Tag Archives: Torah

Day Three – Part 2 – The Holocaust & The Christian World

Leave a reply
IMG_7376

Street Art in the centre of Jerusalem

In Shoah and Genocide I wrote about Professor Yuhuda Bauer’s insights into why the Shoah or Holocaust was unprecedented. However, for any genocide to occur there has to be a history behind it. Dr Jesper Svartvik* suggests that however painful it might be we have to recognise the part that Christian anti-Semitism had to play in it. So what was the history of this anti-Semitism?

He suggests that this can be explained as a sevenfold process:

  1. SIBLINGS (Mark) In the beginning Judaism and Early Christianity had something in common. However, like most families where there are siblings, although they have a common origin that can be very different in character
  2. RIVALRY (Marcion) For more than 100 years, Christians had been using the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, and even the most sacred documents of Christians referred to and relied heavily on, the Old Testament. The solution for Marcion, a second century theologian, was to completely reject the Old Testament and establish a canon that de-emphasized Christianity’s Old Testament and Jewish roots as much as possible, to move from the LAW to GRACE. Although his solution was rejected it did cause the early Church Father to do some re-evaluation, after all they were reading it through Christian spectacles
  3. NECESSARY (Augustine) Despite speaking out against the Jews, he did not consider Judaism a problem, in fact he is quoted as saying that Jewish scripture was vital to the Christian faith, “If any adversary should say you have forged these prophecies, let the Jewish books be produced. They are our librarians.” But he did not consider the survival of Jews as necessary, after all they were the ones that had said ‘no’ to the Messiah and had therefore been relieved of God’s promises (replacement theology).
  4. OPPOSITE (Luther) Martin Luther believed that there is no valid way of being a Christian that will make you Jewish, it could be agreed that they had the right texts but they were doing the wrong thing with them. At first Luther wanted to convert the Jews to Christianity, it had been done before because Christ himself was a Jew, but when this failed he said ‘Away with them’. As he grew older this attitude became more and more polemic, using the rudest and vilest scatological language, perhaps the politest example being ‘throw sow dung at him . . . and chase him away’. The effect though of this is that defendants in the Nuremberg trials after the war were able to quote from his treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies, written in 1543, as justification
Martin Luther

Martin Luther

5. UNNECESSARY (Enlightenment). You would have thought that the Age of Enlightenment in the Eighteenth century, with its metaphorical image of light, would mean that these differences would disappear. However, when you become a minority, marked by your religious symbols and customs, these are seen as making you more religious, rather than part of the establishment . Therefore, religious attachment becomes a problem.
6. POISON (Nazi Germany) Christianity remained the dominant religion in Germany through the Nazi period. That Nazi ideology was able to come to the fore was due in part to the social and economic situation between 1918 and 1933. However, the Nazi’s didn’t even consider Jews as human and started talking about them as ‘rats’, a natural pest to be destroyed. Using a Christian perspective it was considered that there could be no salvation without the defeat of the Jews. The commandment to ‘love your neighbours’ was interpreted as ‘they live next door to us, but they are not my neighbours’.
7. SACRAMENTUM (Nostra Aetate) The Nosta Aetate is the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council and repudiated anti-Semitism and the charge that Jews were collectively guilty for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It said that we were all children of Abraham and that Christians and Jews were a blessing to the world. It also drew on Romans 11, the fact that ‘they are our brothers’.

This seems to bring the seven points in full circle – from Siblings to Sacramentum because Early Christianity and Judaism were so similar, but that Christianity had stepped out of the ashes of the 2nd Temple’s destruction. Christianity being the word that became flesh whilst Judaism was the flesh that became Word.

Jewish and Christian Thinking

Dr Jesper Svartvik
Dr Jesper Svartvik since 2009 is the holder of Krister Stendahl’s professor of religious theology at the Center for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University and the Swedish Theological Institute in Jerusalem. Between 2005 and 2009, he was chairman of the Swedish Committee against Anti-Semitism

 

Day Three – Part 1 -From The Beginning

Leave a reply
IMG_7379

The Partisans Panorama includes a tree of people which pays tribute to the Jewish fighters who joined the partisans during the Holocaust. As the sun hits it it glows red.

Taking part in this series of seminars becomes a real privilege when you realise that you are listening to world experts in their field. You frantically scribble down your notes, trying to capture if not every word at least as many as you can (I am already up to 29 pages of foolscap notes). How then to share that without reducing it to unconnected bullet points? The beauty is that the lectures are presented in chronological order and so there is some logic in just taking what you consider to be interesting and informative it, because after all this is a blog and not an essay. So the next couple of days may appear to be more academic ponderings but hopefully they will be thought-provoking as well. So let’s start at the beginning:

Shoah and Genocide

genocide-iraqProfessor Yehuda Bauer* states that the main question we should be concerned with is how to prevent the mass murder of one group of humans by another because genocide ‘disfigures the world’. International law talks of genocide as the ‘crime of crimes’ against ethnic and national groups with the intent and action of annihilation.

