Review of Modern Jews Engage the New Testament by Rabbi Michael J. Cook, Part 2

Chapter 1—When Advice of Sages Ceases to be Sage Advice


I won’t say too much about this first chapter, since it serves basically as an introduction to the themes of the book which will be more fully elaborated later. Two of these themes stand out in importance. The first is that Jews continue to ignore the New Testament to their own detriment. Cook relates nine short vignettes—ranging from reactions to a nativity scene, to the Hebrew name of Jesus, and to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ—to underscore how Jewish ignorance of the New Testament ends up being counter-productive for Jews who become “seriously disadvantaged.” Indeed, Cook says, Jews get tongue-tied when asked questions such as “Who do you think Jesus was?” or “How do you account for Jesus’ empty tomb?” Or even when asking questions of themselves, such as: if Jesus’ death conferred benefit on humanity, why aren’t Jews praised instead of blamed for that death?

What we need, Cook argues, is a revolution which can only come from the top down, not from the ground up. He gives us an instructive historical note here. In 1899, Reform Rabbi Harris Weinstock wrote a sort of survey entitled “Shall Jesus of Nazareth Be Taught in the Jewish Sabbath School?” which in fact advocated for greater Jewish knowledge about Jesus, in order that Jews might better defend themselves. Responses among the 60 respondents ranged from the negative to the cautiously positive. Yet no change ensued because “seven required conditions” (to be enumerated in chapter 23) did not yet exist.

Jumping ahead one hundred years to 1999, we find another survey taken by Roxanne Schneider-Shapiro, designed to update Weinstock’s results. The proposed learning curve would embrace not only Jesus but also the New Testament and Christianity. Of the 450 synagogues who received a survey, 225 responded—with again, both positive and negative feedback. These two surveys give us meaningful data on the attitudes of “Jewish religious professionals,” a baseline from which we can determine what is still needed.

The second main theme to be elaborated in the rest of the book concerns the New Testament itself, which does not portray the “real” Jesus. The gospels, in Cook’s view, are the real culprits in fostering anti-Semitic attitudes, as can be seen from their blaming of the Jews for Jesus’ death and from their supersessionist theology, exploited in recent times by Nazism. For historical reasons, then, the Jewish community has been discouraged, or rather discouraged itself, from engaging the New Testament. (In the Introduction Cook has already reworked the metaphor of famous sculptural figures of Synagoga and Ecclesia—which depict the blindness of the Jewish people towards the gospel—into an image of Jews’ self-imposed blindness vis-à-vis the New Testament.)

The particular way in which Jews should come to know the New Testament lies in what Cook calls its “dynamics”—and to apply this knowledge to “enhance the well-being of Jews living in a Christian environment.” What he means by “dynamics” is, as he will show, learning how the gospels developed, namely, through inventions, alterations, and creation that leaves the now-undiscoverable real Jesus behind. In the course of the book Cook will show himself to be a minimalist in terms of “recovering” the historical Jesus. In fact, his approach is standard-fare form- and tradition-criticism; he accepts, for instance, the idea that there is a sharp dichotomy between history and theology. That is, the gospels reflect the theological concerns of their writers rather than history—not as well as history or not as (true, accurate) history written from a theological viewpoint. Or, the idea that the later church created material now in the gospels in order to meet its own needs at the time.

And those needs had distinctly anti-Jewish overtones. A minimalist when it comes to the historicity of the New Testament, Cook is a maximalist in finding anti-Judaism embedded in the final gospels.

NEXT: Chapter 2—Results of Ignorance: Evolving Jewish Views of Jesus

You Say You Want a Revolution . . .

I’m part way through Rabbi Michael J. Cook’s Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-Being in a Christian Environment. Here’s the scoop: Cook teaches at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. Specifically, his area is Judaeo-Christian Studies, and his affiliation is Reform Judaism. HUC-JIR, Reform’s rabbinical seminary, is according to Cook the first such seminary to require training in the New Testament. It is high time, Cook believes, that Jews stop being intentionally ignorant of the New Testament and come to learn what it’s all about. In contrast to the high value Jews place on knowledge in other areas of study, we are woefully ignorant of the New Testament and therefore cannot formulate a proper response when confronted with questions from or about Christians. New Testament study will enable Jews to feel empowered rather than tongue-tied in dealing with texts that have contributed to anti-Semitism and ill feeling towards Jews.

