Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 3 - October 1984 - ARTICLE

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Anti-Semitism is the Heart
By A. Roy Eckardt

THE distinguishing mark of this symposium's subject is its radical asymmetry, theologically as well as morally. Theologically speaking, God is the victimizer, Jews the victim. Morally speaking, Christians (and others) are the oppressors, Jews the oppressed. In a most telling sense, there is no "Christian-Jewish relation" in the sense of participating equals. The Jewish people have done nothing to hurt Christians, they have only helped them immeasurably. The "Christian-Jewish dialogue" is a product of parthenogenesis: the single parent is Christian anti-Semitism.

The late James Parkes. British historian and eminent authority upon anti-Semitism, and my teacher, always stressed that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews and surely nothing to do with Jewish behavior. Anti-Semitism is a special kind of projection from beyond Jewishness. Its dwelling place is the minds and hearts of anti-Semites. Accordingly, Jewish behavior becomes "bad," not because it is humanly bad (which it often is) but because it is Jewish. This means that it could be "good" but would still be as -bad" as ever. For the imputed guilt is one not of doing but of being. Yet to impute badness to being is a pathological act or, theologically put, a uniquely sinful act. Parkes was right. I have spent a lifetime finding out just how right he was.

The Christian contribution to the Holocaust (Ha'Shoah) is transparent, if still (immorally) denied. The people whom the Nazis saw as the Evil in the world had been long since identified by the church as the killers of God, the devil's special agents, and the contemporary, continuing Nay-sayers to the Truth of Christ. Helmut Gollwitzer observes that the so-called absoluteness of Christianity was eventually to spell doom for the Jews of Europe. AN William J. Peck attests, in a

A. Roy Eckardt endeavors here to sum up certain major lessons garnered from a lifetime of study and work in Christian-Jewish relations. A Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University and a United Methodist clergyman, he is professor emeritus at Lehigh University and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He has written a number of books on relations between Jews and Christians, such as Your People, My People(1974) and. with Alice L. Eckardt, Long Night's Journey Into Day ( 1982). He is a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and has an honorary degree from Hebrew Union College. Dr. Eckardt has been a visiting fellow at several academic centers such as Harvard, Cambridge, and Tübingen. A recent visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, Dr. Eckardt has just finished a book in Moral philosophy, For Righteousness' Sake.

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"structural sense, the whole of Christianity was responsible for the death camps."

The Covenant is penultimate victimizer. In the Covenant, the Jewish people were set apart as "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," a light to the peoples of the world (Ex. 19:6; Isa. 42:6). God should have foreseen the direct and inevitable line from the Covenant to the death camps. The Nazi intention to kill every last Jew (especially children) brings to light once and for all the monstrousness intrinsic to the Covenant. This is reflected in the question of a young madman in Elie Wiesel's Beggar in Jerusalem. "How does God justify Himself in His own eyes, let alone in ours? If the real and the imaginary both culminate in the same scream, in the same laugh, what is creation's purpose, what is its stake?" In the Holocaust the holy nation is turned into excrement. That was the program's entire purpose. Therefore, after the Shoah, collective Jewish martyrdom would make feces of the Name of God. Alternatively, a singular way left for surviving Jews to serve God is to have children and to keep them safe (Emil L. Fackenheim). The enemy is human suffering. And if God insists upon human suffering, this is not God but the devil.

"A Christian theology of the people Israel" is indefensible. The Christian church spent nineteen- hundred years seeking to negate Israel as the people of God. Today some Christian theologians are moving to the opposite position, but, in effect, this is no less grievous and blameworthy than the traditional stance. Jews are being fabricated into special witnesses of God whether they like it or not. The phrase quoted above comprises the title of a current book by Paul M. van Buren. Such a Christian effort is implicitly presumptuous, a form of lingering imperialism. It is essentially a pre-Shoah undertaking, and it ought to be abandoned. In his neo-Barthian work of spiritualization, van Buren strives hard to religionize the Jewish people. The only legitimate theology of the people Israel is a Jewish one. If Jews wish to opt for a religious identity, fine-and the same goes for their dereligionization. One way or the other, the determination is exclusively theirs, not that of Christians.

