By Martin Jaffee, JTNews Correspondent
It was like Y2K all over again. All the hype surrounding the recent Mel Gibson exravaganza created apocalyptic expectations which, like all such dreams, end in anti-climactic letdown. Historians of religion call it “Messianic disappointment.”
The eagerly awaited “moment of truth” breaks in upon us, but instead of leaving us transformed in a transfigured reality, everything goes back to normal. Some diehards keep banging the drum of the end-time, explaining a delay in the scheduled arrival of the transforming moment as a result of our own failures and miscalculations. Others will explain how the failure of the promised “moment of truth” is in fact proof that it has happened as planned. But most will walk away, reabsorbed in the mundane sequence of dull moments that is, in fact, our greatest comfort.
So the movie has come and gone and things have pretty much remained as they were. We don’t find reports of enraged mobs surging out of the theaters to attack the Jews. Some folks loved it and, perhaps, became more serious Christians without hating Jews. May they live and be well. Others saw it and witnessed a mediocre drama distinguished only by a remarkable technical achievement—producing an illusion of violence so |realistic that you could almost feel the pain of the film’s hero in your own body.
Still others remained convinced that the implicit anti-Semitism of the movie overpowered all other messages. But even they realize that anti-Semites won’t need Gibson’s movie to encourage them, nor will good-willed people be convinced by this movie to log on to the Aryan Nations Web site for more inspiration.
I know there are many Christians finding themselves in this last category and we Jews should be grateful for their solidarity with us. But we should also remember that their ability to criticize the tradition of Christian anti-Semitism depends upon a singular act of religious courage. They are willing to acknowledge that the images of the past recorded in the key writings of early Christianity are not so much “history as it happened,” but “history as it was selectively remembered and transmitted.”
Part of Christian faith, from this point of view, is to challenge the truth of the Gospel traditions about Jesus’ death in the name of a greater truth stemming from the Gospel traditions of his teachings of love. This kind of faith comes at great cost—the sacrifice of the comfort of simply believing what has always been believed.
As the season of Passover approaches—the time of the redemption from Egyptian bondage—we might consider the example of Christian criticism of faith in the name of faith.
How so? Think of the stories we recall at this time. At Purim, a month before Passover, we celebrate our victory over ancient Persian enemies. But the victory includes celebration of the vengeance we inflicted upon the Persians, and in its commemoration we are required by tradition to remember to “blot out the name of Amalek and his descendants from beneath the heavens.”
Passover, too, is saturated with the theme of vengeance—a quid pro quo enables the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn to compensate us for the loss of our sons thrown into the Nile at imperial command. Also, the drowning of Egypt’s army in the sea that parted for us alone as we fled under God’s protective wings.
What are we to imagine as we retell these with our children? If, as Jewish tradition informs us, the Torah is from heaven and it is a Torah of truth, a tree of life to those who embrace her—how do we find truth and life in our recounting of vengeance and death?
Can we beg off and simply affirm, “that’s the way it was and that’s the way we tell it”? If we can, then I guess we can also excuse Christians who excuse the hateful Gospel images of Jews on the grounds that “that’s the way it was.”
It so happens that I embrace the belief that Torah is from heaven and that its essence is truth and life. But I also know that Jews, as human beings, are not from heaven. We are from the dust of the earth, the basic thing we share with all humankind. It is we “dust beings” who mediate the truth of Torah into the world. Our Talmudic sages knew this well. They insisted, for example, that the written and oral Torah surely came from the mouth of the Blessed Holy One.
But the written Torah does not conform to the original sequence of revelation. They experimented with the thought that at least some portions of the traditional text stem from hands other than those of Moses. The key thing is that, as the great medieval scholar Rashbam insisted: the literal meaning of the written Torah is not as authoritative as the interpretations supplied by the human tradition of oral Torah. Where the written Torah would immerse us in the exultation of collective vengeance, the oral Torah reminds us of the Divine tears shed over the death of the Egyptians. And so on.
So when Passover overtakes us this year, let us remember all of this. I am helped by that middle matzoh that we break in two. It lies between two whole matzot. The top one symbolizes the Torah that Israel knew at Sinai. The bottom one is the Torah as we will know it again in the Messianic Age, its full meaning restored to us beyond exile. But that middle, broken matzoh—that’s the Torah we can know in our exilic human fragility. It is Torah, and we honor and cherish and obey it. It is Torah for the broken, something to feed us on our path from Sinai through exile to redemption.
If in this Torah for the broken we see only the brokenness of our enemies, we see in it only our own fractured meanings. Our challenge is to see in Torah not only what is broken in others, but also what is broken within us. Let the one who understands understand!
Martin Jaffee is Chair of the Comparative Religion Program at the University of Washington, and he teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs. When not masquerading as a journalist, he writes on the history of Talmudic literature as well as theoretical problems in the study of religion.