How Is the Church to Confront Jesus' Jewishness?

BHOROWITZ, EUGENE

ow Is the Church to Confront Jesus9 ewishness? EUGENE B. BOROWITZ Not long ago, I was asked to address the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning on the topic "The Challenge of Jesus the Jew for the...

...He should define what he means by "the Church...
...In numerous passages Jesus seems to restrict his message to his own religio-ethnic community...
...But to capture the Jewish self-understanding, the term "people" needs to be given a much more specific, perhaps more European, certainly more Hebraic, content...
...Jonah is sent to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, the symbolic center of the enemies of God's own people, the people of Israel...
...He seems primarily concerned with his fellow Jews...
...Third, I agree with Borowitz that the Church "has not yet truly confronted Jesus' Jewishness" in itself or with reference to the Land of Israel and the implications of the Shoah, the Holocaust though there are excellent efforts in this direction in several recent Church statements, especially those of the pope.* The trenchant reality of Jewish peoplehood, however, admittedly continues to elude Christians as a community...
...To a great extent the term "Holocaust" does not appropriately denote the Nazis' horrifying deeds "Holocaust" derives from a Hebrew term iolah) that symbolizes the ascent of the soul in worship...
...The Holocaust, however, creates a special problem for the Church unrelated to the theology of the cross...
...The reference to the covenant with Noah is imperative and should be bolstered with citations to the covenant with Adam developed in pre-70 CE...
...Surely, in the attempt to have an honest dialogue among Jews and Christians, we must admit that there are many types of Jews and Christians...
...This has some interesting lessons for us as Jews...
...A Torari scroll burns (below right), but another is rescued in the arms of a fleeing villager ¦below left...
...How could our common God have allowed such a terrible extermination to happen...
...Then, as today, the land of Israel had a special hold on all Jews, Jesus among them Quite naturally, Jesus goes to Jerusalem, the center of the land, to bring his life's work to climax...
...no one Christian can speak for all Christiana Moreover, the appearance of scholars who are Jews or Christians and who write and speak in ways dictated more by the academy and its paradigms than by the synagogue or the Church make it difficult to discern or define what constitutes a Jew or a Christian...
...He takes it for granted that the Galileans or Jerusalemites to whom he is speaking can, in fact, carry out t'shuva, repentance, entirely on their own...
...Instead, Chagal...
...Having earned a degree under Pere Roland de Vaux and Pere Pierre Benoit at the Dominican Fathers' Ecole Bib-lique in Jerusalem, I am compelled to warn that such caricatures are inappropriate and may be polemical...
...He is a figure of that country, and his life is conformed to its villages, its fisherfolk, its great lake...
...It is unfair to weigh the Holocaust against such interpretations of suffering as Borowitz attributes to Christianity Genocide breaks the mold cast by the English concept of "suffering" Borowitz confuses different contexts in which suffering is defined...
...He does not tell them, "Go to the Temple and participate in the rites of the Day of Atonement" He does not advise them,' 'Have one of the priestly class lead you through the established rites of repentance...
...Moreover, by setting up culinary traits as the primary criteria for ethnic distinctiveness, the boundaries between ethnic groups are considerably reduced and are readily crossed...
...I expect the perception of Jesus' Jewishness to play an important role in reforming the ever-reforming Church, and in bringing into focus the similarities and differences between Jews and Christians...
...That brings me, as it must, to the question of how the Church relates to that great contemporary reflection of Jewish ethnicity, the revival of the corporate life of the People of Israel as an ethnic group on its own land, namely, the state of Israel...
...Fourth, I would challenge Borowitz in return (and Jews generally), to grapple more strongly with the concrete particularity of Christian peoplehood...
...The sociological settings of such statements must be examined and the resulting insights used to assess Christianity that is grounded in the truly Jewish Jesus...
...I've been dying to do that in a restaurant for years ' And he couldn't find a place to do it in...