So in Modern Jews Cook becomes, you should pardon the expression, an evangelist who wants to see a revolution in the curricula of each and every Jewish seminary, synagogue and religious school. It’s radical, unheard of, extraordinary, out of the mainstream. But it needs to happen.

I’ll look at each of his chapters in coming posts, hopefully one every week or so. This week here are a few of my first thoughts.

What Cook attempts to teach is not so much the content of the New Testament as what he calls “Gospel Dynamics.” (The constant repetition of that phrase in the book begins to sound like a registered trademark after a while, and it strangely reminded me of Charles Atlas’ “Dynamic Tension” exercise method!) What are Gospel Dynamics? It’s Cook’s phrase to explain how the New Testament gospels work. And specifically, to explain why the New Testament is (allegedly – more on that later) anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish.

In a nutshell, here’s how it goes. The gospels are not really interested in history. They are interested in theology. In fact, what the gospel writers did was to take the real, historical, Jewish Jesus and to rework the story of his life to meet the needs of a community several decades, even generations, removed from the original. So for example, by the time the gospel writers wrote, Christians were afraid of Rome and afraid of being associated with the Jewish people – Christianity had been considered a Jewish sect early on - who had just unsuccessfully waged a failed rebellion against Rome, which ended in the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. So what did the gospel writers do? They switched the blame for Jesus’ death from Rome to the Jews, thereby in effect pacifying any Romans who would hear or read the Christian message.

Think of it this way. Supposing that in real history John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by a coterie of Republicans. For the next forty years the Democrats hold sway in the government, only to be finally replaced by Republicans. And the life of Kennedy has not been written down until the Republicans come to power, though early on everyone knew whodunnit. Now comes the time to write that story, but for fear of Republican reprisals the chroniclers rewrite history and make Democrats to be the real assassins.

That’s not a full analogy to what Cook is doing, because even more than being motivated by politics and fear, the gospel writers are motivated by theology. But it’s enough to give you an idea.

And such ideas are by no means Cook’s own, just the rather patentable phrase “Gospel Dynamics.” For a long, long time, some scholars have done two things when approaching the gospels (they’ve done a lot more, but let’s start here):

1. Assume that the content of the gospels was first circulated orally, then later on massaged, shaped, and reworked in written form not to tell what actually happened, but to meet the needs of a later generation, in the process often inventing things wholesale.

2. Assume a false alternative. Either the writers were interested in history, or they were interested in theology, but not both. Either the writers were interested in their own generation, or they were interested in what really happened in a previous generation, but not both.

Imagine a malleable, clay sculpture of a man in a standing posture, hands at his side. Decades after the statue was first created in peaceable times, life takes a dramatic turn for the worse and the hapless people are in need of self-defense. They take classes in karate, they carry weapons, they keep their lights turned on all the time. They look to heroes who can defend them against others. In this social climate, someone takes the original clay sculpture and reworks it so that the man is now shown to be carrying a machine gun, and the statue is put on public display. This is the kind of person we need these days! This is what speaks to our community. And that is what we are interested in — what works for us today, not what the original may have been.

I am oversimplifying a huge area of scholarly study, but I am doing so in a calculated way in order to make vivid some of what is going on in the field of gospel studies. Actually, what Cook calls “Gospel Dynamics” includes what scholars otherwise call “tradition-history” — the idea that the gospel content (“traditions”) circulated orally for decades before being shaped in light of community concerns and finally written down, with minimal concern for history. And so the historical Jesus, his actions, his words, and those of his immediate followers, are lost to us, the only Jesus we have being in large part the creation of a later time.

I’ve said so much on this in order to point out that Cook is not doing anything especially new, and in fact he takes his ideas even further than many others would. But is it “good for the Jews”? Cook thinks so. In succeeding posts I’ll examine his chapters individually and see if he presents an accurate picture of the New Testament as well as how he hopes his understandings will benefit the Jewish people. And we'll explore if this is a Twitter-worthy revolution.

