Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 44, No. 1, 1995

Reflections on the Holocaust 1 David Glick 2

This paper is a personal reflection on the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish psyche, and on the anti-Jewish teachings within Christianity, which over many centuries created a climate of hatred, contempt, and suspicion of the Jews that made it possible for the Holocaust to happen within the heart of Christian Europe.

Yom Hashoah is the solemn and sorrowful day when Jews remember and honor the six million men, women, and children who perished in the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people. Adolf Hitler intended a "final solution" to what he called "the Jewish problem." That solution was to be the systematic extermination of the entire Jewish people. Jews were killed not for who or what they were but for the very fact that they were. Fifty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, it is fitting that we remember and reflect on those da~k and terrible days. The Holocaust, or Shoah, which in Hebrew means "total destruction," was the ghastly and incomprehensible culmination of what is perhaps the longest and most virulent hatred in human history--the hatred of the Jews. It is this hatred, and its relationship to Christianity, that I wish to address. Before proceeding, however, it is important to acknowledge that the Nazis also committed genocide against the Gypsies, murdering a quarter million of their people. Among the other victims of mass murder of the ruthless Nazi regime were tens of thousands of homosexuals, tens of thousands of physically and mentally handicapped individuals, Jehovah's WitIBased on a talk given on April 10, 1994 at Christ Presbyterian Church in Terra Linda, San Rafaei, California. 2The author is a psychotherapist in private practice and is on the staff of the Lloyd Center Pastoral Counseling Service of San Francisco Theological Seminary. Address correspondence to David Glick, P. O. Box 542, Ross, CA 94957. 13 9

1995Human SciencesPress, Inc.

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nesses, communists, trade unionists, members of the Resistance, several million Soviet prisoners-of-war, and several million non-combatants throughout Europe. Such was the scope of Nazi brutality. In an interview which appeared in the Winter 1994 issue of Chimes, the quarterly publication of San Francisco Theological Seminary, I touched on several issues--psychotherapy, spirituality, religious tolerance, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and finally the relationship between the Holocaust and the centuries-long tradition of anti-Jewish teaching which has been central to much of Christian theology and preaching. In that interview I said the following: In coming from a people that have historically been subjected to persecution and ultimately genocide, the notion of promoting religions tolerance is edtieai to me. Remember, the genocide of my people took place in the heart of Christian Europe. I am convinced the Holoeanst could not have happened without the ground being seeded by centuries of Christian anti-Jewish teachings. We find it in the Gospel of John. We find it in the notion of Christian supersessionism and the notion that the Jewish exile was God's punishment. We find it in the early Church fathers and later in Luther, who preached burning Jewish synagogues after Jews failed to become Protestants. Until Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church held Jews collectively responsible for the death of Christ. All this teaching of contempt and hatred was mixed with rabid German nationalism and fascism and unleashed the darkest of passions. Even today the ghastly result is denied by some. (Gliek, 1994, pp. 12-13)

RIGHTEOUS GENTILES It should be noted, however, that during those dark and dreadful years, when the Nazi scourge spread throughout Europe, numerous Christians-many of humble birth and many among the clergy--risked their own lives and those of their families to hide and protect their Jewish neighbors. Daring heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, and Herman Graebe come to mind. Unsung heroines like Maria Kielbasa. Intrepid clergy like Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII, Father Lichtenberg, Father Benoit, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Then there was the courageous Christian community of Le Chambon, France, which hid several dozens of Jews and saved them from certain death. And when the heroic Danes learned that the occupying German army planned to deport the Danish Jews for extermination, the entire nation rose up in defiance. The Danes warned their Jewish neighbors, hid them, and over a period of several weeks ferried some six or seven thousand Jews, in small vessels under cover of darkness, across the sea to neutral Sweden where they found safety. Many hundreds of Greek Jews were also transported from the Greek Islands to Turkey by their Christian neighbors.

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Protests by the local populations in Holland, Finland, and Bulgaria against the deportation of Jews also helped save thousands of Jewish lives. The courage and humanity of these people astounds us. An Italian newspaper editor who raised his voice on behalf of the Jews had his seven children murdered by the Nazis as punishment. There is the incredible story of the Lithuanian priest who hid 30 Jewish children whose parents had been executed by the Germans. When a German officer arrived at his church to remove the children, the priest blocked the doorway, and said, "If you kill the children, you will have to kill me first!" The German soldiers did just that, killing him and the children.