...There is much more to be said in reply to Rabbi Borowitz's deeply moving challenges, especially on the land and state of Israel...
...Therefore, I told my audience that contrary to Father Pawlikowski, I see Jesus' Jewish intimacy with God as a challenge to the Church, which, as I understand the Church from the outside, manifests a somewhat different sense of God's availability...
...Galatians 329 *** Isaiah 496 Luke 232...
...it is not a point of divergence between us The question of authority is, of course, also very Jewish in its framing and terms It is on that issue—of authority—where I would direct our attention in the next stage of Jewish-Christian dialogue Second, I would want Borowitz to draw out a bit more his reference to the "different sense of God's availability in Christianity...
...The light from the menorah, the only stationary object in the painting, echoes Jesus' halo and is another reminder of his Jewishness...
...Indeed, there isn't a metaphysical chapter in all of our Bible, but there is constant concern about this folk seeking to establish itself as an ongoing social reality in the land of Israel...
...John Paul II on Jews and Judaism, U.S Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C, 1987...
...Christians have a powerful theological symbol Christians Are God's Folk Too: A Catholic Response EU6EHE J. FISHER First, I agree with Dr...
...That state is more secular than I would like, and in some respects more ecclesiastical than I would like...
...Through the pact made with Noah and his seed, God has a significant, serious relationship with all the nations and tongues of the world into which the family of Noah was split after the Tower of Babel...
...Saints can take the sufferings of life and transform them into a path to intimacy with God...
...Reconciliation between Jews and Christians involves repentance by Christians...
...They unburden their hearts, itemizing their physical ailments and detailing their suffering Their sense of God being at hand and open to their personal woes is astonishing in itself...
...Jewish writings and the Noachian commandments found in rabbinic literature Early Jews knew the enduring covenants antedating Abraham...
...Indeed, Jesus fearlessly sought dangerous confrontations Borowitz also wisely laments that non-Jews too were gassed—"so industrially murdered"—by the Nazis His claim, however, that for Christians "suffering is a way...
...He says to them, "Repent, for the White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall (see previous page) Marc Chagall's Wtvtt Crucifixion, painted in 1938 (oil on canvas), portrays Jesus suffering while all around him scenes of Jewish persecution fill the canvas...
...His preaching, in this respect, reflects, as I understand it, his ancestral Jewish faith...
...Likewise, our dialogue needs to * Deuteronomy 303...
...To confront this issue, Christians must understand the true theological implications of the Cross, especially in light of the pope's recent statement (to the Jewish community of Australia) that anti-Semitism is "sinful...
...he speaks its language...
...That's how Hebrew Scripture describes us Like other ethnic groups, we have a language and a land and a history and heroes and other ethnic involvements...
...Consider Jesus' preaching to the Jews of his time...
...Yes, we have been strongly buffeted by the winds of secularization, perhaps more so than any other religious community...
...To be sure, Nazism is not only un-Christian but profoundly anti-Christian...
...suggests that Jewish suffering and Jesus' anguish may spring from the same source: humankind's inhumanity...
...Jonah doesn't want to warn the Ninevites about God's intention, so Jonah flees...
...probe the numerous themes in Jewish mystical literature, such as the self-exile of God and the redemption of the sparks of the divine that seem to me to evoke a sense that human suffering has a larger meaning resonating from the suffering of God...
...To fail to see the places named in the Gospels as real places, not to understand that there are really hills and mountains and valleys in the land of Israel, that its dust is real dust, its rocks are real rocks, is to neglect a significant element—part of what I should think Christians mean by the Incarnation...
...But they also have no hesitation about complaining to God or calling God to account...
...We do not have a theology of the cross in Judaism...
...Jesus is bathed in a muted white light Unlike the bright colors associated with Chagall's romantic pieces, the subdued coloring here further emphasizes the suffering of European Jewry...
...By blaming Jews for Jesus' death on the Cross, many Christians sought to avoid their own theological responsibility as sinners for Jesus' death...
