Christianity

Church agrees to tone down anti-Israel report

Marcus Dysch — Thu, 16 May 2013 22:45:26 +0100

A “truly hurtful” report about Israel is to be rewritten in an attempt to diffuse a row between the Church of Scotland and the Jewish community.

The discussion document compiled by the Church’s church and society council provoked outrage after apparently suggesting that Jewish claims to the land of Israel could be invalidated by the treatment of Palestinians.

Church leaders will vote on whether to adopt the 5,000-word report as policy at its annual general assembly this weekend.

But at a meeting in Edinburgh with a delegation of Jewish community leaders, representatives of the church and society council agreed to tone down the language in the document.

In a joint statement following the meeting, the Jewish groups — which included the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, the Board of Deputies, Movement for Reform Judaism and Rabbis for Human Rights — and the Church said an agreement had been reached for parts of the report to be changed.

“We agreed that the drafting of the report had given cause for concern and misunderstanding of [the Church’s] position, and requires a new introduction to set the context for the report and give clarity about some of the language used,” the statement said.

The alterations will make clear the Church’s “long-held position of the right of Israel to exist” and will condemn “all things that create a culture of antisemitism”.

Board vice-president Jonathan Arkush said: “It was a good meeting with a positive outcome. We set out our deep concerns about the report and we were listened to. The joint statement is the beginning of what we hope will be a much better process of dialogue and understanding.”

The report’s contents had provoked strong criticism from interfaith groups and threatened to cause a breakdown in relations on a par with the fall-out from the Methodist Church boycott of Israel in 2010, which saw the Board cut-off all links with Methodist leaders.

Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Daniel Taub, said the report “not only plays into extremist political positions, but negates and belittles the deeply held Jewish attachment to the land of Israel in a way which is truly hurtful”.

He added that if it was adopted by the Church’s general assembly, it would be a “significant step backwards for the forces of tolerance and peace”.

This church report on Israel sets the clock back 70 years

Patrick Morrow — Sun, 12 May 2013 10:11:28 +0100

'A slap in the face to the Jewish community" is how Jonathan Arkush, vice-president of the Board of Deputies, responded to the report, The inheritance of Abraham? A report on the "promised land". This document comes from the Church of Scotland's church and society council, and is to be debated by the general assembly next week. As a Christian (an Anglican priest), I can sympathise. There are several contenders for its most contentious phrase. But the sharpest must be the rhetorical question: "Would the Jewish people today have a fairer claim to the land if they dealt justly with the Palestinians?"

So, has Jewish-Christian dialogue reached the end of the line, following the recent unhappiness with the Methodist Church and the Church of England? Or is there still a case for the differing parties to meet, talk, listen, and arrive at - not necessarily agreement (for why should we agree?) - but a better quality of disagreement? I have to believe the latter.

What of the substance of the report? The church and society council is clearly committed to work for justice. Its other reports are on human rights, and poverty. But when it comes to Israel, its attention slips from the modern realities.

Here are words absent from the report: Herzl, secular, Knesset, Fatah, Hamas.These absences are telling: the paper does not seriously engage with contemporary Judaism, religious or secular, or contemporary Israeli politics. Islam and Islamophobia are both mentioned only once. So it is not that the contemporary Palestinian reality is more truthfully encountered. A radical political-theological critique of Israel would have been one thing, if still controversial. But the paper barely addresses the politics. So what is really going on?

The bulk of the report discusses how the Hebrew Bible and New Testament treat "the land". God's promise of the land to Abraham's descendants is held to be "literal" and "unconditional". Devastatingly wrongly, based on little more than one quote from David Ben-Gurion, the report determines: "This is the position of Zionism".

The second biblical idea is a land held in trust: God offers the land on condition that the inhabitants act justly, as the prophets insist. It is in this context that the question of the "fairness" of the Jewish claim today is raised. But even this conditional offer is held to be problematic. Drawing on the US Jewish critic of Zionism, Mark Braverman, the report finds the root problem to be Jewish notions of "separateness, vulnerability and specialness". Bluntly, the argument is not only that Zionism is bad, but so is the conviction that "the Jewish people are serving God's special purpose". It is shocking to read such a cavalier undermining of mainstream Judaism. Yet if the idea of a special vocation from God is unacceptable, orthodox Christianity is itself stymied.

