The Changing Shape of Antisemitism
David: Carl you've been teaching for quite a long time. You pick up on the attitudes and the understandings of your students. But as you know antisemitism, anti-Judaism, hatred of the Jewish people is quite a moving target. It sort of changes its shape every few years. There are some themes that stay the same throughout the centuries but nonetheless you might find the fashion of antisemitism might be with right-wing conservatives and five years later it may have moved and taken up residence with those who are liberals or progressives.
We can't necessarily address antisemitism that's in the secular world or in every aspect of culture—but at least we as Christians should be addressing this very vigorously in the church. When I was recently in the state of Missouri, where Christians began to ask me questions again about Jews and Judaism, and they concerned me.
David: A very popular way of trying to delegitimize Judaism and the people of Israel today is the claim that they have no connection with the Hebrews, the Israelites or the Jews who lived in biblical times. How would you address that in class and how should we address that when we speak to those in our Sunday school class or those in the church fellowship hall?
Carl: I've always taught in my classes that the Jewish people today are the Judeans of ancient times. I think that's pretty consistent historically. Although some have argued that the Jewish people are really the British people of today, I don't find any historical basis for that. I think there's an absence of support from what we know from history and the Judeans, when they went off into captivity, they came back as Judeans or as the New Testament translates the word, Jews. I prefer the term Judeans because I think it's a broader thing.
The Judeans who came back followed the religion of ancient Israel, but then the rabbis began to alter that and interpret it in certain ways. Basically, what Judaism is for the most part today is the interpretation of the scripture by the rabbis who recorded their views in the Mishna and the Talmud. But to say that the Jewish people today are not the Jewish peoples of ancient times is really contrary to history and linguistics.
It's even contrary to genetics. Some say the Ashkenazi Jews are really the Khazars from southern Russia and that they only took on Judaism by adoption, by converting to Judaism. That's been disproven by genetics, and they trace their genes actually back to the Jewish people around the world.
Comparing Rabbinic and Christian Interpretation
David: Another issue that is increasingly popular is the argument that modern Judaism really has nothing to do with the biblical faith of Israel. That argument is insidious especially when people don’t take into account that the New Testament itself – by the first century – is already a living interpretation of the scripture. Jesus, when he enters the scene of first century Judea, affirming and practicing a faith that is largely based on interpretation.
How do we get that across to people without saying that interpretation is always bad and allowing that Christians today may respectfully disagree Rabbinic Judaism? Seems to me a little bit of a tension and a balancing act.
Carl: The Old Testament sacrifices are a good example. Jewish people today don't have an Old Testament sacrifice with a temple and with priest and a blood sacrifice. That's been reinterpreted by the Jewish people today to say that prayer takes the place of sacrifice. As Christians we don't have a sacrifice and we view Jesus' sacrifice as the full and final sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins and for the issue of sin. We interpret the scripture, and the Jewish people interpret the scripture. We're both doing some interpretation here. And of course we view ours as the correct interpretation. But we couldn't say that the Jewish people are not practicing the biblical religion. They are and they celebrate the feasts: Passover, Pentecost, the Feast of Tabernacles. They recognize the various laws and traditions of the Hebrew Bible. And there are Messianic congregations that continue to do that.
I think that the key is to recognize that there are differences based upon rabbinic interpretation that don't match exactly with the Hebrew Bible. But these are still people who are worshipping the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. They have a biblical tradition. For those who are Messianic they have a biblical faith and so they are brothers. Those who are Messianic Jews and trust in Jesus as their personal Messiah, we are one family with them. So there are differences yes, but I don't think those differences mean that they're not Jewish, that they're not the people of God whom God has a special place for in his great plan for the ages.
David: Right. It seems to have been either a tactic used by Antisemites or Christians to mistakenly drive a theological wedge between the Judaism of today and ancient Judaism and to delegitimize modern Judaism.
You know, you made me think of the idea of prayer and good deeds as a sacrifice. There's a passage in Hebrews 13 — and we're not sure if Hebrews was written before the destruction of the temple or after — but it says "through Jesus therefore let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise, the lips that confess his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others for with such sacrifices God is pleased."
