Got this in the mail from a friend...
A Gospel of Love and Hope: How to Respond to Mel Gibson's "Passion"
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun Magazine
Mel Gibson unlocked the secret of why Americans have never confronted
anti-Semitism in the way that we did with the other great systems of
hatred (racism, sexism, homophobia) when he told a national t.v.
audience on February 16 that "the Jews' real complaint isn't with my
film (The Passion) but with the Gospels." Few Christians today know
the history of anti-Semitism and the way that the Passion stories were
central to rekindling hatred of Jews from generation to generation.
Many are embracing Gibson's movie and not understanding why Jews seem
to be so threatened. Gibson knows that for many Americans it is simply
unimaginable to question the Gospels.
Those who wanted to purge hatred of Jews from the collective
unconscious of Western societies after the defeat of Nazism in 1945
faced an impossible dilemma. The dominant religious tradition of the
West was based on a set of four accounts of Jesus, each of which to
some extent is riddled with anger at or even hatred of the Jews. The
Gospels were written, many historians tell us, some fifty years after
Jesus' death at a time when early Christians (most of whom considered
themselves still Jewish) were engaged in a fierce competition with a
newly emerging rabbinic Judaism to win the hearts and minds of their
fellow Jews (some of whom were becoming Jewish Christians, retaining
their Jewish practice but adding to it a belief in Jesus as messiah)
and the minds of the disaffected masses of the Roman empire (some
Christians already having given up on converting Jews and beginning to
think that the real audience for their outreach should be the wider
world of the Roman Empire).
The Gospels sought to play down the antagonism that Jews of Jesus'
time felt toward Rome, so they displaced the anger at his crucifixion
instead onto those Jews who remembered Jesus as an inspiring and
revolutionary teacher but not much more (not a messiah, not God). The
result: an account that portrays Jews as willfully calling on the
Romans to kill Jesus, rejecting the supposed compassion of the Romans,
and thereby earning the hatred of humanity for the Jews' supposed
collective responsibility for this act of deicide. Conversely, Jesus'
Judaism, his viewing the world through the frame of his Jewish
spiritual practice and Torah-based thinking, is played-down or at
times completely obscured, so that the message of these professional
"convert the non-Jews" thinkers would not be undermined by a covert
message (still advocated by some of the Jewish Christians at the time
of the writing of the Gospel) that to be a Christian one should also
become a Jew.
When Christianity gained state power in Rome in the 4th century of the
common era, it quickly began to pass legislation restricting Jewish
rights. And as Christianity conquered Europe in the ensuing centuries,
spreading its story that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus,
the Jews became the primary demeaned other of Europe for the next 1700
years. Jews came to fear Easter-because the retelling of the
Crucifixion story often led to moob attacks on defenseless Jews who
were blamed for having caused the suffering of Jesus.
In the aftermath of WWII, many principled Christians recognized that
the Holocaust was possible in part because Hitler was able to draw
upon the cultural legacy of hatred toward Jews nurtured by this kind
of Christian teaching. The Catholic Church and some Protestant
denominations have sought to distance themselves from this long
history of demeaning the Jews. But although anti-Semitism became
unfashionable, only a few Christians were willing to take
responsibility for the devastating impact of the hateful
representations of Jews that suffused the Gospels and culminated in
its historically doubtful account of the Roman imperialists, who ruled
with an iron fist and crucified thousands of Jews, bowing to the will
of a hateful Jewish mob determined to kill Jesus.
Even when the Catholic Church officially banned teaching hatred of
Jews, it never ordered its dioceses to teach about the role the church
itself had played in creating and sustaining those negative
stereotypes.
Liberals and progressives in the late 20th century did an impressive
job of confronting and educating the public about the literary,
intellectual, and cultural sources of racism, sexism and homophobia.
But they tended to shy away from anti-Semitism, both because of the
mistaken assumption that it was no longer a real problem (after all,
Jews were economically and politically flourishing in post-WWII
America) and because such a confrontation would have forced a
challenge to the dominant Western religion at the core of its most
dramatic
story: the crucifixion.
Nevertheless, ever since the 1960s there have been thousands of
sensitive Christians, who, to their credit, have created a Christian
spiritual renewal movement which rejects the teaching of hatred in the
Gospel by allegorizing the story and giving greater focus to the
Resurrection than to the Crucifixion. Returning to Jesus' Jewish
roots, and refocusing attention on the bulk of the Gospel, with its
stories portraying a Jewish Jesus who builds on and elaborates the
ancient Torah commandments to "love your neighbor as yourself" and
"love the stranger," the Christian renewalists tended to see the
two-thousand-year history of Christian anti-Semitism as a distortion
of the deeper truth of the Gospel. Easter became a holiday to
celebrate the rebirth of an ancient Jewish hope-that the forces of
hatred and cruelty manifessted in the Crucifixion could be overcome by
a triumph of the forces of love, generosity and kindness whose
Resurrection and ultimate victory were celebrated at Easter.