It has been emphasized, by others as by me, that Judaism and Jewishness are foundational and substantive, in abiding ways, to Christian faith. Yet this insistence is productive of torment. Today it is riddled with irony and under the sway of destructiveness. For in a post-Shoah world any such historical-moral-theological testimony may do no more than help perpetuate Christian imperialism. The predicament obtains as much as anywhere with respect to the present essay's effort at a certain apprehension of the Jewish people, their dignity, and their rights. (The critic will have already fixed an eye upon a, seeming, antipathy to the "God of the Old Testament." Here I can only respond that the "God of

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the New Testament" is no different and is one and the same God.) Again, no affliction is more heart-rending than the ambivalence that possesses the Christian community respecting the Jewishness of the New Testament and of Christianity. This ambivalence is one of the more fateful creations of Christian history. And there persists the haunting eventuality of transference from Jesus to anti-Semitism: What better way to get back at "this Jew" for his eschatological imperatives than to shame and ravage his people? In sum, the objection of more than one contemporary Jew is unanswerable: "After 1900 years. is it not time that you Christians just let us alone"

The moral norms of today's theology of liberation apply unexceptionally to Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people-though anti-Semitism tries its very best to bar the way.

That almost forty years after the establishing of the Third Jewish Commonwealth-upon centuries-old foundations and uninterrupted possession of Eretz Yisrael (see Parkes, Whose Land?)-we are still being forced to defend and justify Israel's existence (alone among all countries) suggests the atmosphere of a mental institution. The distinctive genius of the anti-Semite is to put Jews forever on trial. Always evaluate Jews-unceasingly so. Always judge them-unceasingly. Jews are the eternally evaluated people, the eternally, judged people.

Liberation thinking calls us to the moral requirement of taking sides: for the poor, which means perforce against the rich, for blacks, which means perforce against the whites, for women, which means perforce against men. Yet it is necessary, lamentably, to apply the doctrine of sin to the great bulk of' liberation theology itself. This is due to the latter's congenital failure-or refusal-to include on the list: for Jews, which means perforce against their destroyers. The Jewish people and Israel are the single most pilloried collectivity in the history of the world Is it simplistic to urge the taking of sides with Jews? If it is, why then do we not hear that objection respecting other liberation group commitments? That we do not tells an entire story. The God of today is permitted to be poor and black and female-but not Jewish.

James Cone declares: "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him." We must "reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes his or he is a God of racism." In Is God a White Racist." William R. Jones rejects as beneath contempt any theodicy of blacks as God's contemporary suffering servant. Such a theodicy simply means that God is a racist. The parallels are clear and elementary. If not for Jews and against the destroyers of Jews, God is a murderer. We have to reject any conception of God that stifles Jewish self-determination. Either God is identified with oppressed Israel or God

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is anti-Semitic. And any theological demand that the State of Israel behave in morally self-sacrificing or morally superior ways makes God an anti-Semite. The Shoah turns the traditional theodicy of Israel as the Lord's powerless and suffering servant into a moral obscenity.

Christian anti-Semitism is nowhere more alive and well than in Christian anti-Israelism. It is hypocritical to lament the suffering of the poor without a "preferential option for the poor" and their power; to bewail black persecution without supporting black power; to deplore female oppression without supporting female power. The National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and unnumbered denominational offices nod their heads enthusiastically-and then go about their infamous business of making "evenhanded" (read: anti Israel) pronouncements on the Middle East. Evidently, there is no hypocrisy in talking of Christian repentance for the Holocaust while sympathizing with the would-be annihilators of the Jews of Israel. As a matter of fact, in certain quarters such repentance is now even being condemned. The Vancouver Assembly, of the World Council of Churches managed to hit a new moral low even for that body-rivaled only by the United Nations Assembly-by charging that some Christians allow their guilt for the Holocaust to corrupt "their views of the conflict in the Middle East," in ways that entice them into "uncritical support" of Israeli policies.

In recognition of massive Jewish and Israeli concern and action for the well-being of Palestinian Arabs (and surely not in deference to anti-Semitic church bureaucrats), I include a word about these hapless people. The lesson of the Shoah is that the political powerlessness of Jews meant certain death. This lesson is hardly the private property of the Jewish people. The Arabs of Palestine do well to learn from it, and they have learned from it-not alone with respect to their vis-a-vis with the powerpossessing State of Israel but with respect to their infinitely and interminably more grievous condition within the power-possessing wider Arab world. With the exception of their relatively happy status in Jordan and happier status in Israel, the Arabs of Palestine remain pariahs.

