Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (68 page)

Luria's teachings spread quickly through the traumatized Jewish world. In an ingenious leap of religious imagination, Luria enabled Jews to transcend their recent experience of catastrophe by positing a primordial catastrophe—
tsimtsum
—in which elements of the Divine Being were splintered into an infinity of broken pieces. These "shards" are the stuff of creation. The purpose of creation, this splintering of God, was seen as nothing less than, in Silberman's words, "destroying the principle of evil from within."
¹⁰
Once this shattering of the divine has occurred, it becomes the responsibility not of a single Messiah but of the Jewish people to bring about the gradual restoration of cosmic unity and God's own being, the ultimate ingathering of those broken pieces—a redemptive process that is called
tikkun olam.
The Messiah will come when the work of the Jewish people has been accomplished, which will be done through faithful study of Torah, observance of the Law, and performance of works of justice.
Tikkun
is one of the most precious ideas ever to strike a human mind. It is the "restoration of creation [which] must be carried out by the religious acts of individual men, of all Jews struggling in the Exile, and indeed of all men and women struggling in the Exile that Luria saw as the universal human existence."
¹¹

Emphasis on redemption based on the response of the people set Judaism apart from Christianity more than ever, for in bringing about the fulfillment of time, the Messiah, in this scheme, takes second place to Torah. Jews found a way to believe that even in their degraded situation, they had a noble, uplifting function to perform, one entirely unlike the Christian mandate—one that was nothing less than contributing to the restoration of the fullness of the Godhead. By means of the lighting of candles on Shabbat, the study of Torah, the observance of
mitzvot
("commandments"), and prayer, exiled Jews understood themselves to be preparing for a messianic future by redeeming the splintered past. It was a call to rebuild the cosmos so that the exiled God could come home.

Karen Armstrong, in her
History of God,
notes the stark contrast between this positive mythology, which defined the broken creation as partaking in the divine, and the dark contemporaneous visions both of Protestantism, with its puritanical emphasis on the doom of humanity without grace, and of Catholicism, which during the Counter-Reformation fell ever more under the sway of a morbid, cross-obsessed hatred of the world.
¹²
It is in this period, for example, that the Stations of the Cross, the mournful following in the imagined steps of Christ on the way to Golgotha, comes into its own as a dominant Catholic devotion.
¹³
In contrast, Luria's conception of God, according to Armstrong, "was able to help Jews to cultivate a spirit of joy and kindness, together with a positive view of humanity at a time when the guilt and anger of the Jews could have caused many to despair, and to lose faith in life altogether."
¹⁴

As Luria's movement grew in Safed, other manifestations of Jewish vitality showed themselves. Messianic figures appeared, like David Reubeni and Solomon Molcho in Portugal, and
conversos
and unconverted Jews alike took heart from their bold rejection of the idea that Jews were fated to be oppressed.
¹⁵
In the next century, a Kabbalist from the Turkish city of Izmir emerged as the leader of one of the most potent religious-political movements in Jewish history. He was Shabbetai Zvi, a self-declared Messiah who found enthusiastic followers in Jewish communities around the Mediterranean, and in Europe as well, especially Poland. The political hopes that many had for Shabbetai came to nothing when, imprisoned by the Turks in 1666—the combination of sixes in that year had made it portentous—he chose to convert to Islam rather than risk martyrdom. But his heroic movement had by then spawned numerous centers of enthusiastic Judaism, including one that would quicken in Poland and Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Spreading throughout eastern Europe, this movement was led by Israel ben Eliezer, the beloved Baal Shem Tov. Yet another charismatic leader, he "transformed the shattered hopes of the messianic movement, the surrealistic images of Lurianic kabbalah, and the centuries-old magic of the Jewish mystical tradition into the vibrant
modern
movement of the Hasidim."
¹⁶
Across geography and across generations, Jews were reinventing their ideology, renewing their commitment to the God of Israel, and finding ways to express joy, hope, and happiness while the world outside remained ignorant of these currents.

