Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (37 page)

Each October, the community organizes a torchlight
March of Remembrance for the Roman Jews and all other Jews who perished under the Nazis. It starts at the portico of the basilica of Santa Maria (which contains the first-century Jewish and Christian grave slabs) and proceeds to Tiber Island (where the Jews of Rome were brought by the Nazis in 1943 prior to their deportation to Auschwitz) and ends at the steps of the synagogue beyond the river. Large black banners are held aloft, each with the name of one of the death camps printed in white letters. At the head of the march, which is silent (an unusual occurrence in Italy), the largest banner contains Santayana’s famous sentence “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Several years ago, members of the community, believing they had a Gospel mandate to act as peacemakers, undertook a series of quiet, amateur efforts on their own and succeeded in arranging a peace in Mozambique between the guerrillas and the government (after sixteen years of war and one million casualties). The peace has held, as has a similar peace that the community has helped to achieve in Guatemala. They continue to attempt reconciliation in Algeria, the Balkans, and other hotspots, working intuitively and patiently, never abandoning hope, and true to their belief that “war is the greatest
poverty of all.” As I write, a million refugees are spilling out of Kosovo. At its muddy borders are the people of Sant’Egidio, constructing sanitation and housing, offering medicine, food, and schooling, and helping to coordinate the efforts of others. In this new mission of peace, the community has at its disposal only its own part-time volunteers (almost no one at Sant’Egidio is salaried) and what it calls “the weak strength of the Gospel.”

But it also has a growing network of religious leaders of all kinds, committed to its vision that the religions of the world must take the lead in bringing peace to their regions. In this spirit, the community organized in 1986 the first
Uomini e Religioni (People and Religions) conference in the Assisi of Saint Francis. Leaders of all the world’s religions were invited—and they came, and they prayed and talked together for several days. Each year since then the community has organized a similar conference in a European city, in the course of which you may spy Arab sitting down with Israeli, Serb with Bosnian Muslim, Irish Protestant with Irish Catholic. Over time, this mingling in friendship could spell the difference between war and peace in many regions—and the difference between death and life for many individuals.

If there is no magic in the people of Sant’Egidio, there is much goodness. It is a goodness cultivated as any quality must be cultivated—with practice and attention—and, no doubt, in their case, with grace from above; and it has transformed the lives of countless human beings in Trastevere, in Rome, in Italy, and far beyond. But the only mystery here is the mystery of human will. Anyone on earth could do what they have done.

Cynics often say that “nothing can be done,” meaning that nothing can really be accomplished to improve the lot of those
who suffer. Defensive Christians are often heard to say of Christianity that “it has never been tried.” But people like Mother Teresa and the Community of Sant’Egidio give the lie to all cynicism and defensiveness. This earth now holds six billion souls. How many Mother Teresas would it take to succor the abandoned and dying? How many Sant’Egidios would it take to transform the social fabric not just of Trastevere but of the earth itself?

As a percentage of global population, not all that many. It requires only that each of us take the first step—“open [our] hearts” and hold out our hands. When asked once by an incredulous interviewer, “But, Mother, how do you
do
it?” the shrunken and smiling Albanian nun replied, “One by one.”

There is an old French saying, “Hell is paved with the skulls of priests.” I wouldn’t know, nor does anyone. But I am pretty sure, harking back to Jesus’s description of the
Last Judgment, which is preceded by his excoriation of the religious establishment of his day, that many people, both high and low, are in for a surprise. When dealing with hallowed religious material, we must always be on our guard against a knee-jerk piety that obscures rather than assists insight and that prefers to judge, punish, and exclude rather than welcome. Christians, therefore, reading their own sacred texts and revering their own sacred objects, should welcome especially the insights of outsiders—like
Chaim Potok’s Asher Lev, Yale’s
Donald Kagan, and China’s
Yuan Zhiming—who can bring new depth to their experience.

Modern scripture scholarship, rising in nonsectarian, agnostic circles, has brought believers new riches, allowing us to see anew the life of Jesus and the story of the early Church—to view these ancient treasures from venues never available before. Now we can appreciate the personalities, the strengths and limitations, of each evangelist, even finding useful scripture scholarship’s “criterion of embarrassment”—the idea that certain elements of the text were so embarrassing to the sponsoring community that the writer could have included these things only because he did not feel free to leave them out. Such a criterion gives us confidence that Peter (later a great figure) was indeed the bumbler he is portrayed to be, that women (later told to keep their mouths shut) like Magdalene were leaders of the early church, that Jesus casually forgave sexual transgressions, and that his crucifixion rattled his followers to their bones. Modern scholarship has also given us a better sense of the continuities (and discontinuities) between the teaching of Jesus and his first followers and among the various factions of the developing Jesus Movement, as it grew into the Church of later centuries. All these are new insights that give new strength.

If we take from the most modern, we also borrow from the most ancient, for the worldview of the Jews is the rock-solid promontory that supports Christian faith. Without the Jewish sense of destiny, both corporate and individual, without the Jewish sense of history and the meaning given to suffering, no part of the story that Christians tell themselves would make any sense whatever. It is from the Jews that we received the idea of chosenness by God—“You have not chosen me; I have chosen you”—and from the Jews that we learned that chosenness implies both suffering and redemption. Indeed, to approach
the idea of chosenness with humility and imagination is to find oneself on the point of retching—because it brings one in fresh proximity with one’s own suffering (past, present, and to come) and with the pain of others, of all others—the great moaning and shuddering that runs through the whole of human history.