Why then do human groups murder other groups? Perhaps we have to go to the very beginning. Human beings were and are inherently predator mammals; more specifically we are hunter predators, and although nowadays we don’t dash out to spear a passing hairy mammoth for supper we do, as a group, raise animals and farm fish specifically for our food. We are ‘programmed to be killers’ as well as collectors.

We are also members of a herd, a group, a nation, but ‘to kill inside the herd destroys the herd’, so to justify killing we have to turn to laws and principles in opposition to our predator instincts. But what about the fifth commandment I hear you say… what the commandments actually says if you accurately translate the Hebrew word is ‘You shall not murder’ not ‘you shall not kill’; therefore killing is permitted murder whilst murder is prohibited killing.

Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’
Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)

The crux of the matter revolves around racism and religion, and yet there are no racial groups because we are one race – the human race. Nevertheless racism exists, although this wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t until Christians reconquered the Iberian peninsula and expelled the Jews and Moors (Arabs) in 1492 in Toledo that the first racial law was passed. Since then there have been many ‘racially’ motivated incidents that we can classify as genocide but there was something different about the Shoah or Holocaust

It has parallels with other genocides in that it was mass murder; it was committed by the best possible means at the disposal of the perpetrators (whether gas chambers or machetes) and it mirrors the suffering of victims which is unquantifiable. The difference, however, lies in the motivation. All other genocides were committed for pragmatic reasons, in that the perpetrators were seeking power, domination or revenge. Yet the Jews had no real political representation in any European countries, they had no army, they didn’t really control any large national companies and didn’t have control over the economy. They were therefore murdered for ideology.

It showed itself in anti-Semitism (which is a singular contradiction as you cannot have a positive, i.e. Semitism) which was happening even pre-Christian times as shown in the allegorical story of Esther (Chapter 5). By killing Jews you are attempting to eliminate cultures different to yourself, which explains the roots of anti-Semitism and it arises not at a biographical level but a cultural level

 

Anti-Semetic Cartoon

Illustration from a German textbook used by primary schools (c. 1934)

 

However, it then reaches a theological level beginning with St Augustine of Hippo’s tract of 429BC Adversus ludaeos, which eventually mutates into nationalism, so that by 1941 Nazi ideology has reached the stage that it is necessary to kill ALL the Jews in the world. This has a new global element in that by the twentieth century it was physically possible to reach all corners of the world. So despite being very clearly part of genocide it is also very different because it was so unprecedented.

Where then does this leave those of us who profess a Christian faith, because after all the Jewish culture is part of our inheritance, and a Jewish man is the Messiah

A Torah Scroll

The Torah and The Old Testament

Yehuda-Bauer

*Yehuda Bauer was born 1926 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In the 1930’s his father tried to raise money to get his family to the British Mandate of Palestine. On 15th March 1939, the day that Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia the family managed to get past Nazi officials onto a train that took them over the border to Poland and from there they moved to Palestine via Romania. He continued his studies, including studying history at Cardiff University in Wales on a British scholarship. He returned to Israel, completing his doctorate in 1960 and began teaching at the Avraham Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. He served on the central committee of Mapam, then the junior partner party of Israel’s ruling Mapai (Israel Labour Party), and was a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Yale University, Richard Stockton College, and Clark University. He was the founding editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, published by Yad Vashem in 1990. He continues as a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University as well as travelling around the world talking out genocide and discussing ways to prevent it.

 

 

 

Day Two – Introductions

1 Reply
IMG_7351

Yad Vashem – Memorial of names –  ‘I will put my breath into you, and you shall live again, and I will set you upon on your own soil…’ (Ezekiel 37:14)

Morning brings with it new introductions, the first being the cityscape outside of our hotel window, which was in darkness when we arrived yesterday evening. An earlier decision to go for a morning swim in the pool was postponed (due to the towel situation) but breakfast was delicious and plentiful before we boarded the minibus to be taken to Yad Vashem where the seminars are to take place.

IMG_7350

Daylight brings a clearer view

Firstly an introduction to each other, including our host Yiftach Meiri, who is the Lead at Yad Vashem for groups from Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, when we share a little bit about ourselves and why we have chosen to come on this series of seminars. An eclectic mixture of lay leaders, church ministers, priests, ordinands, church educators, cathedral deans and even a bishop, drawn from various church denominations as widespread as Edinburgh, Northern Ireland and deepest darkest Somerset.