Again and again we hear the remonstrance among Christians and others: "I reserve the right to criticize Israel." The protestation can be highly revealing, for it most usually has nothing to do with the right of criticism. This is shown through a glaring but wholly ignored truth: When are people ever heard to say that they reserve the right to criticize Ethiopia, Brazil, the United States, Jordan, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, the Philippines, Italy, Egypt, Syria, India, Uruguay, etc. as the condition of granting the right of existence of such countries? The exceptional reservation of the right to criticize Israel already shows that she has been remanded to a category different from other peoples. And, as

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we would expect, the blame for this alleged necessity is assigned to Jews-standard operating procedure in all anti-Semitism.

The special protestation respecting Israel is most often followed by forms of adverse criticism that point to very serious doubts in the critic's own mind over the legitimacy of Israel's existence. The disapproval and condemnation of Israel's specific policies are in many, cases inseparable from a not-so-hidden desire to delegitimize the Jewish state. Whenever the sentiment is expressed, "Of course, I concede Israel's right to exist but …." it is most essential to listen carefully to what follows the "but."

The false consciousness of a double standard is manifest not alone in prejudice against equal rights for Jews. It appears. in even more insidious form, in the demand for superior Jewish and Israeli behavior. For example, a Christian clergyman asserts that if Jews choose to live in Israel, he is quite "comfortable calling them to live by a morality greater than that of their neighbors…. If it [Israel] becomes just another nation, then it has lost its birthright" (Peter R. Powell, Jr., The Christian Century, May 9, 1984). This preachment forcibly reminds one of a certain cynic's comprehensive definition of Christianity: that religion which teaches that Jews are to turn the other check. The preachment suggests that such Christian spokespersons in comfortable and power-ridden America have simply lost all moral credibility with respect to the sufferings of the Jewish people-not excluding, be it noted, implicitly proposed sufferings.

Has the Christian community learned nothing at all from almost two thousand years of Jewish powerlessness, and from its own contribution to the Holocaust and the afflictions of Jews? For when, as is in fact the case, Israel's surrounding enemies today do not choose to live by a like higher morality but intend instead to wipe her off the face of the earth, the demand that Israel observe a higher morality comes down to complicity in her future destruction. Thus is a lower morality given sustenance, all in the name of a higher morality-and even worse, in the name of the Christian church.

How many Christian pastors today would dare to demand that the poor or blacks or women must show special virtue as a condition for supporting their causes Christians who condemn Israel outright and those who level special moral demands upon her share a single inheritance of anti-Semitism.

In all acts of human liberation, other human beings are hurt. Such is the unfortunate fate of the rich, of whites of males-but also of the foes of Israel. Were the ethic of liberation to be truly fairminded, the Jewish people would not be singled out for reprobation over this fact of life. Indeed, one major test of the presence/absence of anti-Semitism is the presence/absence of such reprobation. The singular way to honor Jewish existence today is to honor the State of Israel, for Israel lives at the center of that existence and its meaning.

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There appears little means of accounting for the peculiarity, vehemence, universality, and indestructibility to date of Christian anti-Semitism apart from Christian triumphalism and supersessionism vis-a-vis Judaism, including the false consciousness that "the Jews" have "rejected" their own Redeemer and the one true faith. A shattering lesson of the Shoah is the exposure of the pretense that there can be anti-Judaism without anti-Semitism. Defamations of the spirit become the destruction of human bodies.

The culpability of God and the culpability of the church converge in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the Christian dogma sine qua non.

From the standpoint of the enduring social, psychological, and theological power of Christian anti-Jewishness, the event of the Resurrection is all-decisive. The final culprit is not Good Friday but Easter. For had there been no first Easter, the Crucifixion, incarnating the "sin" of "the Jews," would not have been able to reap its harvest of human hatred. Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was and remains the raison d'être of the church, its life and mission.

Once the Resurrection is identified as a special act of God, a divine event or divine fact, how is Christian exclusivism and supersessionism ever to be vanquished? For the issue between the two sides is seen to be, not a relatively harmless disparity of mere human symbolism, myth, spiritual conviction, or religious "experience"-all of which are amenable to the soothings of "relativization" or "confessionalism"-but a matter of coming forward with an obedient "Yes" or a disobedient "No" to the Sovereign of the universe. Since Jesus has in fact been raised from the dead by God, Jesus' claim to divine authority "has been visibly and unambiguously confirmed by the God of Israel"; indeed, in and through the Resurrection, Judaism is abolished (Wolfhart Pannenberg).