The third idea is of a land with a universal mission. Evidence for this is supposedly found in the book of Jonah, which brings the message of God's universal care, from "a time when Jewish people were turning inwards". But is it really Jesus who putatively sets things right, offering "a radical critique of Jewish specialness and exclusivism"?

So the report's basis is a good number of the tropes of Christian supersessionism. According to this Christian triumphalism, the Hebrew Bible can be portrayed as bad (promoting Zionism), or as useful preparation (the warnings of the prophets); either way, it is exclusivist and it takes the great universaliser - Jesus - to heal. In this frame, it is unsurprising that the newer "problem" of the "ethno-national" state of Israel can apparently be solved only by the universalism of Christianity. Bluntly, it is as if there had been no Jewish-Christian dialogue since the Second World War.

But there has. Other Christians' claims are not negated by this rather breathless document. The Vatican has said of the Jewish attachment to the land: "Christians are invited to understand this religious attachment ,which finds its roots in biblical tradition, without however making their own any particular religious interpretation of this relationship." We can honour a profound theology of the land, even though it is not ours.

The most generous reading of the report is that it is struggling to say something like this: as Christians we are not compelled to have a Christian theology of the land. The real protagonist in sight is the archetypal "Christian Zionist". In any event, my prayer is that the general assembly will have the courage to listen. The dialogue needs their more-considered input.

A damaging document

Oliver Kamm — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:46:53 +0100

'All men," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant ethicist, "are naturally inclined to obscure the
morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm."

Niebuhr was a steadfast friend of Israel. His warnings about the temptations of deploying religion in political argument are confirmed by a document arguing a very different position.

As revealed in the JC last week, the Church of Scotland is considering a report from its "church and society council" that challenges the Jewish national claim to the land of Israel. The Church stresses defensively that the paper (tellingly entitled The inheritance of Abraham? A report on the "promised land") has yet to be debated by its general assembly.

The damage has been done, however. This isn't a rogue opinion-piece: it exemplifies an approach that has become common in recent Christian thinking. Eschewing historical scholarship and running to just 10 pages, the report does little more than apply a radical patina to some highly traditional stereotypes. It obsequiously commends an American activist called Mark Braverman for being "adamant that Christians must not sacrifice the universalist, inclusive dimension of Christianity and revert to the particular exclusivism of the Jewish faith because we feel guilty about the Holocaust".

It's as if the 20th century never happened. As late as 1939, Jacques Maritain, the Thomist philosopher, could write a book entitled A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question that perplexedly treated the Jews as a historical aberration. In spite of a historic catastrophe in which the Jews' resilience was not some abstruse theological conundrum but a matter of bare survival amid barbarism, a major Protestant denomination is now reprising the dismal philosophy of counterposing Christian universalism to Jewish particularism.

The Church of Scotland's report is tendentious and inflammatory but it has recognisable ideological roots. While denouncing the biblical literalism that it claims underlies the cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, it derives from a reactionary and atavistic theology. According to the paper's authors, Zionism holds that "God promises the land to Abraham and his descendants". That's so crude a depiction of the Jewish national movement that it doesn't even reach the level of caricature. Many early Zionists were reacting against the notion that the Jews were a people engaged in prayer and scriptural study till the Messiah returned. One of the deepest fissures in modern Israeli society is between an ultra-religious minority and a far bigger constituency that supports pluralism.

As a commentator sympathetic to Israel, I pay precisely no attention to sacred texts. I'm swayed instead by Israel's status as a democracy in a region where that form of government is scarce, as a force for scientific inquiry and secularism, and as a polyglot and multi-ethnic society. Under armed siege since its birth, the Jewish state has perpetrated mistakes, injustices and crimes. These tarnish its history but do not invalidate its ethos, whose commitment to pluralism would be exemplified in a pacific two-state solution with a sovereign Palestine.