Then the real learning begins with our first seminar – An Introduction to Judaism (On One Foot) given by Ophir Yarden. The origins of this unusual expression ‘on one foot’ actually  provides a very simple but effective answer. The story goes that a gentile wishing to convert to Judaism said he would do so only if a rabbi could teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective candidate, stood on one foot. Most rabbi’s thought this was a ridiculous request, but Hillel, one of the most famous rabbis who lived at the end of the 1st Century BC and who is associated with developing the Mishnah and Talmud, gave this response:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah;
the rest is the explanation of this–go and study it!”

Remind you of another famous saying?

 

IMG_7358

The view over one of the valleys at Yad Vashem toward an Ultra Orthodox Jew community where most of the men will spend up to 14 hours a day studying while the women go out to work

But of course there is more to Judaism, some of which is not so simple to explain and it has as many different hues and forms as most religious groups, from liberal Judaism to traditional Judaism; Zionist to Hasidic Judaism (colloquially known as the Men in Black). Still a useful exercise to get us started.

The afternoon brought us an introduction to teaching about the Holocaust and the first thing we learnt is that the preferred term is Shoah a word that appears in the bible several times, meaning ‘destruction’. This is not to deny the other victims of the genocide: the Roma people; homosexuals; the physically and mentally disabled; the Poles and other Slavic peoples, but it makes it more personal to the fate of the majority who were Jewish.

The Shoah as a story of mankind. It was done by humans and suffered by humans

Our lecturer Dr Noa Mkaton, spoke of the problems with telling history; the main concern being that as it was the Nazi’s intention to systematically destroy every single Jew the result would be that there would be no one to tell the story from any other angle other than the perpetrators. It became imperative therefore that ways were found to pass on the stories of not only the Jewish people but individual families histories as well. Hence Yad Vashem became a resource for the names and stories to be gathered together in one place. There were some six million stories to be gathered and work on this still continues today and for the foreseeable future.

But stories can be told not only in words but in pictures as well. Of the many photographs that we see of the holocaust or Shoah they are almost certainly of humiliated, browbeaten, tortured people; either political propaganda or physical evidence of murder and abuse. Yet, there are narratives to be told from photographs taken in happier times that can be more effective in telling what has happened and give us insights into Jewish identities both before, during and after.

Children of the Shoah

A Childhood Portrait

The ‘before’ picture is of a two children, dressed in their best clothes and probably taken by their proud parents to have their portraits done in a studio, creating a physical memento that could no doubt be looked at in later years to smile at the poses and the outfits, but nonetheless a pinpoint of what life was like at that moment. Would you be able to tell that the children were Jewish? Does it matter that you can’t tell?

Who knows if a picture of these children exists at the time of their incarceration in the ghetto or one of the concentration camps – most likely they were not even there long enough to ‘pose’ for a photograph, but perished almost immediately in one of the ‘gas showers’.

For one survivor of the holocaust a picture, such as this, was the only thing he had left, although he could never speak about  had happened, his story is ‘articulated so clearly by the words he wrote on the back of photograph in 1945 after he was ‘liberated’. He simply wrote ‘Paper Children’.

IMG_7364

Yiftach explains the significance of the inscriptions in the Valley of the Communities

The day finished with a visit to ‘The Valley of the Communities’ This is a massive 2.5 acre monument literally dug out of natural bedrock. Over 5000 names of communities are engraved on the stone walls , each name recalling a Jewish community which existed for hundreds of years. Today, in most cases, nothing remains but the name.

 

 

 

 

 

Its symbolic connection to Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones is emphasised with no deliberate planting at ground level, but some growth at the top of the stones to represent new risen life; but its greatest impact is in the space in between – a deliberate void.

IMG_7365

A full and interesting day, laying out the groundwork for our seminars over the coming days – but maybe this evening there should be an introduction to the nightlife of the city as well!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff?

Leave a reply
Don't sweat the small stuff?

Don’t sweat the small stuff?

Readings: James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

May I speak and may you hear through the grace of our Lord: Father, Son and Holy Spirit

There’s an American idiom that you may have heard of, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’. It’s basically something that might be said to someone in order to tell them not to worry about things that are not important. It’s actually not a bad thing to suggest, because sometimes we worry about getting the small things sorted out and forget to look at the bigger picture. So are the small things unimportant?

The bigger picture as far as Jesus was concerned was teaching people what their attitude needed to be in relation to God, not whether they had dotted the ‘I’s and crossed the ‘T’s on their membership application to the Christian faith.

In this section of Mark’s gospel people are flooding to him – he has just fed the five thousand, had a brief respite in prayer; and then walked out to his disciples in their boat, when they were fighting against an adverse wind, to calm the weather and their fears. On landing he has been immediately recognised and word has spread and people are rushing about the region, bringing to him their sick, begging for and being granted healing.

