which also details how Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire and then a dominant force in the nation states of Europe after Rome’s collapse. Christianity’s contempt for Jews, coupled with its newfound power, had disastrous results for the Jewish people – and for the church that preached this contempt alongside its message of salvation. This contempt culminated in the nearly complete destruction of Europe's Jews.
In the decades after the Holocaust, theologians and commentators of various stripes went about the task of ensuring that such an event was never repeated. Historians documented how church teachings about the Jewish people helped lay the groundwork for the destruction of Europe's Jews. They studied how the words that came out of Christian mouths and from the ends of Christian pens made life unsafe for Jews in Medieval Europe, deprived Jews in Western Europe of their natural rights after the Enlightenment, and helped render them targets for mass murder in Nazi-controlled Europe. They began to understand that their churches had served as storehouses of invective toward the Jewish people.
With a great sense of urgency, Christians went about the task of unpacking this armory of its weaponry. Christian theologians reinterpreted their scripture. They wrote statements affirming God's love for the Jewish people, and formulated liturgies asking forgiveness for Christian complicity in the Holocaust. They uttered phrases like “Never Again” and “We remember.” They assisted in providing proper memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. One of the most potent expressions of this work was Nostra Aetate, a document published in 1965 by the Roman Catholic Church which suppressed the deicide charge – or the notion that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Christ. Such work was an absolute necessity not only to protect the Jews, but to protect the Christian church and its ability to profess the Gospel to the world.
If this were a fairy tale, the story would end with, “And they lived happily ever after.” But this is no a fairy tale. It is the real world, where there are no permanent lessons.
Enter Jewish Sovereignty
Concurrent with the effort to rework Christian theology regarding the Jewish people, the modern state of Israel – founded after intense diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations 1948 – demonstrated a capacity to defend its territory and sovereignty against numerous attacks by the Arab nations in the Middle East that refused to accept its existence from the outset.
Despite these periodic attacks against it (which can be fairly characterized as comprising a continuous war of aggression against the Jewish state), the modern state of Israel did what it was supposed to: provide Jews a sovereign homeland where they could rely on themselves – not the good graces of others – for their own safety, freedom and well-being. As dangerous as life can be for Jews in the Middle East, Israel is still a much safer place for Jews than Christian Europe was during the 1940s. More Jews (approx. 33,000) were killed in the course of a few days in a ravine outside of Kiev in 1941, than in all of Israel’s wars since 1948. (About 24,000 Israelis have been killed by violent acts since Israel’s founding.
The relative safety of Jews in the Middle East is not due to the peaceful intentions on the part of Israel’s neighbors. Political and religious leaders in the Middle East speak about Israel in the same manner as the Nazi regime in Germany spoke about Jews before and during the Holocaust. Israel is regarded by extremists in the Middle East as a cancerous entity which must be destroyed, just as the Jews of Europe were portrayed as a blight on Europe.
To be sure, Egypt and Jordan did sign treaties with Israel in exchange for territory, but hostility toward Israel has been a permanent feature of the political and religious landscape of the Middle East. When governments fail to exhibit the hostility toward Israel as required by the people they govern, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah take up the cudgel against Israel. Hostility toward Israel has become a relay baton passed back and forth between governments and mass movements in Arab societies since 1948.
The Arab peoples are the most numerous victims of this hostility. Indeed, more than an estimated 50,000 Arabs have died as a result of the 1948 War, the Suez War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. And these estimates do not include the other 5,000 Palestinians killed during the Second Intifada or those Arabs killed during the 2006 hostilities in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
Despite the willingness of Arab leaders to squander the lives of their citizens time and again in an effort to destroy it, Israel survived through a combination of diplomacy, deterrence and use of military force. Israel fields and equips an army of young men and women who are willing and able to kill those who attack Israelis. Israel buys missiles, planes and helicopters and uses them to attack terrorists, sometimes killing innocent civilians nearby.
Israel built (and continues to build) a security barrier on disputed territory in the West Bank in a successful effort to reduce suicide attacks. And apparently, Israel even maintains a stockpile of nuclear weapons as a deterrence against complete destruction. And while Israel has tried to minimize the harm done its neighbors, Israeli soldiers have committed war crimes, Israeli politicians made diplomatic and strategic blunders. They have discriminated against Israeli Arabs living in their midst. In other words, by becoming responsible for their own safety, Israeli Jews became just like any other sovereign people on the face of the planet. They made mistakes, caused other people to suffer, and got blood on their hands. This is the regrettable and inevitable consequence of sovereignty.
A nation can be innocent or sovereign, it cannot be both. Just as Great Britain, France, Spain, America, Holland, and every other Western democracy falls short of perfect conduct – especially in times of peril – so has sovereign Israel. Israelis, like all other self-governing peoples, have chosen sovereignty and in so doing have run into what Reinhold Niebuhr called the forces of “pitiless perfectionism” which motivates what passes for progressive thought in the West. Israel is held to a utopian standard of conduct, while its adversaries are held to no standard at all.
