Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (10 page)

I could have told him, Some of my best friends are Jews. That spring, determined to defuse the anti-Jewish powder keg of Holy Week, I invited some Jewish friends to join us at Newman House for a Passover Seder. The Jews present were not, to my knowledge, religious, and it did not occur to me not to preside. As I went through the Haggadah, having carefully rehearsed, I felt personally responsible to undo centuries' worth of Christian Holy Week Jew hatred. I was celebrating the Jewishness of Jesus, having come to the belief, I suppose, that nothing significant really separated our two religions. Implicitly I assumed that once Jesus was proclaimed in his Jewishness, Jews would finally accept him. When I lifted the matzo, I cited his act at the Last Supper,
his
Seder. "This is my body," I said, "broken for you." Moved, I sought the eyes of my Jewish friends, but did not find them. Religious or not, they knew better than to join me in my presumptuous gesture. I would not recognize it for what it was until years later.

When the priest at the consecration says, "This is the cup of the New Covenant," he is pronouncing the Old Covenant superfluous. Its job, after Jesus, is to leave the sanctuary. The Jew's job is to disappear. From a Christian point of view, just by continuing to exist, Jews dissent. Because of the threat it poses to the faith of the Church, that dissent can be defined by Christians as the core of Jewish belief, which of course continues the insult. These were the currents running below the surface of that liturgy. By refusing to meet my eyes, my Jewish friends were withholding assent from my Seder-turned-Eucharist. Even as I wished to root out the ancient assumptions, in other words, I was reiterating them. Old Testament promise leads to New Testament fulfillment. Real prayer involves Jesus. The "chosenness" of Israel extends to all human beings. I felt deputized—a "deputy" myself—to declare for Jews the universal extension of their covenant with God, whose name I felt free to pronounce aloud. The New Covenant was my watchword as I claimed a kind of Jewishness myself, not knowing yet to call it "Judaizing." Christian Jewishness was only the awareness of having been adopted into God's chosen people, as my patron Paul had put it. But if, through Jesus, God "chooses" everybody, why are the once chosen Jews still here? I'd been taught to think of that as Paul's question, as if he were the first Christian universalist.
³²

And always, like a stake in the heart of such considerations, there stood the cross. Before the cross, in my most solemn moments, I bowed. I had long since left behind my personal share of the anguish of my brother's polio—he had grown by then into a confident young scholar—but the anguish of my own unhappiness as a young American at the mercy of that conflicted age was pointed. I lay the bundle of my feelings before the cross each day, and in truth the burden lifted as the cross carried some of its weight away. In particular, my noontime routine of saying the Mass—the
sacrifice
of the Mass—was deeply consoling. What I prayed for mostly was peace.

The war had become my personal obsession. Indeed, the silence of American bishops on Vietnam—what Rabbi Heschel had called "blasphemy"—had become, to my mind, a replay of the silence of German bishops. That was the occasion of a life-changing epiphany: If American B-52s had been dropping condoms on Vietnam, as wags noted, the Roman Catholic hierarchy would have vigorously and unambiguously condemned the war as intrinsically immoral. But they had no moral competence to make such a judgment, they said in effect, because the B-52s were only dropping napalm. On that Good Friday, I joined a protest demonstration outside the residence of Boston's cardinal archbishop. Standing on the sidewalk before passing traffic, I held up a sign that I had lettered myself: "Another Crucifixion in Indochina." Yet it had not occurred to me that it was mostly Christians who were dropping gelatinous fire on the heads of mostly Buddhists. Would Buddhists have been consoled to be told they were Jesus Christ?

This was the time of my self-surpassing, in Heschel's word, yet I heard nothing discordant in a line I often quoted from our hero Thomas Merton, that war in the nuclear age is an evil "second only to the crucifixion."
³³
Long the touchstone of my religious imagination, the crucifixion had become my political touchstone as well.
The Non-Violent Cross
was the title of a book by James Douglass that caught the spirit of our engaged theology. "One finds real revolution...," Douglass wrote, "by immersing oneself in the dark beauty of space and time where the crucifixion of man is felt most deeply."
³⁴

"I will give you the treasures of darkness," the Lord told Isaiah, "and the hoards in secret places that you may know that it is I, the Lord."
³⁵
Eventually, there was nothing beautiful in my darkness, and the sum of my twenties seemed the farthest thing from treasure. In January 1973, the American phase of the Vietnam War ended. The American-supplied South Vietnamese army would fight on for two more years, but GIs fired their last shots on January
22.
It was the day Lyndon Johnson died of heart failure in Texas, the day the Supreme Court handed down its
Roe v.
Wade
decision concerning abortion, and the day I turned thirty. By then, everything I believed in had been upended. There seemed only one place for me to go, given the shape of those beliefs, to try to set them right.