Eventually, just as contact with Jews had threatened the broader culture during the period of
convivencia,
the self-sufficient separateness of Jews would do the same. Both their friends and enemies in the Christian world consistently saw Jews as having no existence apart from their function either as witnesses to the flaws of the Church or as accusers. But the fact that Jews had an independent positive theology of their own, it came to seem, was the real affront. "All that the Jews of Europe asked," Leon Wieseltier explains, "was not to believe in Jesus, and to be left alone in Judaism. But it was too much to ask."
¹⁷
The choices of the past had consequences for the future. Patterns of rejection, acceptance, and ever-fiercer rejection kept repeating themselves. "Thus, in Spain in the sixteenth century," Rosemary Radford Ruether writes, "we have a dress rehearsal for the nineteenth-century European experience. The Jewish community, made to assimilate
en masse,
then is perceived as a shocking invasion of Christian society, and barriers previously thrown up against them on religious grounds are now reinstituted on racial grounds."
¹⁸
In Part Six, we will see how that nineteenth-century development, especially as embodied in the Dreyfus affair, constituted, in turn, as Hannah Arendt similarly dubbed it, "a kind of dress rehearsal for the performance of our own time."
¹⁹

38. Shema Yisrael!

M
ORAL MATURITY LIES
in the ability to see links between events—how choices lead to consequences, which lead to new choices, which set up even more fateful consequences. Such a concatenation of choice and consequence defines the narrative arc of every story, including this one, which curves from Jesus to the Holocaust. Yet the same question surfaces at every point of choice-and-consequence: Where does the Christian hatred of the Jews come from? This history invites a return to John Paul lis answer to the question put by the Bob Dylan song. "One!" the pope said. "There is only one road, and it is Christ!"

But for Jews, the word "one" has reference only to the Holy One of Israel. The post around which this entire narrative has turned is the ancient, enduring statement of Jewish faith, the Shema: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!"
¹
Age in and age out, from Jerusalem to Mainz to Toledo to Rome, then back to Mainz again, Jews do not yield on their affirmation of God's oneness, their affirmation of the way to God represented by "carefully"
²
obeying God's commandments. Their very existence as a people doing this denied the Christian claim, as Saint Thomas Aquinas defined it, that Jesus is "the absolutely necessary way to salvation." Their denial has had tremendous power over Christians. At some deep psychological level, it has felt like nothing less than crucifixion: The Jews who crucified our Lord crucify us. Obviously there is far more than a mere theological dispute here, as if the issue were a Nicaea-like conflict over Trinitarian monotheism. It is more than a mortal grudge tied to a crime, even deicide, from long ago. Choice and consequence. Is it that an early Christian choice—whether in Saint Paul's generation or in Constantine's, whether a choice for religious exclusivity or for absolute uniformity—undercut Christian certitude of belief in a Christian meaning that had become too constricted? Is it that subliminal anxiety about the Church's faithfulness to Jesus—his message of love betrayed precisely in
this?—
prompts the Church to make extreme claims for its own inerrancy? "Universalist absolutism," a Catholic veteran of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, Padraic O'Hare, has said, "thrives on the diminishment of the other." The more the Church shores up the reach of its claim, the greater the danger that, again—here is the lesson of the Inquisition—we will have "religion as a source of brutality."
³

In addition to everything else about Judaism—its integrity as a religion affirmed on its own terms—Jews have perennially made visible the invisible mystery of such contradictions. Have they therefore become a kind of living epiphany of a restless Christian conscience? Jews survive as an un-settling figment of the religious imagination of the Church—which is the problem. Judaism has its own existence, of course, apart from any such link to Christianity, and I intend no reduction of Judaism here. I write as a Christian, from a Christian point of view, admittedly concerned with the meaning of these events for Christians. But their meaning has wider importance than that. In academia, the history of antisemitism is taught in Jewish studies departments, if at all, when it should be taught as a core component of the history of Western civilization. When the narrative of Jew hatred is recounted within the relatively narrow scope of Jewish studies, the structure of Jewish accusation and Christian guilt is reified, and antisemitism is defined as the Jews' problem, instead of that of Western civilization, the culture that came into being with the Jew defined as a religious, economic, social, and, ultimately, racial outsider. But when antisemitism is treated mainly as a Jewish problem, the Jew is condemned to play the role of either self-flagellant or denouncer, with obvious dangers attached to each. That is why this history must be recounted not as the history of Jews but primarily as a history of the Church.