The Jewish people today say that what takes the place of sacrifice would be prayer and charity. But already we see in this passage in the New Testament that that idea wasn't foreign to the writer of the book of Hebrews.
The Concept of Divine Election
David: If we're educating the misinformed or those who are uneducated, how do we approach the issue of so-called chosenness? Here there's a huge amount of misunderstanding, sometimes by Jews themselves and certainly by Christians. Although to be fair to Jewish understanding, they don't oftentimes use the word chosen. They use the word elected. God has selected them or he's asked them to perform a task. We might call it a ministry: to be a blessing to all the nations of the world.
Yet it seems to me with a lot of Christians that there is some kind of jealousy or some misunderstanding and perhaps even on the side of Jewish history that Jews many times have withdrawn from the vocation to be a blessing to the nations. That's quite understandable when you think of the persecution and misunderstanding. It's very easy to say, "Well, I don't want to have anything to do with the Gentiles." This notion of election or chosenness may be causing jealousy and misunderstanding. How should we as Christians understand that and how do we properly explain it to others?
Carl: I'm sure you're familiar with the passage in Deuteronomy 7 where God speaks of his people that he assigned them this special place in his kingdom work. "You are holy to the Lord." Then he goes on to tell that they've not been chosen as his people because they're more in number or they're better or they're more holy but that he has a purpose for them. God has them as chosen people as an instrument of blessing as you said, David. I try to point out that God has blessed the nations, the non-Jewish people, through the Jewish people. From them we've got the prophets, we've got the promises of God, we've got the Torah, we've got the Messiah. All this comes through the Jewish people. We've got the New Testament written by Jewish people.
David: Yes, this idea that Jews haven't been a blessing and that they are now a curse is especially popular amongst the emerging extreme right in many different countries, especially in the United States. It is something that we'll be hearing a lot more of in the future. A good definition of antisemitism is that, depending on your worldview or your political stance, antisemitism always becomes somebody's "evil."
If you happen to be a socialist or you happen to be on the left wing of the political perspective, then Jews are capitalists and they're oppressors and they're exploiting people, so they become the enemy. But if you happen to be on the opposite side of political perspective, Jews are right-wing, neo-conservative, they're also capitalists who are behind Wall Street and the banks.
One thing I've noticed is that antisemitism in and of itself rarely exists. It's always like a parasite; it always attaches itself to something. It'll attach itself to nationalism, some form of theology, or anxiety. There are many people who have this fear that somebody's coming after them. For example, in the United States, they claim the Jews are behind all this immigration and it's going to turn the United States into a multi-ethnic country and we're going to lose our white Christian identity. Antisemitism is attached to that kind of fear.
Or again, if you're on the left, the world is becoming more and more oppressive because the world is taking a lesson from Israel and becoming more brutal. The Jews can't win. This is part of the contradiction in antisemitism.
In fact, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had this view that Wall Street was a Jewish plot against Germany and so too was Joseph Stalin—that the capitalists and the free marketeers were cooperating with Joseph Stalin in order to squeeze Germany. Of course, it doesn't make sense rationally, but this is the lunacy oftentimes of these kinds of theories.
Responsibility for the Death of Jesus
Carl: David, before we go further, I just want to say something about the view that I've come across in teaching the Gospels class where I always point out that the Jews did not kill Jesus. Yet I've had a lot of pushback in recent years on that subject. Did the Jews kill Jesus? I point out the fact that it was Roman soldiers that crucified Jesus, but I've gotten pushback from my seminary students and Bible school students that the Jews called for the killing of Jesus and therefore they're to blame. This anti-Judaism and antisemitism can be pulled out of scripture and defended from scripture, which is the same view that the Nazis had in the Holocaust. They say Jesus was killed by the Jewish people; therefore, the Jewish people need to be suffering for it.
