dissent—that Che Guevara figure. I did not realize that I was resuscitating an anti-Jewish motif. As a left-wing priest, I would be “marginal” to the reactionary Church and to war-making America the way Jesus was marginal to the Judaism of his day.18 To see dissent as righteous, in our oppositional culture—also known as “counterculture”—one simply had to reject orthodoxy. The liberation theology that my kind embraced began, in its Gospel template, as liberation from an implicitly Jewish power structure. The Jews.
After five tumultuous years, I left the priesthood to claim a more spacious Christian faith, which freed me to begin a profound recasting of the meaning of Jesus Christ. Only as a former priest was I free to question the assumptions—going far deeper than ancient “Christ killer” slanders—that perpetuate, even in this ecumenical age, anti-Jewish stereotypes. Again and again, I had to confront the ways in which my own attitudes toward Jesus were stubbornly anti-Jewish. As a person in the pew, also, I regularly heard the negative-positive pairing of Old Testament against the New Testament, and the tone-deaf sermons that assumed the war between Jesus and “the Jews.” I still hear such preaching at least once a month.
I staked my future on a writerly conscience, but I never abandoned my first religious insight—about God and suffering. It meant everything to me that the entire religious tradition of which I was still a part began with God’s coming to Moses not because God had seen the sin of the people, but because He’d seen their suffering: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt,” He told Moses, “and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”19 Yet it took me decades of work on the sly mechanisms of the anti-Semitic imagination—including two books detailing the history of Christian contempt for Jews20—to reverse my primal identification of the gaunt-eyed Jews at barbed wire with the flayed and battered body of my Lord. Having put Auschwitz at the center of my work, I found it necessary, instead, to look at Jesus with the death camp as a lens—the opposite of my innate urge to see Auschwitz through the redeeming frame of Jesus’ self-sacrifice. At last, I shared the recognition that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had come to in a Gestapo prison; I could see the point that Elie Wiesel had made before the Auschwitz gallows: If Jesus had been hanged there, it would not have been as the atoning Son of God, but as another Jewish victim. Period. If there is to be Christian reckoning, it must begin there.
I have outgrown my childish faith. About time, for a man my age. I’ve left behind naive assumptions about reality irreparably divided between the material world and a separate spiritual world, the bifurcated realms of nature and grace, this life and afterlife. I don’t think that the Enlightenment’s closed system of mechanistic cause and consequence more faithfully renders reality than the spirit-filled world of miracles, but neither do I expect divine interference in history. I hold the faith not because religion can prove its claims for God, but because those claims can make a cosmos that includes self-knowing creatures more intelligible, not less. Proof is not the key; it is irrelevant.
That we know ourselves, and know that we do—there’s the opening to mature belief. One can move through it even in an era when the creation is understood as the infinitely expanding cosmos, rushing madly away from an unknown center, with humanity ever more marginal, insignificant, and puny. Yet we are the puny creatures who know, who think, and who love. We will return to this idea. The point here is that, as humans go endlessly in search of meaning, we also dare to ask what is the meaning of meaning?
“In the beginning was Meaning, and Meaning was with God, and Meaning was God. . . . Meaning became one of us.” That eccentric translation of the opening verse of the Gospel of John—traditionally rendered as “In the beginning was the Word . . .”—points, in an age when the quest for “meaning” has replaced the hope for “salvation,” to a new sense of the relevance of the idea of God, drawing on a particular tradition of Western culture that makes God present.21 A tradition named for Jesus Christ, who, whatever else can be said of him, was a man whose meaning captured what is essential to the meaning of every human fate. And he did this as a Jew—only a Jew, a Jew to the end.
Therefore, the most important way in which I have left behind the childish things of my religion has to do with the Jewish people, whose history remains the key to a plausible and morally responsible faith. I repudiate the hatred of Jews that courses through Christian understandings of Jesus like veins of mineral impurities through marble. “Impurity” in stone hardly defines the wickedness of this history, yet it does suggest the actual pervasiveness of the mentality, belonging, as we have already seen, as much to me as to my tradition. I have no right to judge the hatred of Jews from a place on the moral high horse.
It helps to know how that hatred perverted the story of Jesus, starting with the very human conditions within which the New Testament faith first grew, coming eventually to the apocalyptic climax of 1945, and continuing to the Christian reckoning that has been occurring since then. The long, tragic drama includes unpredicted turns of history more than any will of God. And it shows that, just as the first intimate friends of Jesus betrayed him at his hour of greatest need—all fleeing, except the women—so, too, were the second and third generations of Jesus people treasonous when, however inadvertently, they remembered him in a way that set him against his own people.
Even before that, was there perhaps betrayal when, in the phrase the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus uses of them, “those who first loved him and could not let go of their affection for him”22 stopped proclaiming the Kingdom of God, as Jesus had, and began instead to proclaim Jesus himself as Lord? The primal texts are complex when it comes to this question, as we will see. But what Jesus never did—put himself in the place of God—the Church did, making his humanity deeply problematic. Twenty centuries later, the most fateful consequence of that twist in the story was made brutally clear, for Jesus’ Jewishness had thereby been made problematic, too.
There’s the surprise. The deep past is far more present with us than we think—not only a past that is defined by the figure of Jesus, but a past that took its shape from forces with which, despite seeming dissimilar at first, we are in fact quite familiar. The quest for meaning is never finished. It is open-ended. It is shaped by the imperfections of human perception. Seeking the truth about Jesus can lead to mistakes about Jesus. Our most well-intended efforts are marked by a propensity for error and—most dramatically, as this story will show—by impulses to run from danger. Equally, on the positive side, these efforts are marked by our enduring capacity as humans to surpass ourselves. Once we have tasted the delight of meaning discovered or invented, our thirst will not be quenched. A personal Jesus is never enough. As much as he beckons, so he withdraws at our approach. Such contingencies, for better and worse, drove the faith forward into history, and still do.
Christ actually was like us in all of this, yet for him the lasting anguish would have been, perhaps, in how his elevation as meaning itself, from Word of God to “God from God,”23 ultimately drew attention away from the only One to whom he ever wanted to point. That was his Abba, the God of Love who—this must be emphasized—always was and always will be neither an “Old Testament God” nor a “New Testament God,” but the God of the Jews, pure and simple.
Our images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired. No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps.
—Richard Rubenstein1
By what logic is the claim sustained that the Holocaust provokes a major re-envisioning of Jesus Christ? Among other reasons, because, startlingly enough, a version of this catastrophe happened before, with just