...He feels that he can, whenever he wishes, turn to God personally, in his own language and his own way, and establish communication...
...To be sure, they are sometimes filled with trust, gratitude and adoration...
...That inquiry extends also to the place of Jesus' people To American ears the term "people" often has an abstract, almost empty sense, as if it meant no more than human beings, as in "they're nice people...
...By putting forth culture in the form of food, Sammy's promotes an idea of ethnicity that is pure pleasure...
...But long after the lump had left my throat and the mist my eyes, the land still had its effect on me...
...are God's folk...
...Not only does it suggest that Christians and Jews, despite years of dialogue and honest, forthright discussions, still have different perceptions of Jesus' Jewishness...
...That is why our sacred Scripture is so full of political, social and economic matters, which hardly sound religious at all...
...In a way, that proves how real this history is...
...Unlike all the other peoples____this ethnic community is called into being by God" (my emphasis) These words are self-serving, misleading and contradict his earlier insight that the "new covenant with Abraham does not end the covenant with the nations...
...Compare this to Romans &16 and Galatians 46, where Paul argues that through the Spirit Gentile Christians, like Jews, are able to address God as "Abba, Father...
...And this nation, for all its human frailty and obstinacy, finally agrees to bend its ethnicity to the service of the God who has chosen it...
...When Jesus himself wishes to pray, or when people ask him how they should pray, he does not insist, "You must first gather 10 people and then follow certain routines," which Jewish law came to require for a complete, community service...
...Acts 13:47 Holocaust problems arise from the way Christianity made possible the Holocaust, at least the Holocaust as it applied to Jews...
...The Hebrew nation would be of as much interest today as the Perizzites if it were simply another people of the ancient Middle East...
...he integrates him into contemporary Jewish history...
...He believed that Jewish genetic material was malignant, like cancer, and had to be excised from the human race...
...In response to the same question about favorite anecdotes, Zimmerman seemed hard pressed to come up with any and could relate only the following: "A guy came in in my earlier days, I poured him the wine, he smelled it, twirled it, smelled the aroma again, tasted it, rolled it around on his pallet and spit it across the table And I said, 'Sir, is there something wrong with the wine?' He said, 'No...
...He seems to be referring to a misunderstanding of Roman Catholicism...
...Some Jewish scholars I have read have the mistaken idea that for Christianity, the Incarnation introduces a third party (Jesus as the son of God) between God and the worshipper...
...Yet in the Judaism of Jesus' time, this-is the place where God and creation are in the most intimate contact...
...No one Jew can speak for all Jews...
...But with all its faults, some of which you have no doubt seen in other human institutions, here is God's work being done m our time...
...For early Jews, God could be directly accessible...
...This form of address is found in the Gospels only in Mark 1436, where Jesus uses it in extremis on the night before his crucifixion...
...He cannot be ignored, and existentialist Christians and most Jews in this century have tended to disregard him...
...And that's why gomg to the land of Israel and walking through it, being in the places where Jesus himself was, changes forever the way one reads the Bible...
...This direct access to God is fundamental to Judaism's teaching about humankind and derives from our understanding of the covenant of Noah (Genesis 8 and 9...
...Non-Jews at Sammy's become honorary Jews at one point the entertainer asks, "How many people here are non-Jews' It's OK by the time you leave here you'll be Jewish " Or, "Tonight we're offering a two-for-one special We'll fix your nose for the price of a circumcision " But this subversion is not accidental It is motivated by the logic of carnival—the constant stream of transformations, the assault upon the high by the low Let me conclude with a contrast in anecdotes that suggests how significant the carnival-like quality is in Zimmerman's imagination...
...We find it trying when others suggest that we should bear our pain nobly because they have a doctrine that suffering is a way to God...
...Sammy's is an encounter with a trickster, and because it is, it subverts everything we hold sacred—even the very nostalgia it purveys Food, of course, is an excellent vehicle to subvert cultural pretense and to expose the vulgar and grotesque...