I'm continuing a series of reflections from my reading of Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's Jewish Literacy. Some of these reflections, like this one, take us far afield from the topic of the book, but I have found many of his comments and stories to be applicable elsewhere. Case in point today. In the section on "Destruction of the Temple", Rabbi Telushkin notes:

The Temple’s fall, more than any other loss, signaled to the Jews the final failure of the revolt. The Talmud speaks of Jews who went into a permanent state of depression, who “became ascetics, binding themselves neither to eat meat nor to drink wine. Rabbi Joshua got into a conversation with them and said to them: ‘My sons, why do you not eat meat nor drink wine?’ They replied: ‘Shall we eat meat which used to be brought as an offering on the altar, now that the altar is no more? Shall we drink wine which used to be poured as a libation on the altar, but now no longer?’ He said to them: ‘If that is so, we should not eat bread either, because the meal offerings have ceased.’ They said: ‘[That is correct, and] we will manage with fruit.’ ‘We should not eat fruit either, [he said] because there is no longer an offering of firstfruits.’ The ascetics responded that they would manage with other fruits. Rabbi Joshua said, ‘But we should not drink water because there is no longer any ceremony of the water libation.’” To this they had no answer, whereupon the pragmatic Rabbi Joshua advised them: “My sons, come and listen to me. Not to mourn at all is impossible, because the blow has fallen. To mourn overmuch is also impossible, because we do not impose on the community a hardship which the majority cannot endure.”

There are some Christians, Jewish or not, who believe that it is wrong to observe Christmas or Easter because of their alleged pagan origins. I happen to be Jewish, and there is much about Christmas and Easter that is foreign to the Jewish culture. But to observe the birth and the resurrection day of the Messiah can be a wonderful thing. And actually, the pagan connection was likely that the church took over -- co-opted -- the pagan holidays to sanctify them. Nevertheless, some will insist that by virtue of a pagan connection in the first millennium, they are off bounds today.

To that, I offer a variation on Rabbi Joshua's argument:

"We shall not celebrate the Messiah's birth and resurrection because they were transformations of pagan holidays."

"If that is so, we should not call the names of the days as we do (Sunday, Monday, etc.) because they are named after pagan gods and celestial bodies."

"That is correct. We will manage with saying, 'first day,' "second day,' 'third day'" [as is actually done in modern Hebrew].

"We should not say that either, because English was a language that developed among pagans."

To this they had no answer.

From my mouth to God's ears. I'm sure though, that the anti-Christmas folks will have an answer even to that.

The Ironies of God

Rabbi Telushkin, in the section of Jewish Literacy on “Albert Einstein (1879-1955),” writes:

There is a certain delicious irony in the fact that Nazi antisemitism—responsible for chasing both Einstein, Meitner, and hundreds of thousands of other Jews out of Germany—also guaranteed that the Axis would lose the Second World War. If not for Nazi antisemitism, Germany would likely have been the first nation to develop the atom bomb, and the history of the world would have been radically different.

Is the hand of God in this "irony" of history? Sometimes it is dangerous to read theology into history—there is always someone who is sure the latest catastrophe is God's judgment. Yet in Genesis, the Joseph story recounts how Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. There, Joseph became known to Pharaoh as the only one who could correctly interpret Pharaoh's dreams. As a result, Joseph was elevated to the second highest position in Egypt. By divinely given foresight, Joseph knew that the entire area would be devastated by famine within a few years, and so devised a plan to store grain. When the famine finally came, Joseph was enabled to save his family by selling them some of the grain which had been set aside. As Joseph remarks to his family in chapter 50, verse 2: "And as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive."

Irony? Yes. God's hand? Yes. It's dicey to read off divine intervention from the headlines, but the Joseph story assures us that God can take tragedy and turn it into something that results in good. Maybe we can't trust our interpretations of the lastest disaster, but we can certainly trust God.