Blinding Utopianism
Early on in its history, Israel enjoyed support from progressives for two primary reasons. First Jews had been victims of fascist violence and hostility, and secondly, during much if Israel’s early history, it was a socialist nation. But as the years progressed Israel became more of a capitalist society and was forced to defend itself and in so doing lose its innocence and glamour. This happened during a historical era when notions of sovereignty, national interest and military force came under intense scrutiny, particularly in the progressive communities of the United States and Europe. While this scrutiny was necessary and brought to light the dangers of unbridled nationalism and inequities of the international system, it was accompanied by a utopianism that undermined the ability of many well-meaning people to think clearly about the legitimate use of power in a dangerous world.
As this scrutiny became more intense and overheated, particularly in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, authority of any type (unless it was wielded by third-world leaders from the left side of the political spectrum) was regarded as something akin to fascism and the use of military force (unless of course it was wielded by liberationist movements) was assumed to be an act of oppression. To be sure, the right tolerated its own dictators and murderers as well, but the progressives were supposed to be better than that.
In the progressive world view, first world countries were regarded as illegitimate wielders of power on the international stage and oppressed peoples were given a license to use any means necessary to achieve their liberation. Reality was, in the main, much more complex, particularly in the case of Israel's use of force against its adversaries, but utopianism is the enemy of understanding. As Niebuhr wrote in 1940 “Utopianism creates confusion in politics by measuring all significant historical distinctions against purely ideal perspectives and blinding the eye to differences which may be matters of life and death in a specific instance.”
Sadly, the issues of life and death in the Middle East have not received responsible treatment from well-meaning (mostly white) progressives in the U.S. intent on doing everything in their power to disassociate themselves from the legacy of racism, genocide, and colonialism that they acknowledged in the 1960s and 70s. In the progressive imagination, Israel’s history was that of a population of white Europeans (who admittedly suffered grave injustices) being thrust into the Middle East where they inflicted injustices on a dark skinned population of indigenous Arabs. Condemning Israel became an obvious way for privileged liberals in the mainline churches to demonstrate their righteous moral character – at someone else’s expense.
With this combination of guilt and utopianism at work in the progressive psyche, it became nearly impossible for well-meaning intellectuals in mainline churches to assess Israeli behavior in a responsible and rational manner. When the modern state of Israel contradicted the image of the defenseless, but morally superior Jew, progressive Christians in the U.S. responded with a rancor that contradicted simultaneous efforts to reform Christian habits of mind and patterns of speech toward the Jewish people. Anti-Jewish invective returned to the public square through the back door of utopianism and liberal guilt.
Storehouses of Invective
In short, mainline churches – following the model of the peace and justice activists in their ranks – began talking about the modern state of Israel in a way similar to the way Christians spoke about the Jewish people in Middle Ages. Just as Jews had been the embodiment of the worst traits of humanity, the modern state of Israel was portrayed as embodying all the worst traits of the nation state. As the Arab-Israeli conflict dragged on, churches began to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict not as a tragic and ongoing war between Israeli Jews and their Muslim and Arab adversaries in the Middle East, but as a Jewish assault on Christian sensibilities that could be brought to an end as soon as Israelis came to their senses and made the proper concessions to its adversaries. In some quarters, Israel was portrayed as a racist apartheid state intent on perpetrating genocide against Arabs.
As a result of this process, the progressive mainline churches have become a storehouse of anti-Jewish invective. This burgeoning storehouse of Christian invective includes tolerance for the application of anti-Jewish polemic from the New Testament to modern Israel, false historical narrative about the conflict, and descriptions of Jews as “disobedient,” “fallen,” hysterical, psychotic and paranoid and not to be trusted with a sovereign state of their own.
This storehouse contains one-sided demands and criticism targeted at the Jewish State.
It includes depictions of Jewish settlers as “killer vines” and references to Israel as a colonialist outpost of European Jews (minus any acknowledgement that Jews from the Arab countries in the Middle East comprise approximately one-half of Israel’s population).
This storehouse of invective includes implicit and explicit depictions of Jews as Nazis as having perpetrated a genocide, or intent on perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians – despite the reality that the Palestinian Arab population has quadrupled in the past 60 years.
It includes false portrayals of Israel as an apartheid state and assertions that Jewish sovereignty - and not efforts to end it - as the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This storehouse contains a moral compass which when placed in the Middle East, invariably points critically at Israel.
It is filled with shopworn assertions that Israeli concessions and withdrawals will lead to peace in the Middle East – despite the fact that Israel has been attacked from every inch of territory from which it has withdrawn in the past two decades – from cities and towns in the West Bank, from Gaza and from southern Lebanon.
While this storehouse of invective is camouflaged under numerous protestations that mainline churches affirm Israel’s right to exist, the mainline churches almost always portray Israel as an obstacle, and never as a solution to a problem. (This is Paul Merkley’s description of the World Council of Churches stance toward Israel and the phrase applies to mainline churches as well.)
The most lethal weapon wielded against Israel is silence – silence about the Jew-hatred that permeates the state-controlled media in the Middle East. Peace activists and missionaries returning from the Holy Land, except in a few notable instances, have also failed to acknowledge that religious leaders and extremists in the Middle East talk about Israel the same way the Nazis spoke about the Jews of Europe - as a cancerous blot that needs to be excised for nations in the region to return to their rightful place in world history.
