Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
April 5, 2002
Two Paths to the Same God?
A Post-Easter and Pesach Challenge
A cynical professor of mine used to ask: "What is the difference between religion and superstition." Very simply said, superstition is the other person’s religion.
Ideally, being serious about our own religion should make us more sensitive to and respectful of others’ faith. Yet, too often, the celebration of religious holidays here in America tends to increase antipathy and suspicion, cynicism and insensitivity toward others. For example, when Christmas and Chanukah are both celebrated in December, many people become very uncomfortable with the connections and comparisons.
Yet, living in America, there are other times of the year when our distinctive faiths are highlighted. Each Spring brings with it Good Friday and Easter, and our Passover seders. Some of the same tensions are raised over this confluence of observance. And, frankly, I think this is a much more important time of comparison. Christmas is a Christian High Holyday; Chanukah is certainly not a Jewish High Holyday. But, when we talk about Easter and Passover, we are talking about major league festivals on both sides.
I am regularly invited by churches to help them celebrate a Passover seder. Last week, Cantor Lefko and I presented seders at Tulsa’s Grace Lutheran Church and at St. James Roman Catholic Church in Bartlesville. Often the churches who call me are sincerely interested in learning about our unique Jewish customs and theology. There is a new atmosphere in Christian-Jewish relations, an encouraging attitude which seeks honestly to restructure our dialogue so that we can respect one another’s traditions and beliefs — and I am always happy to help churches in this regard.
Occasionally, however, some Christian religious organizations are merely interested in taking Jewish celebrations and infusing them with Christian symbolism. This not only robs Jews of our own sacred occasions but disrespects the fact that Jewish holidays, Jewish symbols and Jewish beliefs have their own integrity. Some of these groups want to turn the seder into the Last Supper with the matzah representing the body of Christ, the wine his blood, and the climax of the Jewish seder meal the wish that all would accept Jesus as their Savior.
That kind of approach will not lead to respect and harmony. This concept of triumphalism, or "supercessionism" as it is known in the theological world, characterized Christianity’s approach to the Jewish People for much of our history. Such belief says that Jews are no longer a chosen people, having been replaced — superceded — by the new Israel, Christianity. But those in the dialogue business have painfully learned that only the concept of a God who is so great that a covenant can be created with more than one people and in different ways is the path to true interfaith understanding.
This type of understanding is one of our goals in Jewish-Christian dialogue. Jews want Christians to see it that way. Yet in all honesty, how many Jews leave room in our theology to believe that other peoples can be chosen as well? Because God covenanted with us at Mount Sinai does not preclude the possibility of a covenant at Calvary with Christianity, or a meeting at Mecca for Muslims.
Often well-meaning Jews ask me: "Rabbi, tell us the truth. Do intelligent, mature Christians really believe in the virgin birth by Mary of Jesus?" Sometimes I respond by asking a different question — Do you believe that Abraham was 99 years old and Sarah was 90 when they had their first child? "Oh, but Rabbi, that is different!" Is it really?
What about the language we use often unthinkingly when referring to our Christian neighbors and friends — the goyisha kop, that shikse, the shaygetz. What kind of sensitivity do these terms display? What kinds of myths and stereotypes are we perpetuating. Tonight I would like to share with you some views based on the writings of my colleague and friend, Rabbi Norman M. Cohen of Hopkins, Minnesota, which I think challenge us at this season to consider what we really believe.
Today we Jews and Christians are two separate peoples with two distinct faiths, each claiming to be a covenant people. How did we get to be so different? And is it possible after 2,000 years to bridge the gap created by hostility so that we can become more respectful of our differences, even as we share some significant similarities.
It has been easy for Jews and Christians to forget that the religion of Jesus was Judaism. Christianity is the religion about Jesus. The real beginning of Christianity came after the death of Jesus, with an interpretation of the events of Jesus’ life. That first century was a time of tremendous turbulence — the Romans were terrible oppressors, they destroyed our Temple, and Jewish life became difficult. It was in such times of turbulence, oppression and persecution that Jewish hopes and dreams of a Messiah became more urgent. A proliferation of different groups responding to the troubled times included Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Messianic groups, one of which was the early Christians. The Pharisees became the group through which normative Jewish tradition was transmitted. We Jews today are heirs of the Pharisees.
While Christianity was part of the Jewish community in the first century, there came a parting of the ways. After it was clear that Jesus had not done what a Jewish Messiah was supposed to do, Paul helped Christianity understand many basic religious ideas in a very different way, focusing first and foremost on the death and resurrection of Jesus, the events associated with Good Friday and Easter.