On Jewish Loyalties

I’ve been going through the book Jewish Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in preparation for some classes I’ll be teaching this fall on Judaism and Jewish history. It's a superb resource and a great overview of all things Jewish. I thought it would be helpful (for me, maybe for you) to regularly blog on what he has to say.

So today's thought comes out of Rabbi Telushkin’s article on “Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)” which includes this, on Jewish loyalties:

Brandeis aggressively criticized Jews who expressed fear that support for Zionism would call their loyalty to America into question. “Multiple loyalties,” he cogently explained, do not necessarily imply “mutually exclusive loyalties. A man can be loyal to his family, his city, his state and his country, and need have no fear that these loyalties will conflict.” Today, some three quarters of a century later, American Jews still cite Brandeis’s formulation to counter accusations that those who work on behalf of Israel are guilty of having dual loyalties [pages 412-413].

This fear of divided loyalties was also part of early Reform Judaism’s resistance to Zionism, as Telushkin explains elsewhere:

Reform Jews feared that Zionism’s insistence that Jews should live in Palestine would call into question Jewish loyalties to their native lands [“Neturei Karta,” p. 335].

Jews who have come to believe in Jesus but insist they are still Jews claim loyalty both to the Jewish people and to Jesus. And they claim loyalty both to the Jewish people and to all people who follow Jesus, Jewish or gentile.

Brandeis was no believer in Jesus, but one wonders if he would have extended the dictum—“Multiple loyalties do not necessarily imply mutually exclusive loyalties”—to the case of Jesus-believing Jews. Or would he have said, as many do, that for a Jew to be for Jesus is an oxymoron, like vegetarians for meat?

Oxymoron or multiple loyalties? What do you think?

Before Its Time

I've just re-read The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem, noted Polish science-fiction writer. It's one part Brave New World, one part The Matrix, with a bit of Alice in Wonderland thrown in for good measure. This 1970s book was prescient, foreseeing many of the current dilemmas of bioethics and transhumanism. There's a lot of talking points that can could out of this for a group discussion. Besides which it's really quite funny; I had to stop myself from laughing out loud in Borders over my latte. (The last book that had that effect on me was Rabelais' Gargantua in something that was billed as "the lively modern translation.")

What's the future hold for followers of Jesus? For Jewish attitudes towards him?

More on tough Jews...

I haven't blogged here for a while but having finally gotten some responses I guess these things work :) Anyway, I had an interesting time in Philadelphia recently and it's kind of a follow up to my post on "Tough Jews, Tough Messiahs" - at the Jewish Museum there was an exhibit on Jewish boxers. Yes, there were quite a few in the early 20th century. I think about 1/3 of all boxers were Jewish in the 1920s. In the beginning sometimes the Jews took Irish names but after enough Jews had entered the field, some of the Irish started taking Jewish names. Check out the exhibit here. It featured a lot of paintings by Charles Miller who actually has a website at www.jewishboxers.com, as well as newsreel footage, posters, actual gloves and trunks and other items.

And you gotta love the name they gave the exhibit: "Sting Like a Maccabee" !

It's Been a while...

Just realized it's been September since I posted anything here. I guess I like to write and blog and do the push the pencil thing but I don't like to feel that there is a pressure to stick to a deadline. Speaking of laying back and taking it easy, the new Elton John album Peachtree Road has a laid back, lazy-Southern feel to it that I've really been enjoying. (Random review link). I love the country song "Turn the Lights Out When You Leave"; hope some others cover it.

Captain Rat?

OK, in the late hours of the night I was thinking of biotech and comic books. The time may be ripe for a new super-anti-hero...Captain Rat! Created from human genes and rat genes, his life is spent in angst in an attempt to figure out if he is human or rat, accepted neither by people nor by rodents. An old enough idea, but a good time to revisit the topic, as the creation of chimeras will be around the corner, in biotech time. Chimera is the bio-term for a cross-species creature; ironically, the word also refers to a product of the imagination, perhaps soon to take on reality on a street corner near you. Lots of philosophical and ethical grist for the mill here. (For some reason this link does not seem to go where it should in Netscape, but it's OK in my IE.)