Yet that renewal movement is now being effectively challenged by a
Christian fundamentalist movement with deep ties to right-wing
politics. In post 9/11 America, many people have given up on the
hopeful vision of social change movements. They have turned to a deep
pessimism in which the idea of a world based on love, cooperation and
generosity to the Other is alternately ridiculed and disdained as
unrealistic and dangerous. A cynical realism holds sway in the media
and mainstream American culture and political institutions, placing
American progressive and visionary thinkers on the defensive. No
wonder, then, that many Christians are attracted to interpretations of
their religious tradition which emphasize the danger and cruelty in
the world while sidelining aspects of the Gospel which teach
compassion and solidarity with the oppressed.
I've written about this struggle in another context (see my book
Jewish
Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation). Inside the Jewish
tradition there has always been a struggle between those who have heard
God's voice as the voice of accumulated pain and cruelty of the
universe passed on from generation to generation, and those who have
heard God's voice as a voice of love, compassion, generosity and
transcendence. Even in our Torah there are moments when the people
hearing God's voice are hearing it through the frame of their own
accumulated pain and hence hear a voice that talks a language of power,
domination and cruelty, and other moments when the people hearing God's
voice are hearing it through the frame of their own capacity to respond
to God's revelation of love and generosity. And so it is through
history that we find in virtually every religious tradition the people
who distort the message of love of their own traditions and instead
portray God as the voice legitimating domination, power over others,
cruelty and violence. The George W's, the Osama Bin Ladins, the Ariel
Sharons are found in every tradition. And they don't even need the
frame of religion (some people like to blame these distortions-but the
truth is that the Nazis, Stanlinistss, and Vietnam-war mongers of the
US did not need religion to act out the legacy of pain and cruelty in
the world). There is no religious tradition, no ideology of liberation
(including Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, etc.) that cannot be
appropriated by a distorted consciousness and transformed into its
opposite, that is, into a mechanism or a justificatory ideology to
dominate and act out of cruelty.
So let's understand that the attempt to revive Christian enthusiasm
around the part of the story that is focused on cruelty and pain is
not only (or even primarily) a threat to the Jews, but rather a threat
to all those decent, loving, and generous Christians who have found in
the Jesus story a foundation for their most humane and caring
instincts. It is these Christians who are under assault by Mel
Gibson's movie, and by the particular form of Christian evangelicalism
that it is meant to stimulate. Yet, in a deeper way, the Gibson movie
is likely to stimulate a broader assault on all of us who seek to
build a world based on caring and love, cooperation and generosity, by
giving strength to the part within each of us that despairs, the voice
within each of us that tells us that cruelty is what is "really how
the other is, really how the world is," the voice inside each of us
that feels that there is no point in struggling to transform the world
because it is too hopeless and too dominated by craziness (and that is
the point of the Jews in the Gospel calling for Jesus to be killed,
because it is saying "even the Jews, his own people" do this, because
evil is dominant in the world and always will be, and the only way out
is to believe in Jesus and find salvation in another world, and
despair of changing this one). So, part of the struggle is to reclaim
and reaffirm the Jewish Jesus, the Jesus who retains hope for building
love right here, the Jesus who unabashedly proclaims that the Kingdom
of Heaven has arrived (which is to say, that it is here on earth, that
the world right now can be based on love and kindness, and that we
don't have to wait for some future time or "the end of days" as
described by Isaiah, because it is here now, we can make it happen
right away by the way that we live our lives). And it is this voice of
Jesus that The Passion movie seeks to marginalize or make invisible.
I hope Christians will take the lead in organizing people of all
faiths to leaflet every public showing of Gibson's film with a message
that runs counter to the anger at Jews that this film is likely to
produce in at least some viewers. I hope that every morally sensitive
Christian minister and priest will use the weeks ahead to preach about
the history of Christian anti-Semitism until most parishioners can
understand why Jews would feel worried about the popularizing of the
Gospel story. But I hope also that the discussion isn't reduced to
that-that Christians take on the underlying chaallenge and affirm
their commitment to the Jewish Jesus, the Jesus that preaches that a
world of love is possible right now, right here, through our actions.
The best hope to avoid a new surge of anti-Semitism will not come only
from de-coding the anti-Semitic themes in Mel Gibson's film, or the
Gospel on which it was based, but rather by re-crediting the ancient
Jewish vision of Jesus-that in place of the Old Bottom Line of money
and power, a New Bottom Line of Love and Generosity is possible.
People of all faiths need to shape a political and social movement
that reaffirms the most generous, peace-oriented, social
justice-committed, and loving truths of the spiritual heritage of the
human race. It is only this resurrection of hope that can save us from
a new wave of global hatred.
Please take this message and ask your local newspaper to publish it.
Send it to your friends and anyone on your email lists.
Rabbi Michael Lerner