David: We have a lot of work to do to educate Christians just on the basic understanding of the death of Jesus. The Bible divides the world into Jews and Gentiles. At the death of Jesus, you have a few Jews who belonged to the Sanhedrin, who were in charge of the temple, and you have Gentiles. It's the sin of Jews and Gentiles that puts Jesus on the cross.
The Gospels say a crowd called for Jesus’ death. We know the word crowd in Greek could be 50 people or 100 people, not necessarily 10,000 people. Some Jews, according to Matthew's gospel, said, "Let his blood be upon us and our children." I don't know how a bunch of people can get together and call a curse down upon themselves that will go from generation to generation. It doesn't make spiritual sense. Even if this was true, what prayer do we think the Father heard? The prayer of "let his blood be upon us and our children," or "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing?"
You see this incredible tenderness that Jesus has for his people. He comes to Jerusalem in the last week, he cries over the city, he carries his cross, he meets women who are weeping for him. Luke's gospel makes it very clear that he remains popular. While he's carrying his cross, he tells these women, "Don't weep for me. Weep for yourself, because what's coming upon Jerusalem is going to be quite horrible."
Further, we just get Pontius Pilate wrong. We think of him as a kind of a weak but innocent guy and somehow these Jewish leaders twisted his arm to crucify Jesus. But the extra-biblical sources tell us that Pontius Pilate was kind of like a mafia don. He was very brutal and very corrupt—so corrupt and so brutal that even by Roman standards they had to remove him from his position three years after the death of Jesus. Pilate wants to spare Jesus because he really wants to execute Barabbas. We have to really teach and preach the proper context of the scripture. And it's quite a job.
Shared Values and Strategic Alliances
David: Let's turn to some contemporary political issues. Why does the United States give so much support to Israel? The answer is always because of the influence of the Jews or the power of the so-called Jewish lobby. Carl, I'd like to ask: what has it been in American culture that has made people perhaps warm and sympathetic towards the Jewish people?
Carl: I would say first of all, we share a Judeo-Christian ethic. We share the scripture, and from the scripture we get our morality. The Jewish people share that with us. We are in agreement on the basic laws of God to govern society and those laws are often ignored and not honored in other cultures. We share a Bible. We both have an Old Testament; the Jewish people have the Mishnah, which is a commentary on the Old Testament, and the Talmud. We've got the New Testament, which is a commentary on the Old Testament.
Now, we disagree on a lot, and that's okay, too. But that shouldn't create an antisemitic attitude simply because we have a good relationship with the people of Israel. We've got a good relationship with the people of Canada and Japan, and we've got a good relationship with the people of Israel.
Prophecy and the Bond of Scripture
David: Christians who were sometimes sympathetic to Israel often get unfairly painted as a group of people who simply want to see prophecy fulfilled and Jesus come back. This is a fear voiced in Israel in many quarters. "Christians don't have really any interest in us. They just see us as pieces on a prophetic chessboard, and they want to move us all back to the Holy Land and then their Jesus can come back." Some people have some pretty harsh prophetic views. They talk about two-thirds of the Jewish people being killed before Jesus returns. When local people hear that, they become quite concerned.
But I'd like to suggest that what creates a bond or creates empathy is actually reading the scriptures. When you have a Bible-reading church or culture, it's very easy for a community to start to identify with the characters of the Bible: with King David, with the dilemma Gideon has, with weeping over Saul and all the mistakes he's made. It's oftentimes that identification with the text that creates a bond between Christians and the Jewish people. Bible reading has probably been the glue that has created so many Christian empathizers.
How is it that we can, on one hand, be empathetic with the people of Israel and not be entrapped by one prophetic view or another? Is it possible to rise above this? Also, how is it that we as Christians show love for the Jewish people and not get entangled in internal Israeli politics, or basing our support on what one government does or doesn't do?
Carl: In terms of prophecy, I know that Jesus is coming again. I think we can all agree on that. I don't get into the details of prophecy. I think there are differences of opinions on just how this is all going to work out, but I know that God is sovereign. He's got a plan and he's going to fulfill that plan. I'm going to stand back and watch and wait and not speculate in terms of biblical prophecy. God is doing a great work among the Jewish people today. Many are coming to faith in Christ and I can rejoice in that without trying to predict the events of the tribulation.