Most Jews wonder why it is called "Good" Friday, if that was the day on which Jesus died. From a Jewish perspective, there doesn’t seem to be too much good about it at all. The crucifixion of Jesus is an act for which Jews have been accused of Decide for centuries by anti-Semites and those unprepared to strive for historical accuracy. Good Friday has rarely been good for us Jews.
Why do Christians see it as a good day? After all, wasn’t that the day on which Jesus was degraded and crucified? How little most Jews understand Paul’s view of the crucifixion, if we come to that conclusion. In this event lies an important difference between Judaism and Christianity and the ways in which we understand key concepts and ideas.
For Jews, the Messiah is symbolic of a time when the world will be perfected under God’s rule, when there will be no more bloodshed, war, hatred and bigotry. That day is still to come. It is a day that our entire tradition, our mitzvah system , urges us to help bring about.
After the death of Jesus, Paul reinterpreted the Messiah concept. For Paul, the Messiah became a savior, someone whose death redeemed all humanity from sin. This was based on a notion which does not exist in Judaism — that people are born with an original taintedness and must, through some power other than their own, find salvation. For Paul, Jesus’ crucifixion became the redemptive act of God for humanity, purging that original sin. Therefore, it is called Good Friday, because of the redemption and salvation of the world. We see here how Jews and Christians differ in their concepts of sin, salvation and Messiah.
For Christians, the story of Adam and Eve represents original sin. When Adam sinned, the entire world sinned. In Adam’s sin, all humanity sinned, Paul would say. Jews would argue differently. As Adam sinned, so, human beings will sin. Adam did not bring sin into the world by his violating God’s commandment; rather, death entered the world as a result. Until that time, according to Jewish tradition, the human being was to live forever. Remember: Adam was told, "On the day that you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die." Adam ate the fruit, but he did not die on that day; he became destined to die, from that day.
These differences in understanding and interpretation can be quite interesting and exciting, if discovered in honest, open dialogue with those of another faith. But, unfortunately, throughout the ages, these differences in understanding have helped exacerbate the hostility which already existed between Jews and Christians over the charge of Decide, the charge that the Jews killed Christ.
An objective, scholarly study of the history of that time leads to an obvious conclusion that it was the Romans who killed Jesus, and not the Jews. But the time the Christian Bible was written was a period of separation between the Jewish and Christian communities. Christians were looking to identify themselves as separate, and therefore, they would place Jews in an unfavorable light and clear the Romans, with whom the Christians were trying to curry favor so they could convert them. A couple of centuries later, the Roman Empire became the Holy Christian Roman Empire. In all of this conflict during the early centuries of this millennium, the fact that Jesus was a Jew, through and through, was lost in the shuffle.
The darkness of that crucifixion story cast its pall over subsequent centuries. The Middle Ages was a time of escalating violence and hostility. Easter became a dreaded time in Jewish-Christian relations. Good Friday and Easter sermons brought only sadness for Jews. Jews had to stay indoors because Christians leaving church, much like Muslims leaving Mideast mosques on Friday in our own day, were filled with hostility, anger and thoughts of vengeance against the Jews.
Passover was the time of the year when Jews were accused of murdering Christian children to use their blood in the making of matzos. As recently as the 19th century in Russia, there was the Beiliss trial; a young Jewish man was accused of murdering a Christian child as part of Jewish ritual.
How bitterly ironic that this blood libel, which was first leveled against Catholics for their use of the host and wine during the transubstantiation communion act, would be turned against the Jewish people. Our laws of kashrut forbid any iota of blood from being present in food preparation. Why do you think there is no such thing as a rare steak in an Orthodox household?
Thankfully, today, it is becoming equally sad and painful to many sensitive Christians; we witness in many churches a change of attitudes.
Many Christian denominations are recapturing their Jewish roots today, not in an attempt to rob Judaism of its uniqueness, but in an effort to understand more clearly that Jesus was a Jew, that Jesus’ teachings come mainly from the Jewish Bible and the Talmud. Indeed, when Jesus is asked by his disciples in the Christian Scripture, "What is the most important commandment?", Jesus responds, as many Jews of his time and today would respond, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." He repeats the V’ahavta, "You shall love the Eternal your God with all your soul, with all your heart, with all your might", and he quotes from Numbers, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Until recently, most Christians saw those as original teachings that had nothing to do with Judaism. But now Christianity is beginning to come to grips in a more positive way with its relationship with the Jewish People.