Speaking of comics, how come everyone is always Captain? Captain America, Captain Planet. Why aren't there Corporals, Sergeants, Generals? Does Corporal Rat not have the same ring to it? Discuss amongst yourselves...

Of Mice and Men or even of Mice-Men

For the past few months I've had a developing interest in, even passion for, biotech and bioethics issues. These would be subjects like cloning, stem cell research, the future of humanity via the creation of "Techno-sapiens" and chimeras (cross-species creatures). And all the public policy questions that come with the discussion. I've found this book tremendously helpful: Human Dignity in the Bioetch Century: A Christian Vision for Public Policy edited by Charles Colson and Nigel M. de S. Cameron. InterVarsity Press publishes it; IMHO, everyone concerned with these issues ought to read it.

Remember the old movie ca. 1960, The Time Machine based on the H. G. Wells story? Not the goppy remake but the original. Humanity millions of years from now, evolved into two species, one enslaving the other, the haves and the have-nots. Given the current pace of developments, it may not take millions of years for this to happen. Science fiction is a great way to read tomorrow's newspaper today.

Tough Jews, Tough Messiahs

With Yom Kippur coming up tonight, here's a piece I wrote that will appear (radically revised, I'm told) in publication—but here's the bloggy version:

Recently I read a book published just a few short years ago, called Tough Jews, written by a guy named Rich Cohen. It's the story of New York City's Jewish gangsters, and a colorful story it is. The book is peppered with names like Tick-Tock Tannenbaum, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, Gurrah Shapiro, for good measure even two Bugsys (Siegel and Goldstein). Even Larry King figures in this story, not as a gangster but as a friend of the author's father. It's the story of an era gone by, but the author takes away a lesson.

Maybe we wouldn't want to be around these guys, and no one's suggesting that brutal cold-blooded murder is good, but there is a part of the lives of the gangsters that says one thing: Jews can be tough. We don't have to be the victims. We can dish it out. The "spiritual" descendants of these gangsters? Modern Israel, maybe. The Israeli army. One thought resurfaces a couple of times in the book—the image of somebody in one of the ghettos of Europe, nobody knows who it was or exactly when, telling his co-descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: stand up and fight, Jews! If you stand up and fight, they will run. It's no accident that when neo-Nazis started up in America, the government sometimes called on the Jewish gangsters, on Murder, Incorporated, to break them up.

After 2000 years of exile, of being bumped around country to country, of being victims of pogroms and Inquisitions and a whole gamut of anti-Semitism, could anyone blame Jews for wanting to be tough? Sure, some say, it was Torah study and faithfulness to God's covenant that kept us alive all that time. But even the Orthodox, many of them anyway, look for a tough Messiah. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We all have images of the tough Jews in history, the exact opposite of the ghetto Jews meekly marching off to be exterminated. The Maccabees are probably some of the first tough Jews we Jewish kids heard about in Hebrew school. Five warriors against an army of Greeks and Syrians. Ergo, Hanukkah. We also learned about Masada, Bar Kochba (I remember hearing a legend that unless you could ride on a horse through a forest and pull up the trees as you went along, you couldn't join Bar Kochba's army)—jump ahead centuries—the guys who held out in the Warsaw Ghetto, the invincible (it seemed at the time) Israeli army.

And, for Rich Cohen and others, the Jewish gangsters of the 20s, the 30s, the 40s.

If you had asked your grandfather or your great-grandfather what they believed about the Messiah, you would have heard about another tough Jew. The Messiah? He will be a warrior. He will destroy the enemies of Israel. He will rebuild the Temple, not a modern idea of what being tough is about, but after all, a way of saying, "I'll show you" to the Romans, who destroyed it in the first place. Even though Bar Kochba wasn't the Messiah—as the famous Rabbi Akiva claimed him to be—we at least remember his toughness in the war against Rome.

Maybe these warrior-images of the Messiah are a kind of extension of the gangsters—take down our enemies, whip them good, make the world safe for Jews. Not the Orthodox take on the Messiah, maybe, but the reflection in the eyes of some secularized Jews of two or three generations back, who themselves lived in the era of The Kid and the two Bugsys, and maybe saw in their vision of the Messiah a larger version of the guys who hung out on the corners in Bensonhurst.