The upshot is this: There is not one propagandistic trope used to justify violence against Israeli civilians in the Middle East that has not made its way to the United States through mainline churches.The narrative is that the conflict is exclusively the fault of Israel, which is the singular source of suffering in the region. Violence and hostility against Israel has, in the mainline community, become unremarkable, understandable and justified. Mainliners who would have previously condemned anti-Jewish polemic from the mouths of their fellow Christians have tolerated and defended it from Sabeel, and said virtually nothing at all about it coming from the mouths of Muslims in the Middle East.
Just as Christian patterns of speech and habits of mind deprived the Jewish people of their safety and natural rights as individuals in Europe, these same patterns of speech and habits of mind have been used to deny Israel its natural rights as a sovereign state, most notably its right to self-defense.
There were people in these churches who knew what was transpiring – people who knew that the Arab-Israeli conflict was more complex than leaders and peace activists in the mainline churches were willing to acknowledge. Sadly, they remained silent about the ugly polemics and dishonest narratives about Israel that became operative in these churches. Experts within these denominations who could reasonably be expected to be on guard against just this sort of thing did nothing in the hopes that the problem would go away, or up until recently, worked in a sporadic ineffective manner.
As a result, efforts to counter the anti-Israel narrative became associated with a right-wing or conservative agenda in mainline churches, when offering a robust defense of Israel against its enemies should have been part-and-parcel of the progressive church community's historical commitment to pluralism, religious tolerance, equal rights and individual freedom.
The same forces which motivate hostility toward Jews in the Middle East deprive women of their rights and makes life intolerable for gays and lesbians in the region. The enmity toward Israel that manifests itself in Arab countries makes Christians unsafe in the region as well. Mainliners know these things, but for the most part, they do not say them out loud and condemn those who raise these issues as being guilty of “Islamophobia.” Instead of providing a model of how people can address these issues in a responsible manner they offer stratagems by which people can ignore the problem altogether.
A straight line cannot be drawn between anti-Zionism expressed by mainline churches and the Christian anti-Semitism of yore. It is not that these churches believe that the only good Jew is a dead Jew. A more accurate and precise assessment is that mainline churches cherish the image of unarmed Jews achieving their physical safety and well-being - not through self defense - but by morally perfect behavior. In the narrative offered by mainline churches, exemplary behavior on the part of the Jewish state is portrayed as capable of mollifying and transforming Israel's enemies into embracing new modes of conduct. To be fair, this is a dream that mainliners hold for all countries – but it is targeted at Israel with an unnerving ferocity. The anti-Zionism expressed by mainline churches is a consequence of dissappointed millenial hopes.
Just as the continued existence of the Jewish people presented a challenge to church doctrine regarding Christ's divinity and redemptive power, the modern state of Israel challenges two ideas cherished and embraced by mainline church leaders, theologians and peace activists: (1) That human safety and well-being can be achieved without the use of force, (pacifism) and (2) that armed conflict can be ended without military and political defeat of aggressors, but rather through reconciliation (peacemaking).
Jewish history disproves these theories. Unarmed, stateless and largely pacifist Jews were unsafe between the Second Temple and Israel's creation, suggesting that pacifism is not as workable a program as its progressive Christian supporters would like. The failure of Israeli peace offers, concessions and withdrawals to mollify hostility toward the Jewish state in the Middle East indicates that peacemaking activities routinely lifted up by mainline Protestants are not up to the task of bringing peace and security to the region. Israel's history indicates that in fact, military strength does, in at least some circumstances, promote well being.
But rather than reassess their beliefs in light of the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, mainline leaders, commentators and theologians continue to embrace a prescriptive narrative in which Jewish self-improvement, sacrifice and risk-taking lead to peace. (Similar expectations of self-improvement are not typically targeted at the Palestinians – or any of the Arab states and non-state actors in the region that continue to defame and assault Israel.)
Embracing this prescriptive narrative (which, to be clear, is embraced by many American and Israeli Jews) allows liberal Protestants to avert their eyes from the intractable problems in the Middle East which, if fully acknowledged, would challenge their deeply-held beliefs about pacifism, peacemaking, their ability to influence events, and the nature of the world they live in.
The most troubling aspect about the mainline “witness” regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict is the refusal of these denominations to acknowledge the evil that manifests itself in the form of Nazi-like hostility toward Jews and repeated attempts to annihilate the Jewish state over the past 60 years.
Are the Israelis perfect? No. Is Israel without sin? No.
But how perfect must Israel be in order for mainliners to acknowledge that it is being used as a scapegoat by its neighbors frustrated by their inability to adapt to modernity?
How perfect must Israel be for mainline churches to acknowledge that Israel cannot bring about a unilateral end to the Arab-Israeli conflict?
How perfect must Israel be for mainliners to acknowledge that the Jewish people are the target of hostility inspired by the teachings of not one, but two of the world’s religions, including their own?