I began this project by describing it as the story of "Jewish-Christian conflict," but I realized that the word "conflict" was too slight. I spoke then of "Jewish-Christian hatred," but that isn't it either, although hatred is an element. Oddly, the passion of Christian antagonism toward Jews achieves such a level not only of brutality, but of attachment, that it must be seen as including also a rare sort of intimacy, beyond that of any other pair of enemies known to history. It is as if Jews and Christians had begun not merely as rivalrous siblings but as Siamese twins, tragically set against each other in connected bodies that were one body, and sharing, perhaps, one sorely divided soul. This history is nothing but the story of a violent separation, and it prepares us, for one thing, to honor the ways in which Judaism and Christianity have grown radically apart. Obviously, these identities are quite distinct now, and that distinction is the ground on which stands the hope not of some reunion but of mutual respect. That assumes, of course, that talk of "One Way" has no place in this conversation.

Although the opposite is not the case, Christian identity depends on Jews, just as the Christian Scriptures depend on the Hebrew Scriptures. In the past, that has been taken to mean that Christian identity depends on winning the Jews over, or silencing their dissent, bringing order to religious disorder by converting Jews. In reaction to this violent history, trying to overcome it, some Christians now assert that the importance of Jews to Christianity consists in their being the first and last witnesses to the flawed humanity of the Church. If that is true, the position of Jews is still precarious, because the Church, as we have repeatedly seen, is continually tempted to deny its flawed humanity. In other words, the contest continues.

This is not to say that Jews have an investment in criticizing the Church or in bringing the Church around—say, by a full "apology" for the Holocaust—to a new understanding of itself. It is not to say that Bob Dylan had any need of Pope John Paul II that day in Bologna. On the contrary, what Jews are doing is only what Jews have always done, which, if a Christian may say so, is to affirm that only God is God. God's existence is the only absolute, and God's existence matters absolutely. As the late Edward Flannery, a Catholic priest and pioneer in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, put it, "The hubris in the human heart cannot forgive the Jew for bringing into the world the idea of a transcendent God and a divinely sanctioned moral law binding on everyone." Flannery offers a classic statement of the problem: "Jews have suffered so long because they bear the burden of God in history. Anti-Semitism is symptomatic of an animus against God, an animus deeply lodged in every person."
⁴

And, therefore, in every human institution. No Catholic is exempt from this judgment, and, as this narrative demonstrates, neither is the Church. Individuals deflect this damning truth with the shield of an unexamined self-righteousness. The Church does so by the absolute claims it makes for itself, even when it cloaks them in claims it makes for Jesus. The Catholic version of the Shema properly extends to him, but in what way? And does it properly extend to the Church as such, when it defines itself as the Body of Christ? A theology of Incarnation necessarily extends the worship of the holy and transcendent God to a creature of that God. This is the Catholic paradox, and it is somehow a source of the scandals we are rehearsing in this book. It is a source of the Vatican's determination to shore up univocal feudal controls over ecclesiastical organizations and over the thought of Catholics. The Incarnation means that God has come to live among us
as we are.
We may be tempted to deny our flawed humanity. God is not. But God's judgment is forgiveness, which is why there is no reason to fear the truth—not even the truth of this narrative. That is why, to repeat the millennial statement of John Paul II cited earlier, the Church is "not afraid of the truth that emerges from history and is ready to acknowledge mistakes wherever they have been identified."
⁵
Faith in the forgivingness of God makes self-criticism possible—which is another way of saying that it makes history possible.