Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift

Ron Miller, Laura Bernstein

Description

How did a Jewish teacher, healer, sage and mystic become the vehicle for so much hatred and harm directed against his own people?

“Dialogue is demanding and difficult. It is often painful. It entails deep listening, letting others define themselves and being willing to confront and transform deep-rooted prejudices in ourselves. It requires the courage to re-envision absolutely everything we tend to cherish and protect, and to relinquish our entrenched vainglorious ego attachments, our inflated sense of ‘I, me and mine.’ This challenge to grow beyond tribalism, to approach others in a fair and reasonable way, is an essential step in our human evolution.”
—from the Invitation to the Reader

Judaism and Christianity have had a volatile relationship in their two-thousand-year history. Anger, rivalry, insensitivity, bloodshed and murder have marred the special connection these two Abrahamic faiths share. In the last several decades, scholars, activists, laypeople and clergy have attempted to expose and eliminate the struggles between Jews and Christians.

This collaborative effort brings together the voices of Christian scholar Ron Miller and Jewish scholar Laura Bernstein to further explore the roots of anti-Semitism in Christian faith and scripture. In a probing interfaith dialogue, Miller and Bernstein trace the Jewish-Christian schism to its very source in the first book of the New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew. Illuminating the often misunderstood context of Matthew’s gospel—a persecuted Christian minority writing some sixty years after Jesus’s death—this examination of a foundational Christian text discerns the ways in which the Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten and Jews and Judaism became Christianity’s foil. More important, it takes a renewed look at Matthew with contemporary retellings that present a new and better future of conciliation and compassion between the two faith traditions.

Sujets

• Comparative Religion
• Philosophie et théologie
• Judaism
• Christianity
• Religion
• Ron Miller

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594735332
• Langue: English

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W e dedicate this book with gratitude to some of our friends and colleagues in the field of Jewish-Christian dialogue:
Herbert Bronstein
Beatrice Bruteau
James Carroll
Yechiel Eckstein
Douglas Goldhamer
Sidney Hood
Shana Lowitz
John Pawlikowski
Rosemary Ruether
Rami Shapiro
SkyLight Paths Books by Ron Miller
The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice
Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History
The Hidden Gospel of Matthew: Annotated and Explained
Contents
Foreword by Dr. Beatrice Bruteau
All Will Be Well, by Laura Bernstein
Introduction
1 What Is a Messiah?
2 A Miraculous Birth?
3 A Homicidal Jewish King
4 A Maverick Mentor
5 The Message and the Messenger
6 A Program for Jewish Renewal
7 A Master of Metaphor
8 Continuity and Discontinuity
9 Anger, Adultery, and Divorce
10 Opposing Evil without Emulating It
11 The Most Challenging Practice
12 The Lord s Prayer
13 True Treasure, True Vision, and True Worth
14 A Golden Rule and a Narrow Path
15 Teaching with Authority and Healing
16 Those Wonderful Romans!
17 Redeemer or Reminder?
18 Sin as Paralysis
19 The Wrong Sort of People
20 How New Is This Wine?
21 Good News?
22 Enemies at the Door
23 A Challenging Kind of Peace
24 Mixed Messages
25 Jeshu the Lawbreaker?
26 Those Terrible Pharisees!
27 Jews Seek Signs
28 What Makes Us Unclean?
29 Identity Issues
30 Jeshu the Rabble-Rouser?
31 Jews as Rotten Tenants
32 A Damning Diatribe
33 Christianity s Greatest Lie
34 A Final Meal
35 The Unbearable Curse
36 Worse Than Liars
Invitation to the Reader
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
About the Authors
Copyright
Also Available
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Foreword
Dr. Beatrice Bruteau
S ome years ago a group of us here in Winston-Salem were reading and discussing Rabbi Michael Lerner s Jewish Renewal. Several times in that book he says something to this effect: Jews need to mourn for all the wounds we sustained from the various peoples we have tried to live among, being persecuted by Christian nations and finally subjected to the extermination efforts of the Nazi regime. It is right and proper for us so to mourn. Let us do it thoroughly. And then let us move forward from it. The world still remains to be healed, and we are still called to heal it. And God is still the power that can transform the world from the way it is to the way it ought to be.
Our discussion group was much moved by this appeal and exclaimed, We re the ones who should be mourning! We represent the people and the institutions that caused or prepared the way for this terrible suffering. So we organized a year-long program to acquaint Christians with the history of Jewish persecution and distress. We started study groups in churches, we presented public lectures, and at the end of the year we offered a formal liturgy of repentance as a part of the Selichot (penitential prayer preparation) observance in the local synagogue.
The rift between Judaism and Christianity is still a sore matter. It cries out for healing on a broad level. And this means that we still need knowledge-information and explanation, interpretation and exhortation-to help bridge the divide. The sources of these wounds need to be held up for public inspection. What is wrong and hurtful needs to be emphatically rejected and replaced with fresh insight, respect and appreciation, outreach in friendship, trust-building, and side-by-side feelings.
This book is a contribution to that large effort. Anti-Jewish feeling in Christian countries grew out of the New Testament itself, and this is why it is important for us all to understand how this literature was created and how it can best be reinterpreted and dealt with.
The authors of this book bring to their task vigorous action on the two most important dimensions: Ron Miller, as a Christian scholar, shows where the negativity comes from and how the location, history, and political forces of the time contributed to the dire influence these texts have had on subsequent generations. Laura Bernstein, as a devout Jew trained in a Jewish seminary, illumines the essentially and characteristically Jewish root and core of the historical Jesus s ministry, and presses us to appreciate him properly in his own context and in terms of his own efforts at healing the world.
This challenge and this call highlight the loss we have sustained through this dreadful rift. The Christians idolized Jesus and therefore the Jews abandoned him. That s the pity of it, both ways. Jesus s own point of view was lost, and he has been effectively alienated from his own people, his own religion, his own aspiration and work. Both religions have been distracted from paying attention to him in his original reality.
I support our authors efforts because I believe that, behind the miracle stories, the local polemics, and the theological claims of the gospels, we can discern a vision of the value of every person that grounds a social program of revolutionary proportions. Demonstrated on a small scale and startling in its own day, never thoroughly copied, not even by the communities that compiled the literature that gives us our only knowledge of the Jesus movement, this social program still remains to be tried.
If all persons (regardless of age, sex, race, nationality, wealth, political or religious position or affiliation, or any other description) are unconditionally valuable in their personhood, which comes from God , then all are socially equal and are to be accorded the equal and high respect due such children of God, which means no social ranking or deference behaviors. It follows from this that all people are to be cared for equally, as though they are your neighbor (Lev. 19:18); even your enemies deserve your love, just as God sends sun and rain impartially on all (Matt. 5:44-48).
It can well be argued that the shift in attitude and social practice such a view requires is intrinsically and vitally consistent with the tradition of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Talmud, and in fact has been put forward in some way by numerous practitioners of the Jewish tradition. Could we not together examine and consider such possibilities as a way not only to heal our painful rift but also to continue our shared commitment to work at healing the world? I hope so.
This book is not a lone voice in this area of human need. There is a commendable amount of work directed toward this end. This particular conversation between a Jew and a Christian is especially helpful as the Christian relieves us of the false and hurtful passages in the New Testament, and the Jew understands Jeshu from the inside, sharing his outlook and feelings, recognizing her kinship with him in developing the depths and beauties of this ever-renewing religion.
All Will Be Well
All will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.
-Julian of Norwich