The Church of Scotland declares portentously that it "is called to speak out against injustice" yet is heedless of the implications. Niebuhr noted "a pitiless perfectionism" within liberal Protestantism that imagines there is a simple method of resolving conflict. In considering the tragic clash of national claims between Israelis and Palestinians, the churches should understand that peace will not be advanced by calumnious sanctimony.

Driving conflict

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:46:50 +0100

It is hard to conceive of a more one-sided document than the report on the "promised land" shortly to go to the Church of Scotland's General Assembly.

Although it speaks of "justice", its bias against Israel is so pronounced that it mocks the very word: and though it speaks too of "reconciliation", it is difficult to find a single sentence that is likely to aid the search for peace. The report makes no mention of Arab opposition to partition that led to conflict.

It appears oblivious to the violent anti-Jewish rejectionism of Hamas. Worse, it cannot accept any legitimate biblical grounds for Jewish attachment to Israel. Last year, the Anglican Communion produced a much longer - and much more balanced - report which emphasised that Israel was an "established nation state" whose inhabitants had the right to live in peace and security, and that the Jewish connection with Israel and Jerusalem should be "taken seriously" by Christians.

It is a pity the authors of the Church of Scotland report did not pay more attention to it.

Why a 'divine' messiah was not beyond belief

Simon Rocker — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:54:47 +0100

One of the more intriguing trends in Jewish circles is growing interest in Jesus. The work of scholars such as Geza Vermes who have explored the Jewish background of the Christian messiah has filtered into the mainstream. Shmuley Boteach published his book Kosher Jesus last year; Naomi Alderman’s recent novel The Liar’s Gospel was an alternative version of the Jesus story. The American academic Amy-Jill Levine, author of the Jewish Annotated New Testament, found a ready audience at the Limmud conference in Warwick last winter.

There is now a greater willingness to reclaim Jesus as a radical rabbi who preached Jewish teachings to Jews. Christianity is explained as the creation of his followers who introduced into it pagan notions such as the rebirth of a dying god.

But a daring new book by one of the world’s leading Jewish scholars challenges this simple contrast. The Jewish Gospels is a short work aimed at general readers by Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmud at the University of California in Berkeley. In ancient times, the borders between what Judaism and Christianity were far more porous than we conceive today, he argues: it was not until the fourth century that the doctrinal differences were clarified, not least because of the desire of the Roman-backed church to put clear water between the spreading new faith and those it considered Jews.

His most explosive contention is that the concept of a divine messiah was not an alien import but part of the cauldron of ideas that bubbled in the volatile world of classical Judaism. “The basic underlying thoughts from which both the Trinity and the incarnation grew are there in the very world into which Jesus was born,” he writes.

Jesus could have plausibly claimed to be the “son of God”, or rather the “son of Man”, as was the more potent phrase, which goes back to the Book of Daniel. In his dreams, the prophet sees heavenly thrones — the plural is significant. On one sits the “Ancient of Days” whose hair is white as wool (Daniel 7:9): but emerging from the “clouds of heaven” is another apparition, who is likened to a “Son of Man”, whose “dominion is an everlasting dominion” and who is to be served by all peoples and nations (7:13-14).

Some interpreters may regard the Son of Man simply as the symbolic representation of a warrior-Messiah , who does not enjoy divine status, or of heroic Israel. But Boyarin suggests that Daniel’s vision reflected earlier traditions of a dual Father-Son godhead — which later rabbis successfully fought as heresy but which underlay the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus.

It is fair to say that the apocalyptic visions of Daniel are not familiar territory even to most shul-going Jews. Even less known are other texts on which Boyarin draws to bolster his argument that “Gospel Judaism” was a “Jewish messianic movement”.

The Similitudes of Enoch is an apocryphal work dated by scholars to the tumultuous first century CE — the same era as Jesus — and named after the mysterious character who appears briefly at the start of the Bible and is whisked to heaven.