...Our Bible is full of the "Now we love you, now we don't" of the Jewish people confronting God...
...I was struck by our different perceptions of Jesus' intimacy with God—the Christian perception that it is this that distinguishes Jesus' religion from Judaism and the Jewish perception that this intimacy places Jesus solidly in a Jewish context...
...Addressing God in prayer as "Father" or "Abba" is an insight that Jews and Christians share...
...as the "whole burnt offering" was consecrated and consumed, the ascending flames from the altar indicated that the offering was pleasing to God In no way can a Jew or Christian consider the Nazi "Holocaust" in any way pleasing to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob...
...the nations'* to be "co-heirs*** with the People of Israel of God's call to be a "light to the nations...
...Finally, I think we need dialogue on the theology of suffering Central aspects of the Christian theology of suffering, I would suggest are intensely connected to Jewish spirituality—for example, the meaning of suffering evoked in the kiddush hashem tradition and Christian martyrdom ("witness...
...Borowitz states that Christianity's "special problem" concerning the relationship between the Christian ancient teaching of contempt," on the one hand, and modem anti-Semitism and the Holocaust on the other, is "unrelated to the theology of the cross...
...Similarly, some Jewish scholars, again mistakenly, view the priesthood in Christianity as a barrier or "mediator" between the worshipper and God, so that God is not directly "available" to Christians in prayer...
...This new covenant with Abraham does not end God's covenant with the nations...
...he correctly sees this phenomenon as a part of early Judaism...
...They wonder where God is and why God's help is so slow in coming...
...From the Jewish perspective, it suggests that the Church has not yet truly confronted Jesus' Jewishness...
...They would certainly not be like the Jews I know, whose vacillating yet ultimately enduring faithfulness is very much like that of their stiff-necked ancestors...
...For them, suffenng is a way, or can be a way, of serving God...
...In the Jewish tradition too, though it cannot be called incarnation, God has a unique relationship to this particular bit of geography, though God is clearly the creator and concerned "owner" of the entire world...
...Most of us cannot...
...I assume there is something emotional, indeed sentimental, in this...
...A Nazi destroys and plunders a burning synagogue (upper right), while soldiers with red flags storm a small village (upper left...
...What an extraordinary agenda this ethnic group set for itself...
...The calm figure on the cross is wrapped in a UIHL a prayer shawl...
...If, then, the land is so significant to Jesus' Jewishness, one challenge to the Church is, "What is the place of the land of Israel in a Christianity centered around Jesus the Jew...
...The often unspoken Jewish response to such ideas is that those who have a doctrine of suffering as it particularly efficacious way to God apply it to themselves, not to others...
...Coincidentally, I had intended to begin my talk by suggesting that Jesus' characteristic intimacy with God is typically Jewish and appears to create something of a problem for the Church...
...We are a folk, a people like the Hittites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Penzzites, the Girgashites and the Canaanites...
...They too claim to be the people called into being by God...
...Revelation 5-9 ** Romans &17...
...Here is Jesus' Jewishness revitalized in a fully functioning, ongoing social form...
...Chns-tians will be offended by this egregious slip...
...I say that out of my own experience...
...Whatever God's reasons, a topic marvelously interesting to contemplate, God gets Jonah to Nineveh anyway...
...Nonetheless, had there not been centuries of Christian teaching and, more significantly, Christian approval of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust would not have been possible...
...Kingdom of God is at hand...
...Borowitz raises many piercing questions that need careful discussion...
...It is only because humankind failed to live up to that relationship that God decided to choose a People to serve God particularly...
...Suffering often destroys us...
...And by that I surely mean not just the terrible extermination of six million Jews— all that the Nazis could process—but all the millions of other human beings who were so rationally, so industrially murdered However, we immediately part ways if Christians approach this problem with their classic response to the enigma of suffering...
