March 5, 2004

"Asking for Forgiveness"

On Wednesday, the 25th of February, three thousand theaters began filling Mel Gibson’s pockets with bloodstained money made at the expense of integrity and decency. For the Jews in this country, it should have been a day of awakening, but instead, they stuck their heads into the sand and practiced denial.

A scholar on the faculty of a major university called me to share her experience while watching the Gibson movie. “I felt great empathy for Jesus," she said. "It made me cry to see how my Lord suffered to atone for my sins.” But did it occur to her to ask if her Lord had suffered to atone for the murders of two hundred million Jews over the course of two thousand years when priests, popes, bishops, and Crusaders charged Jews as "Christ-killers?"

I have listened to the commentaries of Jews on television and read their columns in newspapers, and every one of them has missed the point. Our rallying cry should not be that Jews did not kill the Christian messiah, but that Gibson's "whodunit" is an old game played for the sole purpose of incitement against the Jews and vindication for the antisemites looking to justify their thirst for Jewish blood.

Not far from where I used to live in the South is an amphitheater where a passion play similar to the Gibson movie is performed every summer. It's no coincidence that the same town in Arkansas where this play takes place was the home of one of America’s most impassioned Hitler lovers, a man who edited the antisemitic Common Sense.

Only recently, Bashir Assad, Syria’s President, called upon the Pope, who was concluding a Papal visit to Syria, to join him in a war against the Jews and Israel. "After all," Assad said to the Pope, "the Jews killed your Jesus." Christians who want to believe that Jews killed Jesus need to see that demagogues and tyrants like Assad use this charge to incite the murder and persecution of innocent men, women and children.

I was invited to address a trans-denominational conference of Christian clergy in Memphis. The subject was "Proselytizing Jews." In my lecture, I called upon the various denominational leaders to declare a twenty-five year moratorium on evangelism directed to Jews. A Roman Catholic Bishop rose, and to his great credit, spoke of Christian regret for the libels, crusades, inquisitions and pogroms. "Jews," he said, "should be hating us, or at least be demanding that we Christians seek forgiveness."

Another prelate of the Church, Bishop Carol Dozier, headed the Diocese in Memphis when I lived there. Students of contemporary American history will know that it was this bishop who marched with the late Martin Luther King, Jr. in a protest in Memphis shortly before King’s assassination. He believed Catholics should plead for atonement for their sins, especially for the persecution of Jews. He called for a mass service for atonement, and despite the reprimand of his colleagues, conducted the service where more than ten thousand attended.

I am tired of hearing Christians defend themselves against the accusation that they have been partners in a two thousand year genocide. They say that those who perpetrated the heinous crimes against Jews were not Christians. I would like to believe it, but as Gibson counts the millions of dollars his film produces each day, I’ve become more convinced than ever of Christian guilt. Jews fail to condemn those who still want to extract a pound of flesh for an act that may never have happened two thousand years ago.

And if, as the Christians say, Jesus never died, then why do they cry for him? They should weep instead for the millions of Jewish children whose murders were worse than anything Gibson’s vile imagination could conceive.

Jews need to pull their heads out of the sand and stop playing make-believe. Nothing in Christian history has changed. We need to be proud of what we as Jews are. We are different—and thank G-d for it. In spite of the continued incitement directed against our people, let us follow our G-d, live on our land, and live our way. Together, we can work for truth and justice, and defeat hate.

Shabbat Shalom