In the Similitudes, the narrator Enoch recounts a heavenly vision of a figure with “a head of days” like “white wool”, accompanied by another “whose face was like the appearance of a man”. That “Son of Man” sits on “the throne of glory”: he will deliver judgment, vanquish the wicked and be worshipped on earth. Enoch comes to understand that the Son of Man is actually himself.

Another first century Jewish text, the Fourth Book of Ezra, depicts a redeemer “like the figure of a man”, flying with the clouds of heaven to initiate some kind of judgment day. “The forms of many people came to him, some of whom were joyful and some sorrowful; some of whom were bound and some were bringing others as offerings.”

Boyarin also shows how Daniel’s vision could be decoded to lend credence to the idea of suffering redeemer. The New Testament, he concludes, is “much more deeply embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many have imagined, even… in the very moments that we take to be most characteristically Christian as opposed to Jewish: the notion of a dual godhead with a Father and a Son, the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the salvational process.”

Of course, this is by no means a consensus view among scholars. PeterSchäfer, author of The Jewish Jesus, for example, believes that Boyarin overstates his case. But investigations of first-century Judaism are shaking old certainties. We all build our worldview on ideas about the past. The effect of works like Boyarin’s is to make the solid ground on which we think we stand seem more like ice that can melt into something more fluid.

The implications of such radicalism could extend beyond the halls of academia and theological exchange between Christians and Jews. If Boyarin is right, then messianic Jews whose belief in Jesus as messiah puts them currently beyond the Jewish pale might have more claim to be an offshoot of Judaism than we think.

Nationality offer from Portugal

Richard Zimler — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:00:48 +0100

The Portuguese parliament unanimously approved on April 12 a new law that will offer nationality to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who escaped from Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries after being forcibly converted to Christianity and then persecuted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition.

Jews who are members of a Sephardic community outside Portugal and who can demonstrate a link to the country based on such criteria as family name, language spoken at home and genealogical records, will be eligible for citizenship.

Historians believe that Jews first came to Portugal with the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. By the 15th century, they represented up to ten per cent of the population, with flourishing communities in Lisbon, Oporto and many other smaller cities.

King Manuel I of Portugal issued an expulsion order against the Jews in December of 1496 but soon decided that he did not want to lose such valuable residents and forcibly converted them in early 1497.

This mass-conversion gave rise to a new class of citizens known as New Christians or Marranos, a pejorative term believed to have originally meant swine.

After the mass-conversion, thousands of New Christians escaped to Istanbul, Salonica, North Africa and other welcoming destinations where they could practise Judaism openly and without harassment.

Papal ties with Jews remain strong

Simon Rocker — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:45:18 +0000

Leaders of the Catholic Church were flocking to Rome this week for Pope Benedict’s farewell yesterday and the prelude to the secretive process to choose his successor. Many of the cardinals had cancelled previous arrangements.

But it is a measure of the importance attached to Catholic-Jewish relations that the head of the Vatican council in charge of them still found time to come to the UK to honour his last engagement under Benedict.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, responsible for the dialogue since 2010, was in Cambridge on Tuesday for a lecture programme at the Woolf Institute which also featured Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.

The Swiss-born cardinal, 62, believes that tributes to the Pope from the Jewish world on his resignation reflects a largely positive appraisal of his period of office.

The Pope was “very engaged” with the dialogue, Cardinal Koch said. “He wanted to deepen the relationship with the Jews. He visited many synagogues, more than [any] pope. He had many audiences with representatives of the Jewish people”.

As for how the dialogue might fare under any successor, he said that Catholic-Jewish ties were “not the private idea of this pope or another”, but an established commitment of the Church.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the ground-breaking Second Vatican Council which led to the Nostra Aetate declaration two years later – and the reverse of the historic teaching of contempt for the Jews.

Benedict had demonstrated that an “antisemitic approach has no place in the Catholic Church”, Cardinal Koch said.

The Church’s talks with the ultra-conservative breakaway sect, the Society for Saint Pius X — from which the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson was expelled — had made it clear that there was no road back unless it accepted Nostra Aetate, he said.

He took a cautious line on one of the remaining areas of tension between the Vatican and the Jewish community — the controversial move to canonise the wartime Pius XII, who stands accused of failing to do enough to resist the Nazi genocide. The beatification process, the next stage before sainthood, is currently on hold.

