Rabbi Gary S. Creditor: "Why Did They Hate Us So Much?"

Why Did They Hate Us So Much?

October 12, 2012

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

rabbigarycreditor.blogspot.com 

 

My tenth grade confirmation class learns about Judaism by looking at Christianity, and a little at Islam. We will "do" theology, history and sociology in a limited number of sessions. I often feel like Hillel needing to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot. I am also trying to prepare them for college in two years where their room mates and suite mates will be predominantly Christian besides of other faiths. They will engage in conversations where they need a higher level of knowledge of Judaism than can be attained by Bar/Bat Mitzvah age.

 

Religion is an adult matter and they only have a child's knowledge. That is why continuing solid and intensive Jewish education through the high school years is critical. Our children are a "Jewishly endangered species" by their lack of substantial religious knowledge. It can only be attained as their minds mature in their teen-age years, just like any other subject.

 

My course is a cram session about Judaism and the faiths they will meet along the way. Maybe, just maybe, they will have a deeper appreciation of the faith into which they are born and maintain an active allegiance into adulthood.

 

Our conversations are never linear. I also only know the starting point. I never know where it will end up. I take on all questions. They often lead to unplanned directions.

 

So, several weeks ago one of the students blurted out: "Why do they hate us so much?" That stopped the class in its tracks. The "they" in that sentence refers to Christians. The use of present tense indicates the sense that it is still continuing. The context of the sentence drew a direct line between "us" and "them," and maybe indicated some fear and concern for personal safety.

 

How would you answer this question? Gloss over it? Ignore it? Sing John Lennon's "All you need is love?"

 

This question enabled me to run a thumb-nail sketch and abbreviated timeline of the separation of the growing Jewish sect that became Christianity from its mother faith, Judaism. I indicated the need for the new faith to shape its only identity based a core issues: do the non-Jewish members need to observe Jewish law, as the born-Jewish members did? Which would predominate, the Church of Jerusalem or the Church of Antioch? What did it mean to be identified as Jews when, particularly after the second rebellion against Rome, the Bar Kochba rebellion, the Jewish people was loathed in the Empire? What were the implications of the Roman Empire becoming the Holy Roman Empire? Namely, what was the road to hatred of the Jews?.

 

It was never ever that we "deserved it." Rather, to learn to "connect the dots" from Jesus and his students who were observant Jews, to the birth of a new faith, to the Christian persecution of the Jew people through the Shoah, the Holocaust, spanning nearly two thousand years.

 

But I assured them that that their neighbors and classmates do not hate them. There is no reason for such fears. The lines between groups in America that cause ignorance that can lead to hatred are being erased by education and meeting each other. I told them about the many church classes that come here to learn about Judaism.

 

But fifty years ago yesterday began the seminal event that changed our world. On October 11^th, 1962 Pope John XXIII convened what became known as the Second Vatican Council and would three years later issue the document called Nostra Aetate. It created a sea-change in modern Jewish history. While it finessed the relation of the Vatican to the Holocaust, for the first time in the history of the church, anti-Semitism was bluntly denounced, and most importantly, the Jewish people were not held responsible for Jesus' death, the charge of deicide. While we never doubted our own validity, in the global context, the repudiation of core Catholic doctrine about the Jewish people was and remains critical. This path would lead eventually to Pope John Paul saying that the Jewish people were his "elder brother." This changes two thousand years of history.

 

In a brief article on the Second Vatican Council I exposed my Confirmation Class to the answer to the blunt question: "Why do they hate us so much?" The church has to change its teaching about us, about our faith, for this to change. They needed to change their preaching from the pulpit and their education in schools. And it took time for it to extend to the far reaches of the church.

 

But Vatican II, as it is better known, did not change their theology. Nor did it change ours. They will read the portion of Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden, of tomorrow's Torah portion and learn from it "The Original Sin." We will learn from it the fallibility of all humanity not to hear the Divine summons, and believe that each soul is born innocent, clean and untainted. They will believe in the need to believe in Jesus as salvational. We will believe that mitzvot – the system to implement God's will - and tzedakah, the righteous living will redeem us, save us, individually and all humanity.

 

I said to my class that they don't hate us any more. They once did. We were powerless. Many Jews died in pogroms, the Crusades and the Holocaust. The Second Vatican Council changed the Roman Catholic Church and greatly influenced the rest of Christianity. The real challenge is for people of all faiths to take their theology seriously, to teach about the sacredness of all life, that will lead society to leaven the riches and elevate people from poverty and disability; that will remove guns and murder from the streets; that all will unite in the fight against disease and ignorance; and that will end wars. Maybe then hatred will truly be removed from the hearts of all people.

 

We will know that the Messiah has come when from the pulpits of mosque, church and synagogue it is taught and accepted, that all roads lead to God.

Shabbat Shalom.

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Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

rabbigarycreditor.blogspot.com