NAZISM AND THE CHURCH It would certainly be unfair to expect such heroism from ordinary people. But in truth it must be said that for every Christian who risked his or her life on behalf of the Jews, thousands became either willing instruments of their destruction or else acquiesced in silence. When we turn to the hierarchy of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, the picture is complicated. Clearly, Pope Pius XII did not openly condemn the Nazis, even when he knew millions were being put to death. It is difficult to know what effect his public and forthright condemnation would have had in saving Jewish lives or strengthening resistance to the Nazi regime among Catholics. Many Jews and Christians alike believe that a Church worthy of calling itself Christian was obliged to speak out clearly against the Nazi atrocities and to not do so was shameful. However, there aresome, including the Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide, who believe any public pronouncements would have only resulted in greater loss of life for Jews and others. Lapide believes that the Pope's quiet diplomacy, working through his nuncios in Nazi occupied lands, helped save hundreds of thousands of lives (Jocz, 1981, p. 38). But Friedrich Heer, a Viennese Catholic scholar, accuses the Catholic Church hierarchy of hatred towards liberalism and democracy, and indicts the Catholic bishops for loving the fatherland more than God. He believes that had the Pope spoken out it would have had a considerable impact on restraining German persecution of the Jews and other victims. Heer cites an incident when the Pope was asked why he didn't openly protest the liquidation of the Jews. His reply: "Dear friend, do not forget that millions of Catholics are serving in the German armies. Am I to involve them in a conflict of conscience?" Heer suggests that the Pope regarded Hitler's war as of supreme importance in saving Europe from godless communism;

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that the Church kept silent so as not to disturb Germany's war against communist Russia (Jocz, 1981, p. 65). When we turn to the Protestant Church, one of the clearest examples of Church opposition to Hitler occurred in the Netherlands. On July 26, 1942, all Dutch churches of all denominations issued a proclamation stating that in the name of law and justice they protested the expulsion of Jews and the deportation of workers to Germany. The situation of the Protestant Church inside Germany was more complicated. Overall, the German Protestant Church was fiercely nationalistic, and loyalty to the fatherland was paramount. Part of the Church, therefore, found itself supporting the Nazi regime for nationalistic reasons, while still trying to maintain the message of the Gospels--a delicate balancing act to be sure. Another part of the German Protestant Church, called "German Christians," strongly and openly supported Hitler. They saw in the Nazi movement the fulfillment of Christianity; they identified the claims of Nazism with the tenets of Christianity. They were supportive of Hitler's racial policies and unperturbed by his treatment of the Jews. Yet another part of the Protestant Church in Germany, what was called the "Confessing Church," was opposed in principle to the totalitarian nature of the Nazi regime, which subordinated all other values and virtues to obedience to the State. The Confessing Church also opposed the unscriptural acceptance of Nazi race doctrine by the German Christian movement. But even the Confessing Church did not take a stand, in the early years of the Hitler regime, against the establishment of concentration camps and the persecution of the Jews. It was only much later, at the end of the war, that one of its most famous members, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was himself hanged in a Nazi concentration camp for his opposition to the regime. Within the Nazi party there were substantial numbers who supported the German Christian movement so long as it saw itself subordinate to the state. Religion, they felt, was necessary for people. But many others, and Hitler himself, had a strong antipathy to Christianity. He felt it weakened the German people. Moreover, there was room for only one loyalty--not to God but to the Fuhrer and the Aryan homeland. Hitler shrewdly aligned himself with the German Christian movement in the early years of his regime, then cast it aside.

UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST I believe it a safe generalization to state that virtually all Jews grow up under the shadow of the Holocaust. Jewish consciousness is shaped by

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the memories of the Holocaust; Jewish identity is steeped in it. Whether on a conscious level or an unconscious one, the Holocaust has seared itself into the psyche of the Jew. The Holocaust is a virtually unparalleled event in history. This is not to deny that there have been other horrendous instances of mass murder throughout history. Indeed history is full of them. In our own history we need only recall the millions of Native Americans who were slaughtered in the course of the settling of the continent by White Europeans. Millions of Africans died during the Middle Passage and on the slave plantations of the New Wodd. Throughout the Middle Ages untold numbers of women were burned alive as witches. The litany of horrors is endless and continues to the present day. But what distinguishes the Holocaust is precisely this: never before had one people sought to exterminate another in its entirety--men, women, children, elderly. Native Americans were killed in vast numbers in the course of being conquered so that their land could be stolen. Most of the survivors of this genocidal subjugation were then placed on reservations. And every effort was then made to exterminate their culture. Africans were killed in massive numbers in the course of being kidnapped from their homeland; in the New World they were terrorized and murdered. But the purpose which lay behind this brutalization was to exploit their labor on the slave plantations of the New World. The fact that there is a discernable reason behind the genocidal horrors these two peoples have suffered does not in any way mitigate the enormity of their suffering. Nonetheless, with the Jews it was different. The Jews had been defined by the Nazis as existing entirely outside the social order, outside the universe of human obligation. They were viewed as so utterly alien and subhuman, so degraded and perverse, so evil and demonic, that their very existence was their crime. There was to be no appeal from this Nazi death sentence for an entire people. The Turkish genocide against the Armenians during World War I is akin to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. It is estimated that some 1,200,000 Armenians were annihilated. And as with the Jews, there was virtually no outcry from the so-called civilized world. The Armenians too had been defined as outside the realm of human obligation. At a certain point, however, the round-up of Armenians from Istanbul was discontinued and the brutal slaughter eventually brought to an end. But the Nazis intended a total and final solution to the "Jewish problem." They intended to kill every Jew who fell within their reach. So fanatical was their hatred and so unrelenting was their determination that priority was given to transporting Jews to the death camps over transporting soldiers to the Eastern

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Front where they were desperately needed for the war effort against the Russians. From the very beginning when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, the German Jews, who for years had regarded themselves as loyal citizens well-integrated into the cultural and economic life of the country, felt the sting of the racist and totalitarian Nazi regime. The country was steeped in anti-Jewish propaganda. "The Jews are our misfortune," was the cry heard throughout the land. The Jews quickly became socially ostracized. There were arbitrary arrests and state-organized beatings of Jews by Nazi toughs. Humiliation was part of everyday life. In April of 1933 there was a national boycott of Jewish-owned stores and in May of that year books of prominent Jewish intellectuals were burned. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 codified the outcast status of German Jews. Jews were stripped of their citizenship and intermarriage with Jews was forbidden. They were denied sick fund benefits and forbidden to work in the civil service or as doctors, jurists, and university professors. In the next phase of the Nazi regime, arrests increased, Jewish property and savings were confiscated, and Jews were encouraged and later forced to emigrate for ransom. During this period acts of collective violence were becoming more and more common against Germany's Jews. The way had been prepared for this violence by the methodical application of racist propaganda. During the Nazi pogrom of November 9, 1938, which is called Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, Nazi storm troopers rampaged throughout Germany, beating up Jewish men, women, and children, breaking into their homes and stores, burning holy books and setting synagogues on fire. In a 24-hour orgy of violence, 91 Jews were killed and more than 30,000 sent to concentration camps. One thousand were murdered before the majority were released several months later. With the exception of a few clergy, such as Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pastor Julius van Jan, the reaction of the churches to this shameful act of savagery was silence. It soon became apparent to the Nazis that there was a limit to forced emigration as a solution to the Jewish problem because most of the Western democracies were unwilling to raise their immigration quotas for the beleaguered Jews. Indeed the United States, bowing to its own home-grown anti-Semitism, put every obstacle in the way of Jewish immigration. By January of 1942, plans for the extermination of Europe's 11 million Jews had been drawn up at the Wansee Conference. The extermination of Russia's Jews was carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, which were mobile killing units of the SS. Jews were rounded up by the hundreds and mowed down by machine guns and buried in mass graves. It is estimated that perhaps one million Jews were killed in this manner. But this procedure was

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too slow for such an immense undertaking of genocide. So the Nazis established the death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the others. There the Jews were transported in cattle cars from the ghettos and forced labor camps, and gassed to death. Their bodies were then cremated; in time the sun was blotted out by their ashes.