...With only a few word changes, I could place large sections of the Zohar into, say, the writings of St John of the Cross (and vice versa), and no one reading them for the first time would know the difference...
...In Jewish law as well as in Jewish lore, it is clear that God's relationship with gentiles is still in effect...
...How much the more will a pious person know God intimately...
...To stress that Jesus would have been gassed by the Nazis is to reveal that none of his true followers could have been anywhere else except with him in such a world of stark blacks and whites...
...Ephesians 36...
...Chagall's portrayal of Jesus is not intended as a Christian representation...
...Then I made my first trip to the land of Israel and realized that walking around there was the most significant act of exegesis I probably could ever do...
...Finally, many Christians do not believe that Jesus was "the Messiah," and there are a few who claim to be Jews who also believe in Jesus' resurrection and some Christians who do not We are frankly confronted with subtle and complex issues...
...Borowitz on the essential Jewishness of Jesus' sense of intimacy with God...
...Even hated enemies of the Jewish people, the Assyrians, can reach God and attain God's forgiveness on their own and without benefit of Jewish priest or sanctuary or rite or ritual...
...He does not feel that to speak to God he needs the help of any of the priests of the Temple or of the Temple rites...
...To appropriate Jesus' Jewishness, that is, to accept him in his full Incarnation, one must accept Jesus' Jewish ethnicity...
...moreover, greater emphasis must be placed on the failure of western "Christianity" to follow the Jewish Jesus To point to the ways that the author of makes the Jews unusual is that they are God's folk...
...We find suffering a terrible challenge to God's justice and compassion...
...He could easily have traveled the Gospel of John, Luther and other influential Christian thinkers have been used to fuel anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism is not to expose such feelings and thoughts at the center of authentic Christianity...
...I cannot read the Bible the same since being there...
...unfortunately, these are missing in Borowitz's probing article The brilliance of Borowitz's article lies in placing Jesus on the center stage of history...
...Our historians suggest that in this period even the communal Jewish liturgy still had a quite open form...
...And our religiosity has been substantially shaken by that process...
...Borowitz's claim that "Jews learned that suffering has no special virtue for getting us close to God" is selective, even misinformed about early Jewish literature The virtue of suffering is affirmed in many Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the Rule of the Community and the Thanksgiving Hymns, in suicides reported by Josephus, and in 2 Maccabees...
...Jeremiah 29:14...
...The most direct evidence of this doctrine is the Book of Jonah...
...To me, that raises another question for the Church: "How should Christians relate to the Jews as a folk and not another church...
...Respectfully, I would suggest that the ability of contemporary Christians to confront this issue is deeply related to our ability to realize the implications of the Cross for us as Christiana The deicide charge-collective scapegoating—woven into the fabric of Christianity's teaching of contempt is, of course, intimately related to the Cross...
...Borowitz's reference to "the way Christianity made possible the Holocaust" raises problems Certainly, the anti-Judaisms in the New Testament and the anti-Semitisms in Luther's late writings served the despicable Nazis...
...On one level, Jews and Christians share a problem here...
...Though some people care only about the fish story, the important part of the book occurs after that episode...
...I react positively to Borowitz's major emphasis Astutely referring to Noah and Jonah, he demonstrates that Jesus, like many Jews contemporaneous with him, knew that he could address God immediately and directly...
...Had he been under Hitler's sway, Jesus would likely have died in the Holocaust...
...The New Testament stakes its claim regarding Jesus' uniqueness much more on his authority regarding Torah than on a special "intimacy" with God in the sense used by those who, like John Pawlikowski, stress ^e$us"Abba, Father" form of address to God...
...he utilizes its distinctive style of instruction...
...If the Bible said the Hebrews had immediately accepted God's rule over their lives and then dutifully carried it out, they would be unrecognizable to us today...
...As Borowitz's argument develops, however, I find many of his judgments objectionable Borowitz simply caricatures "the Church" when he states that it does not embody "Jesus' Jewish intimacy with God...
