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These are just items about issues that my friends & I think are worth logging.

Monday, April 26, 2004

Passions Surrounding (Mel Gibson's) "The Passion"

by Richard John Neuhaus

Copyright (c) 2004 First Things 142 (April 2004): 59-73.

“An Open Letter to the Jewish Community” was issued by the Catholic League a few weeks prior to the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. I have problems with aspects of the letter, but it spoke some hard and necessary words about a few Jewish leaders who are way out of line in their defamation of Mr. Gibson, the film, and the Christians of America. With the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center providing the lead, outrageous claims have been made, also in the major media: that the movie will provoke pogroms against Jews; that Christians are at least latent anti-Semites and the movie will ignite their barely repressed hatred; that Mr. Gibson denies the Holocaust; and on and on. There has never been a pogrom in America and no sensible person thinks there is any danger of there ever being one. On the contrary, never in history have Jews been as secure, successful, and accepted as they are in America . This is underscored by many Jewish scholars, and most recently by Jonathan Sarna in his important new book from Yale University Press, American Judaism: A History.

Of course there has been anti-Semitism, and there still is on some far fringes, but the happy circumstance of Jews in this society is not despite but because this is America , a country in which, not at all incidentally, nine-tenths of the people identify themselves as Christians. To suggest that Christian Americans are latent anti-Semites is a vile slander. It is complained that in his Reader’s Digest interview Mel Gibson declined to say that the death of Jews in the Holocaust is the worst thing that ever happened in history. One Jewish leader voices outrage that, in speaking of the Holocaust, Mr. Gibson mentioned other great tragedies such as the famine in the Ukraine under Stalin. He compared a mere famine to the deaths of six million Jews! A little perspective is in order here. In Stalin’s politically engineered famine, as many as ten million Ukrainian men, women, and children were starved to death. The demand is that we not pay too much attention to that lest it detract from the unique horror of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

In important respects, the Holocaust was unique, but such exercises in competing victimologies are both irrational and morally repugnant. In history, and especially in the last century, there have been horrors enough to go around. It is perfectly understandable that for many Jews there is nothing comparable to the Holocaust, as for Armenians there is nothing comparable to the genocide of 1915. But most people are neither Jews nor Armenians. They can empathize and learn, and they do, but they cannot really know the soul-shattering horror experienced by those whose primary identity is formed in solidarity with one category of victims rather than another. This reality may be especially hard to accept for those Jews for whom the Holocaust is the core of what it means to be Jewish. This does not include all Jews by any means. Rabbi David Novak has said, “I do not get up in the morning to curse Hitler but to praise God.”

If one must speak of the worst of history’s horrors, Christians have no choice but to say it was the killing of the Son of God. Jesus, the first-century Jew, was condemned by the religious leaders of his people as a false Messiah, and they contrived to have him killed by the Romans. Jesus was a Jew, his mother was a Jew, his apostles were Jews, the leaders who opposed his death were Jews. It is the Jewish story of the redemption of the world. That is what Christians believe, and it is worth noting that when some have tried to de-Judaize the story—as some have done, from Marcion to the “German Christians” under Nazism—it has been very bad for Jews. Christians must tell the story of salvation truly, which means telling it Jewishly. “Salvation is from the Jews.” Many a Jew has expressed the wish that God had chosen a different people. But so it was and so it is.

In America over the last century there has been unprecedented progress in Jewish-Christian understanding. Not just at the level of intercommunal relations, but in exploring our inescapable entanglement in discerning the purposes of the God of Israel. In telling the story of Jesus and his death, the Catholic Church has developed detailed homiletical and catechetical guidelines for the depiction of the Jews of the time. A Jewish partner in the dialogue tells me that Gibson’s film does not conform to those guidelines. I think he is probably right, but it should be remembered that this film is not produced by the Catholic Church. Mr. Gibson, while a Catholic, is an artist and a craftsman, and his work should be judged on those grounds. In the film that I saw in advance screening, the rendition of Christ’s passion is eminently defensible—biblically, historically, and theologically. There is nothing anti-Semitic about it, and those who are making reckless claims to the contrary are only stirring up ugly mischief that nobody needs.


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