Is it kosher to work on a poem on shabbos?
This one calls to me like ripe grain begging to be picked,
like honey offering to be sucked from the rock
of my wilderness journey, training hard
for the spiritual Olympics.
The scene: A table laden with books, Bibles,
a silver yad , a Buddhist bell.
My twelve-year-old Torah study partner Daniel-
face, an anemone; mind, the Grand Canyon;
heart, the Milky Way
And me, technically his teacher,
old enough to be his grandma,
wise enough to know how much he has to teach me.
As usual we ve veered off course, this time from Genesis
to an analysis of the New Testament. He s bothered
by the line from Matthew: His blood be on us
and on our children. (I m bothered by it, too.)
Couldn t it be a lament, he wonders,
rather than a self-inflicted curse?
I lament that it could not. I explain
the historical context, the anti-Jewish subtext,
the hideous harm the words have wrought.
He is glad I am working on a book with another partner
to redress this wrong, to heal this rift.
He is captivated (his word) by the project,
eager to see us fix all that is wrong
and make it right.
Then he s concerned that I am less confident than he
about the ease with which this righting of wrongs
can be accomplished. Touching hearts and changing
minds set for centuries on a mistaken course requires
stamina, steadfastness, a burning bush, a pillar of cloud.
Suddenly he is sad at my perceived pessimism
about the world, the slow evolution of consciousness,
and I, an ardent optimist, am at a loss to convince him
otherwise. I rest a moment beside his beseeching
bottomless eyes, and take the plunge.
I am not a pessimist, I insist.
Just uncertain of exact outcome
and willing to marinate in mystery,
to do the work unattached to the fruit.
We earthlings are still toddlers, I tell him,
arguing over mine and yours, grabbing
and biting, throwing tantrums, needing
daily hugs and hourly loving reminders
of who we are, of the greater things that we will do,
of the vastness we have to grow into.
Will we grow up?
I hope so, but I m a poet, not a prophet, dearest.
Still, in spite of everything-
from ancient hatreds to modern holocausts,
from Jesus turned