The next turn in my story took me to Jerusalem. Only in hindsight does it seem inevitable that I should have gone there in the summer of 1973, following the war's end and my coming to maturity. "It had something to do with God," I wrote, the first sentence of a journal I kept during that sojourn. "At the Holy Sepulcher, I tried to imagine the death of Jesus. But all I could see were the warring monks, the bad art, the dollar candles and the tourists." Treasures of darkness? By coming to Jerusalem at this point in my life, I learned that I did not even know what my question was. The calcified geography was no help. I looked for the place where they had crucified my Lord, and I could not find it.

It was the summer before the Yom Kippur War. One day in August, on the Jewish fast of Tisha b'Av, I joined the thousands of Jews hurrying into the Old City, passing closed stalls and shops, going through alleys, gates, and checkpoints, down into the vast open space before the Western Wall. I covered my head and watched as the devout approached the wall, waiting their turn to touch it, to squeeze jotted prayers into its crevices, to kiss the stones. On Tisha b'Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple. A story in the tradition says that when the Romans set fire to the Temple, six angels came down from heaven, lighting on top of the Western Wall. As the violence mounted and the fire intensified, the angels wept. Their tears kept the flames away from that one part of the Temple, which is why the wall survives to this day. Those angels are still there, tradition says, and they are still weeping.

Another tradition says that on Tisha b'Av, each of the children of Israel who had left Egypt dug his grave, and that night he slept in it. In the morning, fifteen thousand of the people did not wake up. Their graves were filled in, and the rest of the people continued to wander. Each year for the forty years that Israel wandered in the wilderness, the same thing happened—everyone sleeping in his grave on that day, and all but fifteen thousand waking up. This is how it came to pass that, by the time the children of Israel entered the Promised Land, all of the generation that came from Egypt were dead. And for this reason, to this day, on Tisha b'Av a Jew sleeps with a stone beneath his pillow, a symbol of his grave.
³⁶

On Tisha b'Av I stood before the surviving wall of the Temple, ignorant of the Arab houses that had been leveled in 1967 to make room for such gatherings. The Palestinian complaint had not registered with me. My theology had been recast by the Holocaust, and central to it now was not the innocence of Jesus but of Jews. I had come to depend as much on a notion of Jewish victimhood as my forebears depended on an idea of Jewish villainy. The symmetry of my theological assumptions required, in effect, that Jews replace Jesus on the cross. And just as it was once forbidden to ask if Jesus could have sinned, so, by the time of my arrival in Jerusalem, was it forbidden to ask if the state of Israel could commit acts of injustice. The symmetry of a supersessionist imagination still required that Jews fulfill a set of Christian expectations. Jewish victimhood and innocence had trumped the charge of deicide.

The Yom Kippur War, only months away, would begin to change all this, as the illusion of Israel's exemption from the rules of real-world politics would be harder to sustain. The "creation of facts" on the West Bank, with Jewish settlers usurping Palestinian land; the ruthless Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; the Intifada and the Israeli war against Arab teenagers; the push-pull of Likud and Labor; the political rise of messianic Orthodoxy—through it all, Israel refused to enact a script written by the West, which is to say, by Christians. It seemed an old story. Christian disappointment in the harsh policies of Israel would fuel a new current of mutual suspicion. Israel, a nation like other nations, with a hard-line pursuit of narrowly defined self-interest? But wasn't Israel, born of the ashes of Auschwitz, required thereby to be different? Why else had the children of Israel slept in graves, if not to be resurrected as more than others? These were questions of which, in 1973, I was entirely innocent. And I was ignorant of the painful history that would eventually demand an accounting—this accounting.