For a lot of Jews, the Messiah—even if they never used those words—was whatever they put their hope in, and that hope often involved tough Jews.

For the Jews of 175 BCE, hope lay in the Maccabees, a little band of five. To be honest, a whole lot of Jews weren't looking for hope. The problem wasn't that Jews were being taken down by the Greeks and Syrians. If you remember your Hebrew school history, Antiochus Epiphanes had a radical program of assimilation rather than physical annihilation. Jews were changing their names left and right. Jacob became Jason, maybe Simeon became Symmachus. They were enjoying their secularized life. Then Antiochus entered the Temple and killed a pig on the altar. That goaded some Jews who were no fans of assimilation. For others who enjoyed their secularized life, it was another step on the road. Not for the Maccabees. They beat the Syrian-Greek army, took back the Temple, and recleansed it for God's service. Today when Jews celebrate Hanukkah, it doesn't really matter if we are traditional or not, the story of the Maccabees resonates. For many it becomes a generic symbol of freedom, especially Jewish freedom. What matters, for a lot of Jews, is not that the Temple was dedicated back to God, but that it was taken back from the Greeks and the Syrians.

The Maccabees were tough. Jews can be free.

Jump ahead to 66 CE. The first War Against Rome. Jews fed up with oppression, not meekly submitting, but fighting back. The ultimate symbol of that first War is Masada, the great fortress on the mountain, still accessible and still visited by tourists year in and year out, trekking up the stairs, imagining what it was like to be holed up at the top, sweating it out, the last refuge in the War, holding out stubbornly till the very last. We didn't win the war that time, not like the Maccabees, but we fought till the bitter end. That's what tough Jews do. If you can't beat 'em, at least hold 'em back as long as you can.

We tried again in 132 CE. The Second War Against Rome. Bar Kochba, the general. Rabbi Akiva, the spiritual guide. And a cast of thousands. Akiva declares Bar Kochba to be the Messiah. His given name was Shimon bar Kosiba, but like Kid Twist and Tick-Tock and Inky and Who-Ha, his nickname stuck and defined him. Bar Kochba, meaning "Son of the Star," a reflection of a couple of verses in the Torah, Numbers 24:17 and 18: "I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a sceptre will rise out of Israel. He will crush the foreheads of Moab, the skulls of all the sons of Sheth. Edom will be conquered; Seir, his enemy, will be conquered, but Israel will grow strong." Bar Kochba, the star out of Jacob. Bar Kocbha, the crusher. Bar Kochba, the Messiah. Bar Kochba, killed and dead in the Second War Against Rome. It was a defeat, not even a Masada this time, but in legend the general grew to mythic proportions. A tough guy, and you had to be real tough to fight alongside him. A false Messiah, too, but not a lot of people remember him for that.

Over the next millennium and a half, there must have been Jews who toughed it out, maybe in Torah study and sheer survival, but they don't resonate with modern Jews the way soldiers and warriors do. My grandfather's idea of the Messiah probably had a lot more to do with military prowess than Torah study. The Messiah? Not just a guy who survives through donning tefillin and praying three times a day. No, he's going to be a guy who demolishes our enemies.

The more modern idea of the tough Jew resurfaces with Zionism. We're not going to take it any more from the goyim in Europe. We're going to have a land of our own. So we fought for it, diplomatically, by physically going there, politically, in song and dream and vision. And after the Holocaust, when Israel was finally reborn, it was the allure of the pioneers, the halutzim, and the skill and daring and ability of the Israeli army that captured the imagination of Jews, and, we liked to think, the envy of others. Reclaim the desert. Knock down six Arab armies at once. The Six-Day War. Entebbe.

Israel in 2004 is nothing like Israel in 1948 or 1967. But we remember the glory days of Israel like some remember the days of Bugsy Siegel. And we think: those were tough Jews.