Now in this passage, the Pharisees and scribes, who had no doubt been sent out from Jerusalem to gather evidence against him are interrupting a well-deserved meal break to tell him that he’s breaking Jewish law by eating with unwashed hands. No wonder he decides to tell them as it really is! ‘Stop sweating the small stuff!’

To the Jews, and in particular the Pharisees, however, the small stuff was important. They believed that, alongside the written Torah, there existed another body of oral laws, interpretations and traditions transmitted by God to Moses orally and then memorised. In fact there are 613 statutes stated in the Halakhah, or Jewish Law, most of which are derived from the Torah’s books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy … never easy reads!… but some are laws that have been enacted by the rabbis, who have interpreted the Torah over time.

A few of them are related to particular groups of people such as the Nazarites, whilst a large proportion of the others relate to sacrifices and offerings which can only be made in the Temple, which no longer exists. There are some that sound rather quaint to our ears, such as ‘not to make a bald spot in mourning’ or ‘not to eat worms found in fruit once they have left the fruit’… presumably it’s okay to eat them whilst they are still in the fruit then! But there are some that are abhorrent… that a rapist must marry his victim if she is unwed and is never allowed to divorce her. Certainly tells us a lot about the status of women if nothing else.

The laws to which Mark was referring to, and which he explained in some detail to his mainly Gentile audience, are part of the Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws concerning kosher foods and its preparation and handling, and were part of a highly complex and developed system of purity regulations. For orthodox Jews even today they throw up problems, such as how you are going to use a dishwasher for both meat and dairy utensils in a kosher home. Still sweating the small stuff!

Kashrut symbols blog

For many modern non-orthodox Jews, however, they believe that the laws of kashrut are simply primitive health regulations that have become obsolete and that the legalistic aspect of traditional Judaism reduces religion to a set of rituals devoid of spirituality, which was not the intention of Halakhah, which can be translated better as ‘the path that one walks’. So they no longer see the need to sweat the small stuff, perhaps having been persuaded by changes in society that these laws are no longer important or relevant to their faith.

However, back in first century Palestine, Jesus points out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, in that by interpreting and applying scripture in this way they are only honouring God with what they say rather than what they do. His kingdom message has nothing to do with how and what you eat, that is not what will stop you becoming pure. Rather the challenge of the gospel is much more a challenge of the heart. He is insisting that good and bad external and physical actions come from internal and spiritual sources, and that it is human motivation that is the real problem.

His list of evil intentions seem full on, and perhaps it is easy for us to glance at the list and feel comfortable with the fact that on the whole we’re fairly sure we haven’t indulged in many of them, especially the biggies like fornication, murder or adultery. Yet can we be quite sure that in some small way we haven’t practiced theft… the pen ‘borrowed’ from work and never taken back; or licentiousness… the extra packets of cakes or food bought which never got eaten and which had to be thrown away; or slander… the sarcastic insult offered veiled with a smile? What about envy, pride or avarice?

Yes, we might say, but that’s only the small stuff… even so, Jesus doesn’t seem to rank them in order of importance; they are all equally said to be possible evil intentions that are present in and come from the human heart.

He also at this stage doesn’t seem to offer a solution as to what we can to do to either avoid or resolve this problem, we are simply left to infer it… of course later on and with our gift of hindsight we do know what the solution will be, through Christ’s ultimate revelation of the kingdom. However, our reading from the letter of James, does give us something concrete to act upon. It tells us that rather than drawing from our hearts those things that make us sordid that we should listen to that part of us that God has already placed within us.

We are to be quick to listen so that we can exercise self-control and know what the right thing to do is; take time to consider what the effect of our words might be on others so that we act with kindness; to be patient so that our actions are those of love rather than hate.

Christians are called to be above reproach and yet we are only too well aware that we so often fall short. But despite this we can’t casually set aside bits of scripture that we don’t like or understand. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to justify our actions because society around us doesn’t seem to worry about the small stuff; that’s how we become tainted by the world.

Yes, we make mistakes and get it wrong… yes we can seek forgiveness… and yes we will be forgiven; but we need to take an honest look at how we behave and change the things that make us follow human traditions rather than being doers of the word.

‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets;
I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them’. Matthew 5:17

The important thing is that Jesus came not to set aside the law but to fulfil it. The scriptures were not necessarily irrelevant then or now. They act as signposts to the reality that was Jesus. Everything that they were getting at reached a climax in Jesus Christ, and from then on everything was different. He became the perfect law, the law of liberty. So by keeping his law we can constantly remind ourselves of our relationship with the divine so that it becomes an integral part of our existence.

The Pharisees were more concerned that the rules were followed and that keeping the laws was more important than how people were treated. Jesus was more concerned with how we treat others; that we were love God and our neighbours as ourselves, because on those two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Should we sweat the small stuff?… I’ll let you decide.

Amen

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil' Matthew 5:17

‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them’ Matthew 5:17