How perfect must Israel be for mainliners to remember that Christian enmity toward the Jewish helped make the creation of a Jewish state necessary in the first place and to take this reality into account when speaking about the Arab-Israeli conflict?
How perfect must Israel be for mainliners to acknowledge that if they are going to be “peacemakers” they must talk about all the factors that contribute to the Arab-Israeli conflict?
How perfect must Israel be for mainline pastors realize that they have no right to wear yellow stars and proclaim “I am a Jew” on Holocaust Remembrance Day while their denominations and local churches support and ally themselves with organizations that demonize the Jewish state?
And lastly, how much longer must we wait for mainline officials to come to their senses and realize that the churches they lead have experienced 40 years of decline and some of these churches are dying? What will it take for leaders of these churches to realize that if they cannot reverse the decline of their own denominations they have little call to tell Israel – a sovereign nation that has been under siege for every year of its existence – how to conduct its business?
These are pretty harsh questions to be leveled by a mainline layman without any theological training, especially since that layman has worked for Jewish organizations since the beginning of 2005. Readers will have to decide for themselves which scandal bothers them more – the fact that a Christian working for a Jewish organization is raising these issues or that people on the payrolls of these churches did not.
For those scandalized by my status as untrained layman working for CAMERA, I can only say that I grew up in the UCC and in 2005, I started doing the work that mainline theologians and officials should have been doing all along, but did not: Insist that mainline commentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict be fair and free of anti-Jewish polemic and that Israel’s behavior be assessed fairly – in context – and not in a vacuum.
Would it have been better if the experts in Christian-Jewish relations who worked in denominational headquarters and in seminaries had raised these issues with greater force? Of course. But for the most part, they stayed quiet – and understandably so. They had families to provide for, careers to protect and status to achieve. The costs were (and remain) pretty high for ordained clergy who would offer even a muted defense of Israel. There are hopeful signs that this silence is coming to an end, but then again, there are no permanent lessons.
Next Installment: Out of the Mouths of Two Witnesses
“For people who bill themselves as committed to non-violence and reconciliation, the so-called peace and justice activists who inhabit the progressive wing of Protestantism in the U.S. (“mainline churches”) sure have targeted Israel with a lot of demonizing rhetoric in the past few years.”
Over the next few weeks, I will be posting essays on UCCtruths to members of mainline churches with some background about how peacemaking and human rights activism in the progressive church community was used as a vehicle for anti-Zionism in American society. James Hutchins has agreed to let me post these essays here given that the United Church of Christ played a significant role in this phenomenon and will feature prominently in these essays. While I am relying on insight gained while working for CAMERA, my opinions are my own. I ask readers of UCCtruths.com forbearance for the length of this post. Hopefully, in the future, it will be possible to “hide” most of the text to a jump, but for now, it will display in its entirety on the front page.
Below is the introductory essay.
No Permanent Lessons
On a Sunday morning sometime in the mid-1990s, my fiancé (who is now my wife) and I sat through a children’s service at Allin Congregational Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, where I was baptized and confirmed into the Christian faith. The children’s service is an annual rite at Allin Church in which the congregation’s youth conduct all, (or at least most), of the worship service on a Sunday morning sometime between Easter and the end of the school year. The way I remember it, the older kids greet people as they come in the door and hand them their bulletins. The Children’s Choir gives the adult choir the day off and the students in the Sunday school read the scripture, give the sermon, and generally run the show.
At one point during the children’s service, the director of the Sunday school, a well-meaning woman known for reading the bible and taking her faith seriously, offered a brief message to the congregation, the content of which I have long since forgotten, with the exception of one brief passage – words to the effect that “Sometimes we rebel against God, like when the Jews killed Jesus.”
I winced. I was no expert on Christian theology, scripture or Christian-Jewish relations, but I thought that referring to Jews as Christ killers was taboo, or at least considered bad form in most quarters, especially in liberal or progressive churches like ours. And yet here I was listening to a brief homily from the nice lady in charge of the Sunday school offering a medieval reference to Jews killing Jesus. To be sure, this woman was no antisemite, she just didn’t know what she was doing.
Just to make sure that I actually heard what I thought I heard, I looked to my fiancé and asked “Did you hear that?” She looked at me gravely and nodded yes. Later I spoke to the pastor, told him that I was bothered by the Sunday school director’s remarks about the Jews.
“You heard that too? I’m glad someone else heard it. My wife and I were bothered by it too.” The pastor went onto explain that the point of the Gospels was not to show how the Jews opposed Christ teachings. The point was to show how entrenched religious leaders, the establishment, protect their own interest and thwart the purposes of God. The takeaway message was that Christians should read the Gospels as a story about human – not Jewish – sin. It was a reassuring message, but in the years since, I’ve learned not everybody has gotten the memo and that some people who have read the memo have forgotten the message.
About a decade later, about nearly three years after I started my work in the Israel advocacy community, I sat in the pew at Allston-Brighton Congregational Church – the church I joined after I moved from the suburbs of Boston into the city. At the start of the service when the pastor asked for petitions to be included in prayers for the people, I raised my hand and asked the pastor to include a petition for forgiveness for the church’s sins against the Jewish people. To her credit, the pastor had put an acknowledgement of Holocaust Remembrance Day at the top of the order of service.