And if we couldn't live it, we could create it. Superman was the creation of Jews. So were most of the comic book characters of the mid-20th century. Superman's real name—Kal-El—used the Hebrew word for God, "El." During the Second World War, the comic book guys even fought Nazis in their pages, much as the gangsters handled American neo-Nazis for real. Some see in the Hulk, that misunderstood giant of a creature with the green skin, a resemblance to the golem of Jewish legend. Sometimes we need to invent a messiah, which is what Superman essentially was. He beat up the bad guys without the murder and mayhem.

Tough Jews. Messiahs. For secular Jews in the 1880s and later on in 1948, Zionism was the Messiah. It was their ultimate hope. For Jewish kids growing up in Long Island in the 60s, Superman and Captain America were other Messiahs. In 132 and 135 CE, Bar Kochba was the Messiah, for a short time, because he too was their ultimate hope. Jews who still expect a real, living, tangible breathing Messiah still describe him largely as the warrior who redeems Israel from all its enemies.

No wonder Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Y'shua min Natzeret, however you call him, never figured as the Messiah of most Jews. Sure, Jews have dismissed him on account of anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the tough goyim (!) who beat up some of our grandparents and great-grandparents and called them Christ-killers.

But I wonder. I wonder if deep in the Jewish psyche, the modern Jewish psyche anyway, there is a need for a Messiah who wins by being tough. After 2000 years of ghettos, who would want it any differently? And Jesus? A man alone, OK, maybe with a band of twelve, who talks a lot, heals people, sure that's good, but doesn't take up a sword, doesn't take out Rome, dies by Roman execution on a cross, and then what? That's it? No fighting? No army? This is maybe a Messiah for goyim, but we Jews need something more.

Maybe. But then again, maybe not. (Enter Tevya: "one the one hand…on the other hand…") There is toughness, and then there is toughness. In their sunset years, the Louis Lepkes and the Abe Releses and all the others were to one degree or another, broken men. How could it be otherwise? And even for them, their toughness showed in ways apart from guns and getaway cars. To the end, Lepke kept the gangster code of honor—he didn't sing, he didn't talk, he didn't rat, and he took the consequences and went to the chair. Sure, it wasn't honor alone. After all, a rat would likely be killed. But still, it took a toughness of another sort to stick to your figurative guns.

Our grandfathers may have hoped for a Messiah who would take down the enemies of the Jews. What it interesting is that long before our grandfathers were born, Jewish tradition saw two Messiahs. One they called the Messiah Son of David. He was tough the way the Maccabees and the holdouts at the Warsaw Ghetto were tough, but more so. He would be Superman come to life, destroyer of the enemies, liberator of the Jews, rebuilder of the Temple.

Then they saw the other Messiah, who they called Messiah Son of Joseph. He'd fight too, but he would die in battle. He would come into Jerusalem riding on a donkey. He would be humble, lowly, an ancient equivalent of a Jewish accountant, foil to the Messiah Son of David the soldier.

What was with the two Messiahs? Mostly, the rabbis who came up with this picture pulled it out of the Bible. Sometimes the Bible pictured a Messiah who was for all intents and purposes, Superman, the victor. But other times, he was the victim, the one killed, the one nobody thinks about, the one nobody notices. [See accompanying chart.]

But here's the thing. There's tough, and then there's tough. There's a kind of toughness that says I'm going to stand my ground, even if it kills me. Even more, I'm going to stand my ground so that it doesn't kill you. Even more, I'm going to deliberately take my stand so that you don't get killed. I'm going to give up my life for you, and I'm going to do it because I want to do it.

And there's a lesson to take away from this about the Messiah, about our ultimate hopes and dreams. If you read about Jesus and his life and his death, you come away with one thing that Christians believe about him. "He died for our sins." This is quintessential Bible Belt material, seen on billboards alongside the highway in the desolate middle of a million American nowheres, recited by street preachers in the tumult of urban bus stations and seedy downtown corners. You've seen it and heard it, but if you are Jewish, what you haven't done, probably, is relate to it. Jesus died for my sins? Sin—this is off our radar, except maybe on Yom Kippur, the one day when Jews think about sin, or think about the fact that we're supposed to be thinking about sin. As far as Jesus is concerned, we maybe picture someone in a white robe, "meek and mild," wimped out and washed up. Movie versions of Jesus' life don't help either. I once heard someone say that when Jeffrey Hunter played Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount, he looked like he was drying his nails. No, thanks. We'll take tough any day compared to that.