In terms of politics, I think that's a dangerous area to get involved in because politics change. Prime ministers change and have different views. I found it's just best to steer clear of the political issues that are really only understood by the Israelis. We as Americans don't really understand what's going on in Israel. We read the news which is often really biased. So I think I can avoid the political controversy and say I love the land of Israel, I love the people of Israel, and I want to see the best for Israel.
I also recognize that there's a spiritual war going on. It's not just about Israel; it's about God and his plan for his people. It's about Satan and the enemies of God who want to thwart God's plan. A Jewish woman who I know quite well said, "Why are there so many people who hate Israel and hate the Jewish people?" I had to explain that there's a spiritual warfare going on: a battle between good and evil, light and darkness. That lies behind much of the hatred and animosity against God's people today. I steer clear of those anti-Israel and antisemitic views and seek to bring people back to God's plan for the ages.
God’s Faithfulness and Human Imperfection
David: That's a very wise word because very often here at Christ Church we meet Christians who are Jewish "wannabes" or who virtually idolize the state of Israel. I agree with you that when God gives Abraham his marching orders, God says, "I will make you great." Ultimately Jewish survival through the ages—with all due respect to Jewish faithfulness or perseverance—it is still, at the end of the day, about God. All of this is about God. And it's about this human relationship with God which doesn't mean that everything that the Jewish people do or the state of Israel does is right or in God's will.
It's no different than the church. Who called the church into being? It's God's church and Jesus is the head of the church. But we are so full of sin and we've made so many mistakes. We probably need to judge the Jewish people in the way that we judge ourselves: with a certain amount of mercy. The sin of Israel and the modern state—and it has a lot of issues—does not negate God's call and God's purposes for them. We can't say they're canceled. Then we'd have to say that about the church every generation. God brings reformation and renewal virtually every generation to us, and I think that still happens in the life of the Jewish people.
Carl: Amen. A scripture that goes along with that is
Isaiah 49:14. Zion said, "The Lord has forsaken me," looking to the exile and all that they went through. "The Lord has forgotten me." Then Isaiah answers for the Lord, "Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you." That tells me that God hasn't canceled his plan for blessing the nations through Israel. God certainly hasn't abandoned his people. Paul recognized that in Romans 11, that God still has a plan for his people and his covenants and promises are not going to be abrogated.
A Model for Ministry and Reconciliation
David: It brings me to an issue that many people face: being too simplistic. We have this understanding that if I really care for the Palestinians or the Lebanese or what's happening to the Iranians, I really have to be against Israel. It happens with those folks who empathize with Israel as well; they oftentimes say, "Well, it's either I have to choose Israel or I have to choose the Palestinians."
At Christ Church, we've always tried to teach and model that there is a way of loving and supporting both sides and being active to bring some form of reconciliation or to be peacemakers. Let's not be—let's not exaggerate thinking we might be bringing Middle East peace tomorrow. But we have the opportunity to be a blessing to both sides and to love people because the scripture bears out that Israel is tied to the nations. The well-being of the nations is connected to the well-being of the people of Israel. Especially for the church, there's a mutuality and an interdependence between the two.
We need to look for a new model, a model in which we reject antisemitism and demonization, and at the same time, we want to pray and work for some reconciliation as the Lord allows and show his love and mercy to both communities. I don't think it has to be an either/or. If my friend Mike K. was here, he would remind me of Isaiah 19. That at the end—maybe even today—the model for ministry is the enemies of Israel coming to Jerusalem to worship. Syria, who was once an enemy, is God's handiwork. Egypt is his people and Israel is his inheritance. The Middle East, which we think of today as a curse, God sees ultimately as a place of blessing. It's an expansion of Genesis 12. This whole region and the peoples of this region will be a blessing to all the earth. That should be our approach and our model for ministry. We also believe it's a prophecy that will come.