“The hope of many people is that we know better the situation of this pope when all the archives are opened,” Cardinal Koch said.

But as signs of progress, he pointed to the continuing dialogue between the Vatican and Israel’s chief rabbis. Theological questions may still be a little too sensitive to appear formally on the agenda but their meetings have discussed the financial crisis and issues of religious leadership.

Civilisation beyond the Church

Oliver Kamm — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:00:28 +0000

It is particularly difficult for a Pope that comes from Germany to come here,” said Benedict XVI at Auschwitz in 2006. This was surely true.

But the Pope, who resigned this week, might have mentioned, too, the difficulties for the Roman Catholic Church in confronting its own historical contribution to the hatreds that fuelled the Holocaust.

Post-war German leaders acknowledged the horrors of the Nazi era. As Chancellor in 1970, Willy Brandt knelt in penitence before the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.

While there does remain historical debate about the role played by the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust years, there can be no doubt that the Church is historically implicated in the myths of antisemitism.

Pope Leo XII ordered in 1826 that Jews be confined to ghettos. Pope Pius IX infamously refused to return a Jewish boy to his parents after he had been abducted by papal police, for the boy had been secretly baptised a Catholic by a domestic servant.

Only in the post-war era has the Roman Catholic Church confronted squarely this legacy. The Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, initiated by Pope John XXIII, renounced the notion of the Jews’ collective guilt for the crucifixion of Christ, and denounced antisemitic hatreds. To his credit, Benedict has shown himself as sensitive as his predecessor to developing relations with the Jews. He visited Israel and Yad Vashem in 2009.

Yet there is an inherent dilemma in Christian doctrine. If you regard Jesus as the Messiah, you necessarily stumble on the historical fact that the Jews rejected that claim. Jesus chose only Jews to be his disciples, one of whom is regarded by Catholics as the first Pope. The Church has rejected the antisemitic myth of deicide but, right up to the modern era, Catholic thinkers have still regarded the persistence of Jewry as, in some sense, a historical mistake (see, for example, Jacques Maritain’s 1939 book A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question).

Whereas the modern Catholic Church has shifted and Pope Benedict has undoubtedly played his part in this, it has never resolved this problem. It was evident even in Benedict’s visit to Auschwitz, where he gave thanks for the witness of Christian martyrs who opposed Nazism, but said little about the crimes against the Jews.

I recalled this history when reading the weekly column of Daniel Finkelstein, my close Times colleague and fellow-JC contributor. Reflecting on Benedict’s resignation, Finkelstein maintained that, contrary to the views of secularists, “the Church has been one of the great civilising institutions of mankind”.

This seems to me exactly wrong. The Church is, rather, a reflection of human frailties and has often compounded them through zeal. The great civilising influence in human history is the emergence of the Enlightenment, which among other things has, in Western democracies (including Israel), at last separated religious and civil authority. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, which enshrined the principle that there be no religious test for public office, is a defining advance for the freedom of religious minorities as well as the freedom of those who profess no religion.

There has never been, to my knowledge, a divine revelation of the merits of democracy and liberal political rights. These are values that human beings have alighted on for themselves. The thriving and flourishing of the Jews, and of all minorities, depends far more on defending them than on the personalities of religious leaders or the politics of interfaith dialogue.

Gay Jewish parents slam Catholic MP’s anti-family allegations

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:51:18 +0000

Jewish same-sex parents have hit back at Liberal Democrat minister Sarah Teather’s claim that gay marriage will make family life more unstable.

In a letter to Ms Teather, Natalie Grazin, who is bringing up her children with her partner Samantha Cohen, wrote: “I completely agree with you about marriage being the right context in which to have children. That’s precisely why we chose to have a religious wedding in 2005, before we began the process of conceiving.”

One Jewish lesbian mother, Pippa, wrote to Ms Grazin supporting her stance.

She said: “People like us need to speak out because our children are just regular kids."

“My children are very clear on their identity. One of them is through a Jewish marriage to a man. The other one is [through] donor insemination at the London Women’s Clinic.”