But because it still requires a great artist or a great saint to “look on” Jesus in his suffering, all our approaches—scientific, Jewish, orthodox, pious—to authentic Christianity are likely to prove inadequate; and I wonder how far we have come—as a civilization—from his own mother’s peasant judgment that what this guy is saying doesn’t really add up. Jesus insists on forgiveness, turning the other cheek, peace, and
compassion,
always
compassion—and which of us wants to hear
that?
The leaders of the Jewish religious establishment rejected Jesus in his own lifetime, not principally because he rejected the
Torah of
Moses or because he claimed to be God, but because of his
midrash, his interpretation of God’s word. He insisted that all of Jewish sacred scripture—the Torah and the Prophets—was asking them to live in a way that they considered unrealistic. Any Christian who imagines himself morally superior to those who turned away has only to glance at the subsequent history of Christian persecution of Jews to realize that Christians have been far more successful at rejecting Jesus than any Jew has ever been.

Despite this catastrophic bimillennial failure, the image of Jesus haunts our civilization in exceedingly persistent ways. Everyone knows who he is; everyone knows what he looked like; everyone knows what he expects of us. This consistency, this transultimate
reliability
is found in the four original gospel portraits and has persisted through the ages. As the ancient
liturgy of Easter says of him: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega—his are the seasons and the ages.” Or, far less triumphally, as a Jewish woman confided to me recently: “I love Jesus. Don’t get me wrong: I have no interest
whatsoever
in Christianity. But I love Jesus; I feel he belongs to me.”

At the turn of the new millennium, it may be time for everyone to reassess Jesus. I hope that the process of Jewish-Christian reconciliation will soon have progressed far enough that Jews may reexamine their automatic (and completely understandable) fear of all things Christian and acknowledge Jesus as one of their own, not as the Messiah, but as a brother who called God
Abba.
For Christians, it may be time to acknowledge that we have misunderstood Jesus in virtually every way that matters. As
Raymond Brown was fond of remarking, if Jesus were to return to earth, the first thing we would do is crucify him again.

But whether we are Jew or Christian, believer or atheist, the figure of Jesus—as final Jewish prophet, as innocent and redeeming victim, as ideal human being—is threaded through our society and folded into our imagination in such a way that it cannot be excised. He is the mysterious ingredient that laces everything we taste, the standard by which all moral actions are finally judged. As one poet, W. H. Auden, echoing centuries of others, says affectionately and without regard to dogma or creed:

I
MEAN
TO
GIVE
HERE
not an exhaustive bibliography of everything I consulted (which, given the enormous accumulation of biblical and New Testament studies over the past half century, would dangerously increase the size of this book) but a sense of what I found most valuable. As I did in Volume Two of this series, I again recommend the six volumes
of The Anchor Bible Dictionary
(New York, 1992), now helpfully available on CD-ROM, as the best of all initial research tools. For those who prefer a more compact instrument, both
The Oxford Companion to the Bible
(New York, 1993) and
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990), the latter containing particularly well focused overviews, are also highly recommended. Other excellent sources of information for the non-specialist are the back issues of
Bible Review
and
Biblical Archaeology Review
, in both of which well-regarded scholars are invited to write for the common reader about current breakthroughs and controversies.

In confirming my presentation of the outlook from the Janiculum, I found helpful Christopher Hibbert’s
Rome: The Biography of a City
(London and New York, 1985);
The Blue Guide to Rome
(London and New York, 1994); the Lazio volume (Venice, 1997) of the
Jewish Itinerary
series; and Ruth Liliana Geller’s
Roma Ebraica
(Rome, 1984). Giacomo Debenedetti’s small but unforgettable book about the Nazi roundup of the Jews of Rome,
16 ottobre 1943
(Palermo, 1993), is not available in an English translation, so far as I know. Livy’s history of ancient Rome,
Ab Urbe Condita Libri
—from which I took the description of the Celtic invaders—is available in many editions.

The title of this book is a phrase from the beautiful blessing of
Jacob on his son Joseph, found in Genesis 49:26. The phrase is translated in different
ways—from “the utmost bounds of the eternal hills” (Jewish Publications Society) to “the delights of the everlasting hills” (E. A. Speiser). My translation is taken from the Latin of
Jerome’s Vulgate, which served for more than a thousand years in the West the same purpose that the Greek Septuagint served first in the Jewish diaspora, then in the Eastern church—as universal Bible. Jerome did not have at his disposal the Masoretic Hebrew text that has since become standard, but different versions of the Hebrew and Septuagint, which he used for comparison and correction. He translated the phrase:
“desiderium collium eternorum.”
Correct or incorrect, it is for me an image of the desire beyond articulation, the desire deeper than all (conscious) desiring.

The “
Axial Age,” or
Achsenzeit
, is a term invented by the postwar German historian
Karl Jaspers in his
Vom Ursprung und Zeit der Geschichte
(1949), in which he proposes his theory, since then widely accepted, of an age of extraordinary worldwide creativity with the fifth century
B.C.
as its white-hot center.

There is no one to whom I owe more in this chapter than the great Italian Jewish scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, who knew more than anyone about just about everything—certainly about everything in antiquity. Two of his books proved especially enlightening:
Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization
(Cambridge, 1971) and
Pagine ebraiche
(Torino, 1987), published in English translation as
Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism
(Chicago, 1994).