A few minutes after the pastor gathered all the petitions she read from the lectionary passage from the book of John, chapter 20 verses 19-31 which describe the Savior’s closed-door appearance to the disciples during which Thomas insists on seeing the Christ’s wounds.
As she read the first verse of the passage the tone of her voice revealed a certain uneasiness, as if she were making an on-the-spot emendation to the text while at the lectern, prompting me to reach for my RSV pocket bible which includes the New Testament and the Psalms and read the passage for myself.
The first verse of the passage read as follows: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”
Ah, this was the source of uneasiness! What an unhappy coincidence! Here we were on Holocaust Remembrance Day reading from our holy scriptures only to stumble across a nasty bit of polemic against Jesus’ Jewish adversaries.
As she read from the rest of the passage, I opened the pew bible – another RSV – just to make sure and it included the same phrase – “fear of the Jews” which my pastor had emended, midstream, to read “for fear of the religious authorities.” I offered a silent prayer of thanks that my pastor knew what she was doing. This was one of the benefits of the UCC’s commitment to an educated clergy.
Still, reading such a jarring text on Holocaust Remembrance Day was a sad reminder that no matter how much Christians may want to avoid the issue, contempt for Jesus’ Jewish adversaries – and for those Jews who refused to accept Christ’s divinity – was written into the Christianity’s sacred texts, which spoke of the Jews as sons of the devil responsible for Christ's murder and an embodiment of all of humanity's worst traits.
Yes, Jesus was a Jew. And yes, Paul’s letters and the Gospels were written by Jews who still felt some connection to Judaism and to the Jewish people. But because belief in Christ’s divinity was regarded as a heresy to Jewish leaders, Christ’s followers were sometimes thrown violently out of the synagogues to which they had belonged, prompting the creation of a new religion whose future was among gentile communities that had no connection to Judaism or the Jewish people.
The resulting change in the “reading community” proved crucial because the most powerful scriptural expressions of Christianity’s offer of peace and salvation were oftentimes coupled with expressions of disdain toward the Jews who did not accept Christ’s divinity, resurrection or status as the Christ. As Christianity went from being an obscure Jewish sect into a different religion in its own right, harsh intra-Jewish polemic targeted at familiar and intimate adversaries evolved into harsh anti-Jewish polemic used to demonize an alien other. In the centuries to come, contempt for flesh-and-blood Jews, rooted in intra-Jewish polemic recorded in the New Testament, became part of the package of Christianity’s offer of salvation – a demonic two-for-one offer.
The history of Christian anti-Judaism – contempt for the Jewish religion – and its transformation into anti-Semitism – contempt for the Jewish people – is a long and torturous one, told more expertly in a number of texts, including Faith and Fratricide by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll which also details how Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire and then a dominant force in the nation states of Europe after Rome’s collapse. Christianity’s contempt for Jews, coupled with its newfound power, had disastrous results for the Jewish people – and for the church that preached this contempt alongside its message of salvation. This contempt culminated in the nearly complete destruction of Europe's Jews.
In the decades after the Holocaust, theologians and commentators of various stripes went about the task of ensuring that such an event was never repeated. Historians documented how church teachings about the Jewish people helped lay the groundwork for the destruction of Europe's Jews. They studied how the words that came out of Christian mouths and from the ends of Christian pens made life unsafe for Jews in Medieval Europe, deprived Jews in Western Europe of their natural rights after the Enlightenment, and helped render them targets for mass murder in Nazi-controlled Europe. They began to understand that their churches had served as storehouses of invective toward the Jewish people.
With a great sense of urgency, Christians went about the task of unpacking this armory of its weaponry. Christian theologians reinterpreted their scripture. They wrote statements affirming God's love for the Jewish people, and formulated liturgies asking forgiveness for Christian complicity in the Holocaust. They uttered phrases like “Never Again” and “We remember.” They assisted in providing proper memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. One of the most potent expressions of this work was Nostra Aetate, a document published in 1965 by the Roman Catholic Church which suppressed the deicide charge – or the notion that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Christ. Such work was an absolute necessity not only to protect the Jews, but to protect the Christian church and its ability to profess the Gospel to the world.
If this were a fairy tale, the story would end with, “And they lived happily ever after.” But this is no a fairy tale. It is the real world, where there are no permanent lessons.
Enter Jewish Sovereignty
Concurrent with the effort to rework Christian theology regarding the Jewish people, the modern state of Israel – founded after intense diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations 1948 – demonstrated a capacity to defend its territory and sovereignty against numerous attacks by the Arab nations in the Middle East that refused to accept its existence from the outset.
Despite these periodic attacks against it (which can be fairly characterized as comprising a continuous war of aggression against the Jewish state), the modern state of Israel did what it was supposed to: provide Jews a sovereign homeland where they could rely on themselves – not the good graces of others – for their own safety, freedom and well-being. As dangerous as life can be for Jews in the Middle East, Israel is still a much safer place for Jews than Christian Europe was during the 1940s. More Jews (approx. 33,000) were killed in the course of a few days in a ravine outside of Kiev in 1941, than in all of Israel’s wars since 1948. (About 24,000 Israelis have been killed by violent acts since Israel’s founding.