Liberal Judaism chief executive Rabbi Danny Rich will today give evidence today to the Public Bill Committee on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill.

He will argue for Liberal Judaism’s right to opt into offering same-sex marriage ceremonies. The movement was the first religious denomination to publish official liturgy for same-sex ceremonies.

A spokeswoman for Ms Teather declined to comment.

Disgraceful yet all too easy linking of Israelis and Nazis

Rabbi Natan Levy — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 16:24:33 +0000

Come and eavesdrop on a question I was asked by a leading Anglican bishop at an interfaith symposium last summer. "Rabbi," he asked earnestly, "how can your people turn Gaza into a concentration camp after Auschwitz?" This being my first encounter with this type of dovetailing - as employed last week by Respect's Lee Jasper and this week by Liberal Democrat David Ward - my reply was forgettable. Lately, my responses are improving.

When Jews and Christians discuss the Holy Land it is this that fundamentally bothers many of my Christian colleagues: How could the victims of the last century's worst atrocity -they ask, faces pained - have begun to act so atrociously?

Church leaders are not the first to castigate Jews as poor students of their own history. Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago announced in 2002 that the blockade of Ramallah was "in the spirit of Auschwitz". In Brazil, a few months later, Saramago announced that the Jews no longer deserved any "sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust… They didn't learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents."

Dr Haider Eid, professor at Al-Aqsa University sang a similar if slightly shriller tune in a 2010 speech to the University of London. "It is that the world was absolutely wrong to think that Nazism was defeated in 1945," he observed. "Nazism has won because it has finally managed to Nazify the consciousness of its own victims."

But what is striking in my conversations with Church figures is how pervasively the association between Israelis and Nazis has slipped into common parlance. At the Methodist Conference in June, a delegate cautioned me to prevent a "second Shoah upon the indigenous Palestinian people". I was asked by a sincere Quaker if the "settlers ever visited Yad Vashem". In a letter to the Church Times last year, John Pearson, chair of the Christian Sea of Faith Network, justified a pro-Palestinian event in Newcastle by remarking that the images of West Bank Palestinians waiting to enter Israel "reminded me strongly of similar photos of 70 years ago, showing vast armies of the innocent being herded into captivity". He failed to acknowledge that these Palestinians were not being herded into anything worse than a long day's work.

There are two salient questions, I think, that emerge from this new language of parallelism between Auschwitz and Gaza. The first is that the Jewish community must be extraordinarily cautious in how we justify Israel through the Holocaust. The line of reasoning that runs from the Holocaust to the state of Israel, is - in misguided hands - a two-way street that also links Israeli soldiers to Nazi stormtroopers.

The second is that European Christendom may have unfinished business with the Holocaust. Once we acknowledge the heroism of Martin Niemöller or the brave establishment of the Council of Christians and Jews, there are vanishingly few instances of Christian leaders saying a definitive "nein" against Nazism. I am neither a Christian nor an historian, but Christianity might engage in hard soul-searching on the silence that echoes out from that dark night.

Unfortunately, there is a linguistic trick that washes the stain of the Shoah from the Christian record. What if the victims of the Holocaust, when eventually given power over another people, acted just like Nazis? If the Jews can build concentration camps in Gaza, then the Christians who simply watched them being built in Poland cannot be judged too harshly.

With the linguistic trick, Christian guilt vanishes. The German pastors who prayed on Good Friday for the "Perfidious Jews" while the ovens smoked are as equally culpable - and thus, as equally blameless - as those settler rabbis who remain silent against the racial injustices in Hebron within sight of their own homes. Do these dark symmetries between Auschwitz and Gaza clear Christianity of its own Holocaust silence, just as Pontius Pilate once washed his own hands to place the blame on Jewish heads?

The Middle East is in desperate need of non-biased voices and agenda-less honest brokers. What it certainly does not need is more entangled histories, more unnamed ghosts of past horror. We Jews and Christians must speak together about the future of Israel and Palestine, but first we must speak together about our own shared and freighted past.