Why is it that anti-Semitism is the last to go (if it ever does), even after the Christian world has gladly bought into and massively accepted the liberation of the poor, of blacks, of women, and of other oppressed? The answer is that there is nothing anti-poor, anti-black, anti-female or anti-oppressed within definitive Christian dogma. In contrast, the French Catholic Christian, Jean Danielou, gives voice to the Christian plight, though he has no idea that he is confessing a crime for himself and the rest of us. The offense of the Jews, he notes, is that "they do not believe in the risen Christ." To enter an analogous accusation against other oppressed groups would be absurd. With the dogma of the Resurrection, Christian triumphalist ideology and pathology attain a substantive fulfillment that can never be surpassed. Just here the varied human and divine claims that go to make up the church's theological and moral corpus are crowned by an Event that is exclusively God's and hence vindicates divinely and eschatologically every other Christian claim.

In the Resurrection, Christianity is brought to trial before the bar of simple human justice. Contra Danielou, the real "offense" is the

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church's, not lsrael's. But God is brought to trial as well, since, in the New Testament view, responsibility for the Resurrection is exclusively God's. (On the day after the Kingdom of Night, to bring God to trial may be one last way for us to be obedient to God, to praise God provided it is really so that "God proves himself holy by righteousness" [Isa. 5:16] See the drama of Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God.) Yet to attack the dogma of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is nothing other than futile, because the Resurrection as a historically actualized event will doubtless continue to be the sine qua non of the Christian church.

It is unrealistic to ask or expect Christians to surrender their conviction that Jesus Christ has been crucified and raised from the dead for their sake. Yet this does nothing to silence a terrible question: What is the word from Auschwitz to the dogma of the Resurrection? Strictly in the frame of reference of the Holocaust, Robert E. Willis writes that the passion of Christ has become part and parcel "of the very evil it seeks to illuminate." Remoreselessly, history (providence?) exacts its tolls upon us.

The devil possesses his very own chosen people. These are the anti-Semites. Anti-Semitism is absolutely unique. It is the world's most pervasive, most enduring, most heinous, and most destructive moral evil. To fight it could be the Christian church's magnificent obsession. That the church as a whole does not dedicate itself to an all-out war against this evil is infinitely more than sad; it is a reflection of moral bankruptcy and a highly specific form of sinfulness. Wolfhart Pannenberg agrees with Martin Luther that genuine human freedom and identity can only be obtained by faith in Christ. This is sacrilege. It is a revolt against the imago dei. True human liberation is freedom not alone from being oppressed, but from oppressing. It is deliverance from all idolatry, triumphalism, supersessionism, and other forms of arrogance. (For an important effort toward such deliverance, see Paul F. Knitter, "Theocentric Christology," THEOLOGY TODAY, July 1983.)

A distinguishing mark of those who are doing post-Shoah theology is the Christian moral revulsion that is their meat day and night. Herein may lie much of the critical power, and eventually redeeming power, of that work. For these lines have meant to say that there remains all the hope in the world for the Christian community. In the shadow of the Kingdom of Night some Christians grope, with some Jews, for the power that is the solitary creation of forgiveness. In Wiesel's Souls on Fire, Rabbi Levi-Yitzhak reminds God that he had better ask forgiveness for the hardships he has inflicted upon his children. That is why, so the tale goes, the phrase Yom Kippur appears also in the plural, Yom Kippurim: "the request for pardon is reciprocal." (Essential here is Isabel Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God A Theology of Mutual Relation, Washington, University Press of America, 1982.) And we had better ask forgiveness for the hardships we have inflicted upon God. Thus one day

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the railroad tracks that have led to Birkenau and Chelmno will be finally torn up. It is entirely so that, in the meanwhile, the contemporary Israeli must make certain that, kiveyakhol, his Uzi is never too far from reach. For the Stellvertreter of the Christian imperium, John Paul II, is still arranging to have his picture taken with a despoiler of Israel, and secretly many of us would love to be part of the photograph. Yet it is in the same meanwhile that a few Christians, whose hearts have been broken by the despicable history of their faith, are taking a little courage from Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav: "Nothing is so whole as a broken heart."