The relative safety of Jews in the Middle East is not due to the peaceful intentions on the part of Israel’s neighbors. Political and religious leaders in the Middle East speak about Israel in the same manner as the Nazi regime in Germany spoke about Jews before and during the Holocaust. Israel is regarded by extremists in the Middle East as a cancerous entity which must be destroyed, just as the Jews of Europe were portrayed as a blight on Europe.
To be sure, Egypt and Jordan did sign treaties with Israel in exchange for territory, but hostility toward Israel has been a permanent feature of the political and religious landscape of the Middle East. When governments fail to exhibit the hostility toward Israel as required by the people they govern, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah take up the cudgel against Israel. Hostility toward Israel has become a relay baton passed back and forth between governments and mass movements in Arab societies since 1948.
The Arab peoples are the most numerous victims of this hostility. Indeed, more than an estimated 50,000 Arabs have died as a result of the 1948 War, the Suez War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. And these estimates do not include the other 5,000 Palestinians killed during the Second Intifada or those Arabs killed during the 2006 hostilities in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
Despite the willingness of Arab leaders to squander the lives of their citizens time and again in an effort to destroy it, Israel survived through a combination of diplomacy, deterrence and use of military force. Israel fields and equips an army of young men and women who are willing and able to kill those who attack Israelis. Israel buys missiles, planes and helicopters and uses them to attack terrorists, sometimes killing innocent civilians nearby.
Israel built (and continues to build) a security barrier on disputed territory in the West Bank in a successful effort to reduce suicide attacks. And apparently, Israel even maintains a stockpile of nuclear weapons as a deterrence against complete destruction. And while Israel has tried to minimize the harm done its neighbors, Israeli soldiers have committed war crimes, Israeli politicians made diplomatic and strategic blunders. They have discriminated against Israeli Arabs living in their midst. In other words, by becoming responsible for their own safety, Israeli Jews became just like any other sovereign people on the face of the planet. They made mistakes, caused other people to suffer, and got blood on their hands. This is the regrettable and inevitable consequence of sovereignty.
A nation can be innocent or sovereign, it cannot be both. Just as Great Britain, France, Spain, America, Holland, and every other Western democracy falls short of perfect conduct – especially in times of peril – so has sovereign Israel. Israelis, like all other self-governing peoples, have chosen sovereignty and in so doing have run into what Reinhold Niebuhr called the forces of “pitiless perfectionism” which motivates what passes for progressive thought in the West. Israel is held to a utopian standard of conduct, while its adversaries are held to no standard at all.
Blinding Utopianism
Early on in its history, Israel enjoyed support from progressives for two primary reasons. First Jews had been victims of fascist violence and hostility, and secondly, during much if Israel’s early history, it was a socialist nation. But as the years progressed Israel became more of a capitalist society and was forced to defend itself and in so doing lose its innocence and glamour. This happened during a historical era when notions of sovereignty, national interest and military force came under intense scrutiny, particularly in the progressive communities of the United States and Europe. While this scrutiny was necessary and brought to light the dangers of unbridled nationalism and inequities of the international system, it was accompanied by a utopianism that undermined the ability of many well-meaning people to think clearly about the legitimate use of power in a dangerous world.
As this scrutiny became more intense and overheated, particularly in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, authority of any type (unless it was wielded by third-world leaders from the left side of the political spectrum) was regarded as something akin to fascism and the use of military force (unless of course it was wielded by liberationist movements) was assumed to be an act of oppression. To be sure, the right tolerated its own dictators and murderers as well, but the progressives were supposed to be better than that.
In the progressive world view, first world countries were regarded as illegitimate wielders of power on the international stage and oppressed peoples were given a license to use any means necessary to achieve their liberation. Reality was, in the main, much more complex, particularly in the case of Israel's use of force against its adversaries, but utopianism is the enemy of understanding. As Niebuhr wrote in 1940 “Utopianism creates confusion in politics by measuring all significant historical distinctions against purely ideal perspectives and blinding the eye to differences which may be matters of life and death in a specific instance.”
Sadly, the issues of life and death in the Middle East have not received responsible treatment from well-meaning (mostly white) progressives in the U.S. intent on doing everything in their power to disassociate themselves from the legacy of racism, genocide, and colonialism that they acknowledged in the 1960s and 70s. In the progressive imagination, Israel’s history was that of a population of white Europeans (who admittedly suffered grave injustices) being thrust into the Middle East where they inflicted injustices on a dark skinned population of indigenous Arabs. Condemning Israel became an obvious way for privileged liberals in the mainline churches to demonstrate their righteous moral character – at someone else’s expense.
With this combination of guilt and utopianism at work in the progressive psyche, it became nearly impossible for well-meaning intellectuals in mainline churches to assess Israeli behavior in a responsible and rational manner. When the modern state of Israel contradicted the image of the defenseless, but morally superior Jew, progressive Christians in the U.S. responded with a rancor that contradicted simultaneous efforts to reform Christian habits of mind and patterns of speech toward the Jewish people. Anti-Jewish invective returned to the public square through the back door of utopianism and liberal guilt.