...He is not even concerned with any particular ritual of address...
...The Church's special APRIL 1 989 • MOMENT 47 Green Bagels continued from page 27 Sammy's location, in the heart of the Lower East Side, on a dirty street of warehouses and tenements, offers clients a chance to return, to relive their ethnic history as Old World immigrants in the New World, to experience their own ethnic birth and perhaps to reclaim part of what they have lost in the process of mov ing from rags to riches This is why Sammy's could not be an old tradition, why it could only be an invented one It was only through a break in the physical and social connection to the Lower East Side that there could have emeiged a nostalgic tie to the area allowing it to provide an appropriate \enue for well-heeled slumming What better indication of this phenomenon could there be than the recent tendency of Jewish restaurants in the area to ''freeze" their decors in time in an attempt to assert a look of historical authenticity Like Sammy's, all these restaurants have assumed a Disneyland-esque quality, parodies of themselves Sammy's is a 14-year-old fabricated universe (Zimmerman refers to himself as an "imag-ineer"), and what it has to offer is a past that many people think is theirs, but that no one ever had Sammy's has a great deal to do with transformations If Sammy's mocks the distinction between authentic history and nostalgic performance, it plays utter havoc with the logic of ethnic categories What better symbol could there be for this than having green bagels for St Patrick's Day' Or escargots avec shmaltz3 Or a medley of "Hava Nagila" and "Ave Maria"' But if bagels.'-can be transformed into something non-Jewish, non-Jews can be transformed too At Sammy's, non-Jews become the other and are confronted, albeit in good natured fun, with the tyranny of the minority—a sort of nightmare carnival or at least the potential to be so...
...It is impressive that Borowitz does not disparage Jesus' closeness with God...
...He spends his life with Jews and addresses himself to his ethnic kin...
...It is not that God is literally m the land of Israel...
...Now, for the first time since the first century, we are perceiving an interest in struggling with the issues raised by his time and his life We indeed are confronted with a Jew of Palestine who was devoted to God, loved Judaism and revered the Land...
...Unlike all the other peoples—those who descended naturally from the children of Noah after the Tower of Babel—this ethnic community is called into being by God God says to Abram, "I will make you a mighty nation...
...of serving God," may be more true of Kierkegaard than of other Christians, and raises the issue of how one ought to define acceptable suffering...
...We obviously had different ways of reading the New Testament data concerning Jesus' religion...
...This, of course, is precisely how joining one's own suffering to Christ's suffenng "completes* Christ's sacrifice, in effect how human suffenng functions in Christian spntuality...
...by taking on the suffering of the world, redeems it suffering does not end with his death...
...Such an interpretation of the Holocaust meets with a stony if not hostile reception in the Jewish community...
...The covenant of Noah (Genesis 9) to which Borowitz refers is a healthy concept especially as developed by rabbinic tradition, of a way of salvation for non-Jews But it does not deal with the Church's central claim to be "God's folk* in its own way no less than, and linked with, the Jews The term "gentile" is in no way adequate to the self-understanding of the Church as a people taken "from among all * John Paul II on the Holocaust, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, D.C 1988...
...What happens to the Ninevites, in spite of the prophet, should make plain God's direct accessibility in Judaism...
...Borowitz continues that "the Jews...
...Only Jewish biology counted—and Jesus of Nazareth had it...
...Although a service probably had required themes, the prayers had no verbal fixity until many centuries later...
...Borowitz speaks as if he can represent the "Jews...
...Likewise, a study of the relationship between the Temple sacrifice and Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross is a vital component of the discussion of suffering and sacrifice in Christian and Jewish theology...
...Historians will caution against the imposition of the category of unusualness or uniqueness without disciplined self-criticisms...
...God is planning to destroy Nineveh for its wickedness...
...But many first-century Jews were only ethnically or culturally Jewish, and many religious Jews did not share Jesus' bold and intimate discourse with God...