But there's tough, and there's tough. If you dip into the New Testament to read about Jesus, you don't find a guy drying his nails or being someone's doormat. On the other hand, you don't find him taking out contracts on the Romans, either. If one reason Jews find it hard to believe Jesus could be the Messiah even in our wildest dreams is that we have a need to have our heroes be tough, then consider. Jesus was tough, the other kind of tough, the way that's even harder to be than by breaking heads. It's the way that says,

I'm going to stand my ground, even if it kills me.
"As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51).
"From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life" (Matthew 16:21)

Even more, I'm going to stand my ground so that it doesn't kill you.
"Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

Even more, I'm going to deliberately take my stand so that you don't get killed.
"The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28).

I'm going to give up my life for you, and I'm going to do it because I want to do it.
"The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No-one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:17-18).

At bottom, Jesus was tough. No helpless victim here, but a man whose mission in life was to stand his ground till he died.

And what was it all for? What did it mean, to lay down his life for his friends? To give his life as a ransom? That this is why he came into the world, why he was born?

This takes us back to other part of the equation. Remember that Bible Belt sign about Jesus dying for our sins? For Jews, Yom Kippur is the time to think about sin. Sin that drove the Greeks and Syrians to oppress Jews. That drove Rome to oppress Jews. That drove Hitler, and Haman before him, and Pharaoh before that. That drives anti-Semitism today on the streets of Europe and even America. That drives you and me in our worst moments, and sometimes in our best moments. On Yom Kippur we confess our sins and fast and pray.

Sin can be tough, too.
"If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it" (Genesis 4:7).

In the old days, before the Romans trashed the Temple in 70 CE, Jews knew that sin was in fact crouching at our door, not just the sin of the Romans but our own sin too, and the way to forgiveness for ourselves was a repentant heart and someone, something to take on themselves, itself, the judgment for our sins. Ergo, the animal sacrifices (today the three main synagogue services are done at the same time, supposedly, that the sacrifices used to happen). The "scapegoat" that ran off into the desert on Yom Kippur, symbolically carrying our sins away. Even today, a few of the Hasidim do the "kapparot" ceremony where they declare that a rooster (for men) or a chicken (for women) is going to death for our sins.

After 70, the rabbis tried to rebuild from the ashes, and without the Temple, they did away with the scapegoat, the animals, the sacrifices, the taking of the judgment and placing it onto something else. It's understandable that they would do that, but the other choice was to believe that Jesus, this carpenter from Nazareth and then from Galilee (the Bensonhurst of ancient Israel to the Scarsdale that was Jerusalem), was the Messiah. Not Messiah the warrior—that would come later. But Messiah the lowly, Messiah the humble, Messiah the tough one who took his stand and died as the ultimate sin-bearer for us.

And why believe that this Messiah was Jesus? That's where you come in. Jewish tradition has said, Jesus is not for us. The New Testament is not for us. Jews who believe in Jesus are traitors, meshummedim our grandparents would say. There are good reasons for considering Jesus, and a good place to start is by reading the New Testament. But doing that requires toughness, the ability to say, I'm going to think for myself no matter the consequences, no matter what my family or friends or rabbis say, I'm going to think it through, check out why people claim him, this Jesus, as the Messiah.

Maybe you aren't a gangster—but are you a tough Jew?

(c) 2004 Rich Robinson

Why the "Canarsie Line"?

I grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York. Where Murder, Inc., used to dump bodies, I was told. But when I lived there, it was a much different place. New Canarsie was Jewish, old Canarsie was Italian, and you could hardly tell the Italians from the Jews unless you noticed who turned into the Catholic Church and who turned into the shul. Now about the "line" part: every day I took the "L" train, the Canarsie Line, to high school in Manhattan. So it's a bit of nostalgia, and then also, you can play around with the metaphor of a "line" as in a stream of thought, a direction to go with a starting point and a destination, etc. So now that's I've started this blog, I'd better get to posting something besides this intro...