Storehouses of Invective
In short, mainline churches – following the model of the peace and justice activists in their ranks – began talking about the modern state of Israel in a way similar to the way Christians spoke about the Jewish people in Middle Ages. Just as Jews had been the embodiment of the worst traits of humanity, the modern state of Israel was portrayed as embodying all the worst traits of the nation state. As the Arab-Israeli conflict dragged on, churches began to portray the Arab-Israeli conflict not as a tragic and ongoing war between Israeli Jews and their Muslim and Arab adversaries in the Middle East, but as a Jewish assault on Christian sensibilities that could be brought to an end as soon as Israelis came to their senses and made the proper concessions to its adversaries. In some quarters, Israel was portrayed as a racist apartheid state intent on perpetrating genocide against Arabs.
As a result of this process, the progressive mainline churches have become a storehouse of anti-Jewish invective. This burgeoning storehouse of Christian invective includes tolerance for the application of anti-Jewish polemic from the New Testament to modern Israel, false historical narrative about the conflict, and descriptions of Jews as “disobedient,” “fallen,” hysterical, psychotic and paranoid and not to be trusted with a sovereign state of their own.
This storehouse contains one-sided demands and criticism targeted at the Jewish State.
It includes depictions of Jewish settlers as “killer vines” and references to Israel as a colonialist outpost of European Jews (minus any acknowledgement that Jews from the Arab countries in the Middle East comprise approximately one-half of Israel’s population).
This storehouse of invective includes implicit and explicit depictions of Jews as Nazis as having perpetrated a genocide, or intent on perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians – despite the reality that the Palestinian Arab population has quadrupled in the past 60 years.
It includes false portrayals of Israel as an apartheid state and assertions that Jewish sovereignty - and not efforts to end it - as the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This storehouse contains a moral compass which when placed in the Middle East, invariably points critically at Israel.
It is filled with shopworn assertions that Israeli concessions and withdrawals will lead to peace in the Middle East – despite the fact that Israel has been attacked from every inch of territory from which it has withdrawn in the past two decades – from cities and towns in the West Bank, from Gaza and from southern Lebanon.
While this storehouse of invective is camouflaged under numerous protestations that mainline churches affirm Israel’s right to exist, the mainline churches almost always portray Israel as an obstacle, and never as a solution to a problem. (This is Paul Merkley’s description of the World Council of Churches stance toward Israel and the phrase applies to mainline churches as well.)
The most lethal weapon wielded against Israel is silence – silence about the Jew-hatred that permeates the state-controlled media in the Middle East. Peace activists and missionaries returning from the Holy Land, except in a few notable instances, have also failed to acknowledge that religious leaders and extremists in the Middle East talk about Israel the same way the Nazis spoke about the Jews of Europe - as a cancerous blot that needs to be excised for nations in the region to return to their rightful place in world history.
The upshot is this: There is not one propagandistic trope used to justify violence against Israeli civilians in the Middle East that has not made its way to the United States through mainline churches.The narrative is that the conflict is exclusively the fault of Israel, which is the singular source of suffering in the region. Violence and hostility against Israel has, in the mainline community, become unremarkable, understandable and justified. Mainliners who would have previously condemned anti-Jewish polemic from the mouths of their fellow Christians have tolerated and defended it from Sabeel, and said virtually nothing at all about it coming from the mouths of Muslims in the Middle East.
Just as Christian patterns of speech and habits of mind deprived the Jewish people of their safety and natural rights as individuals in Europe, these same patterns of speech and habits of mind have been used to deny Israel its natural rights as a sovereign state, most notably its right to self-defense.
There were people in these churches who knew what was transpiring – people who knew that the Arab-Israeli conflict was more complex than leaders and peace activists in the mainline churches were willing to acknowledge. Sadly, they remained silent about the ugly polemics and dishonest narratives about Israel that became operative in these churches. Experts within these denominations who could reasonably be expected to be on guard against just this sort of thing did nothing in the hopes that the problem would go away, or up until recently, worked in a sporadic ineffective manner.
As a result, efforts to counter the anti-Israel narrative became associated with a right-wing or conservative agenda in mainline churches, when offering a robust defense of Israel against its enemies should have been part-and-parcel of the progressive church community's historical commitment to pluralism, religious tolerance, equal rights and individual freedom.
The same forces which motivate hostility toward Jews in the Middle East deprive women of their rights and makes life intolerable for gays and lesbians in the region. The enmity toward Israel that manifests itself in Arab countries makes Christians unsafe in the region as well. Mainliners know these things, but for the most part, they do not say them out loud and condemn those who raise these issues as being guilty of “Islamophobia.” Instead of providing a model of how people can address these issues in a responsible manner they offer stratagems by which people can ignore the problem altogether.