...What, then, is the Church to make of the state of Israel, of the Jewish community, of Jewish nationhood resurrected on its own land in full national form...
...When Jonah makes his proclamation, these gentiles, these Assyrians, believe God, repent their evil ways and God immediately forgives them...
...He is connected to it in a manner that can be called an extension of the Incarnation (the Christian concept of Jesus as both human and god...
...3' across the Mediterranean to talk to other people—but he didn't...
...On the Day of Atonement the high priest guided by liturgical custom, confessed to God his own sins...
...Are not Christians denied the right to their own claim by the subjective confession that only the Jews "are God's folk...
...He does present a noteworthy charge against the "Church's" understanding of Jesus' Jewishness, but he seems sometimes uninformed and uses terms rather loosely...
...Jesus says to them, "Pray this way," taking it for granted that nothing stands between them and God...
...I am grateful to him for it and grateful to moment for the opportunity to reflect on it & for understanding tribulation: the cross...
...Chagall does not present Jesus as God's son...
...Over centuries of experience and prophetic leadership, this folk sought through its community, its monarchy, its military life, its economic arrangements, to be true to God...
...Or consider the act of prayer...
...Amidst the torn and frightened faces ol the escaping Jews, a menonh lights the base of the crucifix...
...Or, to put it the other way around, the God of Jesus is directly accessible and is ever-present Isee nothing whatsoever unusual about this for a first-century Jew Every human being—not only every Jew, but every human being—is God's child, a son or daughter of God...
...Surely, it will be at this point that the issues of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection will loom as essential points...
...I, therefore, see the Jewishness of Jesus as the basis of his sense that he can always turn to God and find God close...
...Neither is Jesus presented as an agent of salvation, one who...
...Protestants also often state that only they can talk intimately with God, and do not need a priest or rabbi...
...In biblical terms we are a "nation...
...But consider that these poems were made a part of Jewish sacred Scripture—and more, that they were then selected as so representative of proper Jewish spirituality that they were extensively utilized in the synagogue and church...
...A new faith made no difference...
...Some Jews correctly emphasized that God preferred spontaneous prayers, and the Lord's Prayer, of which the short version in Luke (112-4) probably goes back to Jesus, is a model for spontaneous prayer...
...Borowitz insightfully states that "God's relationship with gentiles is still in effect" Great emphasis must be placed on "Jesus' Jewish ethnicity," Borowitz says...
...but the historical contexts of both phenomena need to be examined, not ignored...
...This turnabout embarrasses Jonah terribly, engendering such an outburst of prophetic petulance one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry...
...Finally, the Jewishness of Jesus raises the issue of Jesus' people continuing in unbroken Jewish form what we see as Jesus' piety That the Jewish religiosity and spirituality I see in the Jesus of the Gospels is still alive among us Jews raises its own problem for the Church...
...That is to say, Jesus turns to God directly and immediately He has no difficulty in the field, in the synagogue, wherever he is, addressing God, knowing that God will at once be available to him...
...I thought myself a relatively realistic, modern person, one who knew from concerned study how to accept my Bible in the fullness of its humanity while remaining open to the voice of God speaking in its pages...
...For example, he claims that Jesus' intimate relationship with God was not unusual—or unique—for a first-century Jew...
...I then spoke to my largely Christian audience about other challenges that Jesus' Jewishness presents to the Church...
...As Pawlikowski has said, it might be helpful for the dialogue if Jews got together to try to frame a joint Jewish statement of Judaism's attitudes toward the Church as God's people, parallel to the many (admittedly, imperfect) statements issued by various Christian denominations since the Second Vatican Council...
...As already suggested, Borowitz's discussion suffers from the loose use of terms like "Christianity," "Christian" and "Church...
...And he said, 'I hope I didn't insult you.' I said 'No What a great story ' " iji...
...Long before the Holocaust, out of centuries of painful experience going back to Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar, Jews learned that suffering has no special virtue for getting us close to God...