In truth, my first journey to Jerusalem was a journey more into myself than into history, ancient or recent. I was less a pilgrim than a refugee, yet Jerusalem opened itself to me. Jews refuse to refer to the Western Wall as the Wailing Wall anymore—it is referred to by many as the Kotel—yet it was grief that seized me. I felt no presence of weeping angels, and when I raised my eyes to the Temple, it was no longer there. In Jerusalem—"Jerusalem my mother," Augustine wrote
³⁷
—my own consoling faith revealed itself as having been destroyed. In Jerusalem I could admit that the time had come for me to leave the priesthood. Augustine, too, would be displeased.

A few months later, perhaps as the Yom Kippur War raged and as another annihilation of Jews seemed possible, I began the formal process of "laicization." Oddly, I now understand that I left the Catholic priesthood as a way of preserving my Catholic faith, for by then I could only have a doubter's faith. A dissenting priest is a figure of the absurd; I already knew that. I had become a priest because of the cross, and I stopped being a priest because ... Was it the Vietnam War? Was it the German bishops and the American echo of their silence? Was it the hatred I sensed at the cold heart of my own Church? Silence, I would learn, was the least of it.

Rabbi Heschel taught me not only that silence can be blasphemy, but that the breach between his kind and mine can be a form of blasphemy too. Indeed, didn't the one lead to the other? In Heschel's God I saw mine, which taught me that Catholics and Jews did not have to be enemies—in fact, should not have been. Heschel, "the brand plucked from the fire of Europe," was a living demonstration of the permanent relevance of the Holocaust, not just to Zionists or other Jews, but for anyone longing to believe in God today, including, and perhaps especially, the Catholics who recognized themselves in that white-bearded rabbi. "Religion," Heschel wrote, "is the source of dissatisfaction with the self."
³⁸
What befell the Jews of Europe in the twentieth century is the source of the Church's dissatisfaction, whether the Church knows it yet or not. It is surely the source of mine. That it took the Holocaust to open an honorable and reciprocal dialogue between Jews and Christians is an outrage. But that the Holocaust requires us, personally as well as institutionally, to understand how such events were prepared for by other events is an absolute moral legacy. The question posed itself not to me but to history: How did the cross of Jesus Christ become the cross at Auschwitz?

But the cross at Auschwitz raises its first question about the cross in Jerusalem. When the crucifixion of a particular man at a particular place and time is removed from the realm of the vividly real—the abject failure it could only have been to Jesus and those who loved him—and made a universal emblem of victory over death, does it become something false? We will see how, once the crucifixion was made central to Christian piety, the Jews came to the forefront of Christian consciousness as the enacters of that crucifixion, and how their being tagged as such amounts to slander. But here I am asking something more basic, a question prior to the question implied by
Nostra Aetate:
Who killed Jesus?
³⁹

Or perhaps that is just the question after all. We will see how Saint Paul domesticated the meaning of the cross in such a way that, ultimately, consolation-seeking Christians could erect it at a death camp. But what a strange consolation. Those coming after Paul, especially, as we will see, Saint Anselm, would regard the crucifixion as God's saving will, would conclude, that is, that the killer of Jesus was God. And since God, despite everything, was to be trusted, death was deprived of its sting. Even the death of Jesus. In this way, Paul turned the Roman execution device back on the Romans, as the first generations of Christian martyrs, going to deaths equally willed by God, would turn their violent deaths into the fertile ground of a burgeoning Christian faith.

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ, as interpreted by Paul and later incorporated in the Passion narratives of the Gospels, became an image of hope precisely because it gave such complete expression to despair. The brutal death of one taken to be the Messiah, a defeat that included his being abandoned by his most cherished and committed followers, would not have been enough to brace the religious imaginations of believers through their own brutal deaths. The awful fate of Jesus on the cross had to be the fate chosen for him by God. Only then could abject failure itself be transformed. Among followers of Jesus, remembering his last words as "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"—the felt experience of God's murderous absence, which reaches to the religious heart of human mortality—would not undercut faith but prompt it. By sacralizing the profane cross in this way, Paul gave Rome an unprecedented problem: How do you defeat a movement that defines defeat as victory?
⁴⁰