A straight line cannot be drawn between anti-Zionism expressed by mainline churches and the Christian anti-Semitism of yore. It is not that these churches believe that the only good Jew is a dead Jew. A more accurate and precise assessment is that mainline churches cherish the image of unarmed Jews achieving their physical safety and well-being - not through self defense - but by morally perfect behavior. In the narrative offered by mainline churches, exemplary behavior on the part of the Jewish state is portrayed as capable of mollifying and transforming Israel's enemies into embracing new modes of conduct. To be fair, this is a dream that mainliners hold for all countries – but it is targeted at Israel with an unnerving ferocity. The anti-Zionism expressed by mainline churches is a consequence of dissappointed millenial hopes.
Just as the continued existence of the Jewish people presented a challenge to church doctrine regarding Christ's divinity and redemptive power, the modern state of Israel challenges two ideas cherished and embraced by mainline church leaders, theologians and peace activists: (1) That human safety and well-being can be achieved without the use of force, (pacifism) and (2) that armed conflict can be ended without military and political defeat of aggressors, but rather through reconciliation (peacemaking).
Jewish history disproves these theories. Unarmed, stateless and largely pacifist Jews were unsafe between the Second Temple and Israel's creation, suggesting that pacifism is not as workable a program as its progressive Christian supporters would like. The failure of Israeli peace offers, concessions and withdrawals to mollify hostility toward the Jewish state in the Middle East indicates that peacemaking activities routinely lifted up by mainline Protestants are not up to the task of bringing peace and security to the region. Israel's history indicates that in fact, military strength does, in at least some circumstances, promote well being.
But rather than reassess their beliefs in light of the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, mainline leaders, commentators and theologians continue to embrace a prescriptive narrative in which Jewish self-improvement, sacrifice and risk-taking lead to peace. (Similar expectations of self-improvement are not typically targeted at the Palestinians – or any of the Arab states and non-state actors in the region that continue to defame and assault Israel.)
Embracing this prescriptive narrative (which, to be clear, is embraced by many American and Israeli Jews) allows liberal Protestants to avert their eyes from the intractable problems in the Middle East which, if fully acknowledged, would challenge their deeply-held beliefs about pacifism, peacemaking, their ability to influence events, and the nature of the world they live in.
The most troubling aspect about the mainline “witness” regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict is the refusal of these denominations to acknowledge the evil that manifests itself in the form of Nazi-like hostility toward Jews and repeated attempts to annihilate the Jewish state over the past 60 years.
Are the Israelis perfect? No. Is Israel without sin? No.
But how perfect must Israel be in order for mainliners to acknowledge that it is being used as a scapegoat by its neighbors frustrated by their inability to adapt to modernity?
How perfect must Israel be for mainline churches to acknowledge that Israel cannot bring about a unilateral end to the Arab-Israeli conflict?
How perfect must Israel be for mainliners to acknowledge that the Jewish people are the target of hostility inspired by the teachings of not one, but two of the world’s religions, including their own?
How perfect must Israel be for mainliners to remember that Christian enmity toward the Jewish helped make the creation of a Jewish state necessary in the first place and to take this reality into account when speaking about the Arab-Israeli conflict?
How perfect must Israel be for mainliners to acknowledge that if they are going to be “peacemakers” they must talk about all the factors that contribute to the Arab-Israeli conflict?
How perfect must Israel be for mainline pastors realize that they have no right to wear yellow stars and proclaim “I am a Jew” on Holocaust Remembrance Day while their denominations and local churches support and ally themselves with organizations that demonize the Jewish state?
And lastly, how much longer must we wait for mainline officials to come to their senses and realize that the churches they lead have experienced 40 years of decline and some of these churches are dying? What will it take for leaders of these churches to realize that if they cannot reverse the decline of their own denominations they have little call to tell Israel – a sovereign nation that has been under siege for every year of its existence – how to conduct its business?
These are pretty harsh questions to be leveled by a mainline layman without any theological training, especially since that layman has worked for Jewish organizations since the beginning of 2005. Readers will have to decide for themselves which scandal bothers them more – the fact that a Christian working for a Jewish organization is raising these issues or that people on the payrolls of these churches did not.
For those scandalized by my status as untrained layman working for CAMERA, I can only say that I grew up in the UCC and in 2005, I started doing the work that mainline theologians and officials should have been doing all along, but did not: Insist that mainline commentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict be fair and free of anti-Jewish polemic and that Israel’s behavior be assessed fairly – in context – and not in a vacuum.
Would it have been better if the experts in Christian-Jewish relations who worked in denominational headquarters and in seminaries had raised these issues with greater force? Of course. But for the most part, they stayed quiet – and understandably so. They had families to provide for, careers to protect and status to achieve. The costs were (and remain) pretty high for ordained clergy who would offer even a muted defense of Israel. There are hopeful signs that this silence is coming to an end, but then again, there are no permanent lessons.
Next Installment: Out of the Mouths of Two Witnesses
“For people who bill themselves as committed to non-violence and reconciliation, the so-called peace and justice activists who inhabit the progressive wing of Protestantism in the U.S. (“mainline churches”) sure have targeted Israel with a lot of demonizing rhetoric in the past few years.”
Labels: Israel