...In my view, Jesus, as a Jew, has a very special attachment to the land of Israel...
...Finally, there is that painful subject, the Holocaust, which presents its own challenge to the Church, perhaps especially in terms of Jesus' Jewishness...
...Besides, he is as much a part of its culture as he is native to its land...
...Page after page, the Bible tells us what happened as these Jews sought to bend the realities of power in society and in individual life to God's will Jesus is part of this daring folk...
...For me, each of these is also precious and interrelated...
...We are the Hebrews...
...I can promise some lively sessions...
...Borowitz is correct in stating that "Jesus would likely have died in the Holocaust" I would have used a different adverb, surely...
...not infrequently it destroys our faith...
...To put it bluntly, the Jews are not a church...
...The author of the latter work, which is an abridgement of a lost work by Jason of Cyrene, insists that the sufferings and deaths of the Jewish martyrs (2 Maccabees 737-38) "brought God to have mercy on His people" And these are the words of the gifted and informed commentator on 2 Maccabees, the Jewish scholar Jonathan Goldstein...
...Borowitz incorrectly claims that Jewish "prayers had no verbal fixity" during the time of Jesus...
...I asked the manager of Yonah Shimmel's, another well-known East Side eatery, what his favorite anecdote about the restaurants was He related a series of lovely stories about clients coming to relive the past, to sit at tables and recreate courtships or touch the ancient dumbwaiter, which for many is like a family icon and a way of remembering deceased loved ones...
...This also deserves some probing together...
...Indeed, the challenge to the Church raised by Jesus' Jewishness seems to me to begin with his peculiar Jewish intimacy with God...
...Above his head appears the Latin abbreviation for "Jesus of Naiareth, the King of the Jews,' and the Aramaic translation of the same phrase...
...In fact, by the time of Jesus, statutory prayers had been introduced into the services of the synagogue, as we now know from a study of the earliest forms of the Shemonah Esreh, Ahavah ftabbah, Alemu and Kaddish...
...Many Christian scholars have failed to perceive that some early Jews emphasized, as did Jesus, that forgiveness was possible by directly appealing to the God "who forgives readily" feixth blessing of the Shemonah Esreh or Eighteen Benedictions...
...Moreover, the Nazi racialization of anti-Semitism is a classic example of the secularization of religious teaching, in this case leading not only to its extension but to its demonization...
...The parallels with 586 B.C.E, 167 RC.E and 70 C.E are weak...
...He knows his people's literature...
...God was certainly not unusual or unique for a devout first-century Jew...
...What BorowHz Caricatures the Church: A Protestant Response JAMES H. CHAWLESWORTH Rabbi Borowitz's arguments arouse both positive and negative reactions...
...This is clearly another unresolved relationship...
...Borowitz ignores the gray areas in which much of the truth resides...
...Also, to a certain extent the Nazi attempt to destroy all the Jews is an action unparalleled in the history of humanity...
...Think of the liberties the Psalmists take in their relationship to God...
...And repentance, for us, has everything to do with the theology of the Cross...
...The Holy Family and the disciples would have been sent to the gas chambers because Hitler's understanding of Jews was racial...
...Sad implications inhere in the claim that the Jews "have a language and a land and a history and heroes and other ethnic involvements as well," as if this were true of them alone...
...The whole history of early Judaism and early Christianity is highlighted by debates over who really constitutes the Jew" or the "true Israel...
...But if we are to speak comparatively, we ought to compare the best of each community—Jewish and Christian—to one another...
...EUGENE B. BOROWITZ Not long ago, I was asked to address the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning on the topic "The Challenge of Jesus the Jew for the Church," as part of a colloquium on Jewish-Christian relations.1 The speech before mine was given by Father John Pawlikowski, who spoke of a certain intimacy between Jesus and God that he thought might be different from that of the Judaism of Jesus' time...

Vol. 14 • April 1989 • No. 3


 
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