271 - The Jewish-Christian Agenda

The Jewish-Christian Agenda
By Solomon S. Bernards

SOME years ago, in the course of a long conversation with a Lubavich Chasid, a Holocaust survivor, he asked what I did for a living. I replied that I was working full-time to improve relations between Christians and Jews, to develop attitudes of mutual respect and trust and even friendship-so that what happened during the Holocaust would not happen again. He reacted, "You're wasting your time. Anti-Semitism is inseparable from Christianity. It's impossible for a Christian not to be an anti-Semite." I have the impression that the attitude of this survivor is not atypical; and that this bitter, irreversibly hostile feeling has provided strong reinforcement of the regrettably deep anti-gentile prejudices regnant in some sectors of the Jewish community. On the other hand, those survivors who owe their lives to the acts of "righteous gentiles" or observed acts of righteousness by Christians, identify with efforts seeking Christian-Jewish reconciliation.

Is anti-Semitism really inseparable from Christianity? I think not. Even so, the tenacity with which ingrained disparagements, distortions, and hostilities have persisted in church teachings and in Christian society generally over the past 1900 years, has made the task of bridge-building enormously difficult. This labor requires patience, tact, scholarship, and above, all, credibility and trustworthiness. Progress has been slow, often painfully slow, but it is now possible to see improved relations between Christians and Jews in America in fundamental ways.

I

Twenty-one years ago, when I began my work, we were in many, respects, in an elementary stage. We attracted Christian ministers through midrashic tales, rabbinic homilies, chasidic stories. We

Solomon S. Bernards is National Director of Friends of Congregation Mevakshei Derech, Jerusalem, and past National Director of Interfaith Affairs of the AntiDefamation League of B'nai B'rith, New York. A graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, N.Y., where he also received an honorary degree, Rabbi Bernards has been in the forefront of Jewish-Christian discussions for many years. He has organized seminars at Princeton University and other academic centers, and is the author of Living Heritage of the High Holy Days (1965) and Who Is a Jew-A Reader (1969). This brief but personal testimony is reprinted with permission from Sh'ma Journal of Jewish Responsibility, Eugene B. Borowitz, Editor. Port Washington, N.Y., Oct., 1983, pp. 136-138.

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described Jewish holy days in depth. We provided "kits" of Jewish religious articles, a miniature Torah scroll, a junior talit, a Chanukah menorah, to illustrate the life of Jesus. If you brought up the subject of Christian sources of anti-Semitism to ministers and educators, they backed off, despite the fact that in the previous three decades, Sunday School texts had been examined by scholars and found to contain many derogations and misrepresentations of Jews and Judaism. A few Protestant denominations, such as the Methodists, United Church (Congregationalists), and Presbyterians took the lead in trying to cleanse their teaching materials of serious malignments of Judaism. But the majority of Protestant text publishers and virtually all Catholic text publishers wouldn't touch the subject-it was too -controversial."

In college sociology classes, some headway could be discerned, since Gordon Allport's classic, The Nature of Prejudice had helped remove the taboo of discussing prejudice and bigotry in general, and anti-Semitism in particular. When one attended religion courses, particular in church-affiliated institutions, it was taken for granted that Jews and Judaism had ceased to exist after the beginning of the Christian centuries; therefore there was no point in studying this "fossilized remnant of Syriac civilization."

At theological schools, the situation was much worse. The anti-Jewish theological constructs of the classical Christian theologians reigned supreme. The tragic relation between the Christian churches and the Jews from the time of Constantine, when Christianity became the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire, was a "best kept secret" insofar as teachers and students were concerned. Only years later, some Christian clergy and academicians discovered how much they, had been short-changed in their training for the ministry by the withholding of this information from them. Doors of theological classes were closed to Jewish interfaith workers-what could a Jew, who had rejected the Christian Savior, tell Christian faculty, much less students, that was insightful and significant?

II

Closed to the perceptions of all but a few sensitive religion teachers and seminary, faculty was the phenomenon of the State of Israel, and its connection with the spiritual and community life of the Jewish people. To be sure, Jewish community and defense agencies were similarly confused and conflicted on the subject of Israel in the early 1960s. It is no longer so. The 1967 war changed everything. All the indifferent and lukewarm Jewish leaders jumped on the Israel bandwagon and became 250-percenters, of the "my country, right or wrong" type. Before 1967, Israel hardly reached the agenda of Jewish-Christian conversations after 1967, it was never kept out; whether in formal presentations, or in informal exchanges of viewpoint.

Moreover, the period of the 1960s saw only the modest beginnings of introducing American Christians to the Holocaust, its enormity, its

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all-over implications for Christians and Jews alike, and the role of the Christian "teaching of contempt" in preparing the ground for the colossal assault of the Final Solution. A decade was to elapse before the Holocaust was to gain legitimacy and acceptance in American academic circles. The contributions of a number of keenly sensitive Christian scholars accelerated this important achievement, and were crucial to its realization. There were dramatic changes in the Zeitgeist-from the mid-1960s to the 1980s-which changed the course of Jewish-Christian relations, and propelled it with vibrant force into a new path.

(1) Vatican Council II, 1962-1965, opened the windows of the Catholic Church to the air of modernity and contemporary, realities. Under the extraordinary, guidance of the unforgettable Pope John XXIII, and with the energetic involvement of a number of Jewish scholars, leaders, and interfaith workers, the Council produced the Declaration on the Jews-to be sure, a watered-down, compromised version of its original forthright statement-which constituted a watershed in Catholic-Jewish relations. and had an enormous ripple effect on Protestant attitudes toward Judaism and Jews. It exorcised for all time to come, the infamous deicide charge. The American Conference of Catholic Bishops produced further statements and declarations which articulated with specificity the implications of the Vatican document.

(2) The statements on relations with the Jewish people, including the charge of deicide, which came from Protestant denominations and umbrella-groups, at about the time of the Vatican Council and subsequent to it, involved the other half of Christendom in a turning point in its attitudes towards Jews and Judaism. Especially, moving and epochal was the Lutheran statement which labeled Christian anti-Semitism a sin both against the Jewish people and against Christianity, itself, and asked the pardon of the Jewish people for the hurt it had suffered as a result.

(3) The publication of a number of controversial, against-the-grain books on Christian attitudes towards Jews, by Christians, which had a mind-blowing impact on scholars, ministers, and laity. The Glock-Stark volume, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism, was a sociological study of the beliefs and perceptions of a sampling of 4,000 churchgoers, which pointed to a shocking ten to forty percent of Christians in the pew who hold extremely, damaging perceptions about Jews, including their continuing guilt and complicity, in the crucifixion of Jesus. Rosemary, Ruether's study, Faith and Fratricide, The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, examined the ideological anti-Judaism venom in the New Testament and in the writings of the Church Fathers which, today's Christians have to understand, poisoned Christian attitudes toward Jews. In no other previous work had a Christian scholar faced this grim reality, with such honesty. Its translation into German had the effect of rousing German New Testament scholars from their compla-

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cency and indifference to anti-Semitism in post-war Germany, and it moved many of them to re-think and re-examine their positions on Jews and Judaism for the first time.

III

There are many, many unfinished items on the Jewish-Christian agenda, including matters which have barely been touched upon in the realm of Christian ideology/theology, which only Christians can deal with. These matters will have to await explanation and examination at another time. Suffice it to say: Jewish-Christian relations in the past half-century have undergone vast and permanent improvement, but it would be foolish and untrue to say that in this short span of time we have been able totally to reshape eighteen centuries of a tragic and anguished relationship.