Newsletter:
Vol. 14, Iss. 2
October 2015
Time for a Jewish Reformation?
Dr. Mark Braverman
In August 1982, a delegation of nine
South African colored and black pastors traveled to Ottawa, Canada for the
meeting of the General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.
The world body of churches in 107 countries, with some 75 million members,
had no idea that an earthquake was about to shake their church fellowship
and indeed the global church. Soon after the opening of the meeting, the South
African delegates staged a history-changing demonstration in quietly refusing
to take communion with their white colleagues. We will not sit at the Lord's
table with you, they announced, because in Apartheid South Africa, by law
and by practice, white and black cannot receive the Eucharist together.
The World Alliance got the message. It suspended the South African member
churches and declared the international fellowship to be in status confessionis:
nothing else moves for our church until this betrayal of the core values of
our faith is addressed. The global church on an ecumenical basis took the
cue, supporting the South African resistance movements — armed and nonviolent
— and the economic sanctions against South Africa, and in little more than
a decade South African Apartheid was brought down.
In 1963, writing from a jail cell in response to a letter from fellow clergy
urging him to abandon his campaign of sit-ins, marches, and boycotts, Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr. called the church to its mission. "There was a time,"
he wrote, "when…Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what
they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that
recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat
that transformed the mores of society. But the judgment of God is upon the
church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial
spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty
of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning
for the twentieth century." For King and his followers, the gospels provided
the blueprint for the Civil Rights movement's strategy of nonviolent direct
action.
In 1939, heartbroken over how the German church (with notable exceptions)
had supported Nazism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that absent a "reformation
crisis," the church was in danger of becoming worse than irrelevant. Not only
the pulpits but the departments of theology, he wrote to a friend, existed
for the purpose of supporting state tyranny. He returned to Germany from the
safety of New York City, called his "Confessing Church" together, and ultimately
paid the ultimate price for faithfulness to his principles and to the church
that he loved.
Judaism is facing a crisis today on the level of the reformation called for
by Bonhoeffer in its confrontation with Nazism, on the level of the challenge
that King threw down in the struggle to end legalized racism in this country,
and on the level of the status confessionis faced by the global church in
its recognition of the evil of Apartheid. The crisis for the Jewish establishment
has arrived with the growing awareness that all is not right with our Jewish
homeland project in historic Palestine.
In the fall of 2006, I had just returned from Israel and the West Bank. Speaking
at a church in Washington, D.C., I expressed my horror over Israel's violations
of international law and the human rights of the Palestinians, the damage
done to Israeli society, and my heartbreak and fear for my people. I charted
my "conversion" from a Jew critical of some of Israel's policies but supportive
of the Zionist vision to someone willing to cast doubt on the Zionist project
itself. I said that I saw the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 and
its continuation since the 1967 occupation of remaining Palestinian lands
as the cause for Palestinian resistance, and that I was committed to seeking
justice for the Palestinian people as the only path to peace.
After the presentation, the pastor approached me and said that while he agreed
with much of what I had said, he felt that in talking about the Israel-Palestine
conflict, we had to be sensitive to the feelings of Jews. "I have to tell
you that as a Christian I feel personally responsible for the evil of anti-Semitism
and indeed for the Nazi Holocaust. I have been working for social justice
for my entire career, including years spent working with an interfaith group
of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish clergy. When the issue of the Presbyterian
Church's divestment from companies involved in the Israeli occupation was
raised in 2004, I decided not to push the issue out of sensitivity for the
rabbis in the group who were opposing divestment."
My Jewish pedigree must be impeccable; I looked at him and, with what can
only be described as chutzpah (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: supreme self-confidence;
nerve, gall), replied, "Pastor, you need to do something else with your Christian
guilt. The rabbis who will not engage with you about Israel and Zionism are
not acting as friends of Israel. We Jews are in great peril, and Israel is
rapidly descending into fascism. We need your help as a Christian leader and
as a worker for justice. Holding back from engagement in this struggle is
not what Jesus would want you to do." That encounter was my "Road to Damascus"
moment, and the time when I found my voice to speak to the core issue in the
discussion about Israel and Palestine.
The crisis for Jews in confronting our crimes toward the Palestinians interlocks
with a crisis for Christians still struggling with the horror of Christian
sins against Jews. Catholic theologian Gregory Baum has written about the
church's effort to reconcile with the Jewish people. The problem, states Baum,
is that "if the Church wants to clear itself of the anti-Jewish trends built
into its teachings…it must examine the very center of its proclamation and
reinterpret the meaning of the gospel for our times….Auschwitz summons us
to face up to the negative side of our religious and cultural heritage."
Support for the State of Israel has been central to the Christian effort to
atone for anti-Semitism. But the horrific consequences of our Jewish homeland
project now pose a challenge to Christians committed to human rights. Ironically,
political Zionism owes its success in part to the Nazi Holocaust, the same
catastrophe that spurred a radical reevaluation of the foundations of Christianity.
Historians have also noted the influence of a deeply rooted Zionism in Western
Christianity in the support for what amounts to the illegal colonization of
Palestine by the Zionist movement.
So there are two strains within Christianity: one conservative (Christian
Zionism) and one liberal/progressive (interfaith reconciliation). Both support
the concept and the reality of Jewish hegemony in Palestine. Both act powerfully
to stifle criticism of Israel. This helps explain the extreme reluctance of
most Christians to call Israel to account for its human rights abuses. We
are presented with a tragic irony: Christians, attempting to atone for the
crimes committed against the Jews, are by this very fact blocked from confronting
the crimes committed by the Jews.
Where does this leave Christians, committed to working for justice and equality
at home and abroad? Where does this leave Jews who find themselves torn between
their commitment to religious and racial equality and their loyalty and attachment
to the State of Israel? And what must we do as a Jewish community as we become
increasingly aware of the human rights catastrophe we have created in our
quest for freedom and dignity? What is the future we want to create for ourselves?
This parallel crisis presents challenges and opportunities for both faith
communities. Christians must indeed, as Baum states, re-interpret the meaning
of the gospel for our times, but today this means standing up for justice
for Palestine, even when this creates tension and division within the churches
and for many an agonizing disruption in Christian-Jewish relations. And Jews
have a chance to redo the crisis of having lost the Temple and Jerusalem in
the first century when in self-defense we retreated into a brittle exceptionalism
and ultimately a misguided quest for a return to ethnic nationalism that has
resulted in our embrace, in theologian Walter Wink's terms, of the "myth of
redemptive violence."
The problem, as I pointed out in my 2011 blog post about Peter Beinjart and
his brand of "progressive Zionism," is not the occupation, nor is it the religiously-based
racism of fundamentalist Jewish settler-colonists; the problem is a state
founded on an ethnic nationalist ideology. "The late and deeply mourned Tony
Judt," I wrote then, "got it exactly right in his NYRB piece back in 2003:
'The problem with Israel [is that]…it has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century
separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights,
open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state' —
a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from
which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time
and place.'"
When the history of this time is written, church leaders will be held accountable
for their actions, as they are now with respect to black liberation in this
country and in South Africa. Someday, when we look back on this period in
our history, we Jews will be in deep mourning. We will be on our knees in
contrition for what we have done in the name of our own survival and our own
redemption. We must honor the memory of the Jewish community of Europe that
perished by committing ourselves to "never again" for all peoples. If we are
to be true to our prophetic tradition and our demonstrated commitment as a
community to human rights, we must come to the realization — and soon — that
today, it is the Palestinian story that is our story.
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