Christian scholarship, in large part, involves the understanding of historical circumstances that led to the writing of the Gospels in a particular way for particular reasons. Just as we see, in our study of the Jewish Bible, that these stories were written out of a particular faith, that the legends of Genesis contain deeper truths than factual details; so, too, a modern Christian understanding of Christian Scripture and church writings leads to conclusions of how and what people believed rather than historical detail on which to base persecution and hatred.
There is a major effort going on to change textbooks and the way that Christians speak about Jews in the Christian Bible, a growing sensitivity to remove anti-Semitism from the liturgy. There is an honest, sincere effort to study Judaism to better understand how Christianity started. But it is up to Jews, also, not to close ourselves off to new dialogue. We often say that those who forget the past are destined to repeat it; but we should also remember that those who cannot get beyond the past are doomed to relive it.
A rich man came to a carpenter one day and said, "I want you to make the most beautiful house for me. You have an unlimited amount of money to do so." The carpenter thought that if he skimped on the material, he could save even more money from what the rich man would pay him and profit even more. When the carpenter had finished and presented the keys to the rich man, the rich man said, "No, here are the keys. I want you to have it. I want this to be the home in which you live." The carpenter realized that he had only cheated himself.
Indeed, God has given us almost unlimited resources with which to create the world in which we live and the relationships which we will have with our neighbors. We owe not only each other, but also oursleves, to do the very best we can do. Christianity certainly owes Judaism for giving it its birth and so much of what it teaches. It owes Judaism for setting the stage so that Christian proselytizing could be so successful. And Judaism owes Christianity, for through Christianity, monotheism, the belief in one God, our God, has come to millions of people who might otherwise never have known God.
All of this dialogue and relationship started nearly 2,000 years ago, in the First Century. But today, my friends, we are in a new First Century, a century in which for the first time we are talking with each other, not at one another, and we have the opportunity to take the dialogue and discussion in a very different direction than it went for the last 2,000 years.
Let us Christians and Jews not be so chutzpadik as to think that our God is so limited that God chooses only the Jews, or has replaced the Jewish People with a new Israel, the Christian church. God does not break promises. And more importantly, the God we worship is capable of much more than such a limited and limiting theological point of view. Let us be open to the possibility that truth can be found by many people in different ways.
I believe that if God could be heard addressing us Christians and Jews after Easter and Pesach 2002, God would say something like this: Let’s get one thing straight. Those are your religions, not Mine. I’m beyond them all. Every one of your religions claims there is only one of Me which is absolutely true. But in the very next breath, every religion claims it is My favorite one. How do I begin to put a stop to such nonsense? I am your Father and your Mother, and I do not play favorites among my children.
Furthermore, holy books or religious rites are sacred and powerful, but not more than the least of you. They were only meant to steer you in the right direction, not to keep you arguing with each other and certainly not to keep you from trusting your own personal connection with Me.
Furthermore, you act like I need you and your religions to stick up for Me or to win souls for My sake. Please don’t do me any favors. I can stand quite well on My own, thank you. I don’t need you to defend Me, and I don’t need constant credit. I just want you to be good to each other.
Finally, why do you keep making things so complicated? Do you think I care what you call Me? Adonai or Allah or Brahma? Do you think I care which of My special children you feel closest to — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed? You can call me and my special ones any name you choose, if only you would go about My business of loving each other as I love you.
I am not telling you to abandon your religions. Enjoy your religions, honor them, learn from them — just as you should enjoy, honor and learn from your parents. But do you walk around telling everyone that your parents are better then theirs? Your religion, like your parents, may always have the most special place in your heart; I do not mind that at all. Each religion is unique for a reason. Each has a unique style so that people can find the best path for themselves.
The Jewish People is not just a faith community, not merely a collection of individuals, each longing to connect him or herself spiritually with Me. Rather, Judaism is the way of life of a people chosen by Me to be a medium of My vision of holiness and justice. You were chosen, but that does not mean that I do not have other covenants with other good religions, too.
My blessed children of the earth, the world has grown too small for your pervasive religious bigotry and competition. The whole planet is connected by air travel, satellite dishes, computers, telephones, fax machines, rock concerts, diseases and mutual needs and concerns.
Get with the program. If you really want to help, then commit yourselves to figuring out how to feed your hungry, cloth your naked, protect your abused and shelter your poor. Just as important, make your own everyday life a shining example of kindness and good humor. I have given you all the resources you need, if only you abandon your fear of each other and begin living, loving and laughing together. L’hitraot. Your one and only God.
This message is based on the writings of Rabbi Norman M. Cohen to whom I am deeply indebted.