IMPACT OF THE HOLOCAUST ON THE JEWISH PSYCHE As a child of perhaps ten or eleven, I recall seeing a documentary about the concentration camps and death camps. I shall never forget the black and white film footage of the skeleton-like bodies of the survivors, the walking dead, a vacant stare in their eyes--aimless, bewildered, devastated. Nor will I ever forget the limp bodies of the dead being unceremoniously scooped up in a bulldozer. After Auschwitz there can be no easy and comfortable faith in the mercy and grace of God or in the goodness of humanity. The Holocaust stripped away all the masks. No theodicy could ever explain the Shoah. How could one ever again believe in a God in whose world such monstrous deeds could take place? For many Jews belief in God, at least in traditional terms of benevolence and omnipotence, was an impossibility. Yet there arose another response to the Holocaust. For many, like myself, it became a moral imperative not to give up one's Jewishness, however one now came to understand it. As Emil Fackenheim put it, one did not want to grant Hitler a posthumous victory, granting him in his death what he had been unable to accomplish in his life--the destruction of the Jewish people and their religion and culture (Fackenheim, 1978). For the survivors, especially, the moral imperative was to sanctify the dead by remembering. The survivors became the voice of the dead. Life under the brutal conditions of the concentration camps and death camps had no meaning except to survive in order to be a living witness to the hell that had happened there. In every camp there were always Jews who, at pain of instant death, kept diaries hidden away in which they recorded everything so that future generations would know and remember. This became a sacred task. It was their way of keeping faith with those whom the world had abandoned. Some of these diaries were even found among the ashes of those who had been cremated. Under such extreme conditions of powerlessness, keeping a diary became an act of protest and resistance. However, there were also instances of physical resistance as well, in many of the camps--even at Auschwitz. And in the spring of 1943, the heroic fighters of the Warsaw

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Ghetto made their stand against the overwhelming forces of the German Army. The eventual outcome was never in doubt, but it was better to die

fighting. I have always approached the Holocaust with fear, awe, and reticence. If one were to let all its horrors and all its ugly secrets come to life within one's heart, one could easily go mad from grief and rage and despair. It has taken me many years to discern the myriad ways in which the Holocaust has affected me. The issue of trust is the easiest to ferret out. While I have no problem forming trusting relationships with friends and loved ones, I must, indeed, struggle to maintain faith in the decency of humanity and in the beneficence of life. I easily see life's beauty but am ever-mindful of its horrors. There is no returning to the warm comfort of innocence. Abandonment and betrayal are other key issues. The Jews were forsaken by God and abandoned by the world. They were betrayed by humanity. Even when there was incontrovertible evidence of the existence of the death camps, the United States and Britain refused to order air strikes to destroy the gas chambers or the railroad tracks leading to the death camps. A request by certain prominent American Jews to bomb Auschwitz was denied by Roosevelt. They were told that fighter planes would have to accompany the bombers and the British bases were too far away. At that very time, however, Allied bombers escorted by fighter planes flying out of northern Italy were bombing the I. G. Farben factory five miles from Auschwitz. Jewish lives, it seems, were inconsequential. The United States government was, to my mind, an accomplice to genocide. As a consequence, a sense of aloneness and betrayal haunt many Jews. The bestiality of the murderers was matched by the silence and indifference of the world--the world of those who knew and did nothing and the world of those who did not care to know. Lately I have unearthed another piece of the puzzle. I realize how desperately important it is for me to be able to preserve some small corner of innocence and sweetness in the world. That is one reason my dog is so precious to me. He brings so much of this innocence and sweetness, so much joy and love and comfort, into this world. I also realize how important it is for me to be able to protect the ones I love. In Nazi Germany, if a Jewish mother stood up in defiance to an SS soldier, she would likely have her infant torn from her arms and witness it being smashed to death against the curb. Or maybe her entire family or her neighbors would be killed as collective punishment for her insolent defiance. The inability to protect loved ones created a horrible burden of guilt and shame added to the already overwhelming grief, rage, and despair of the survivors.

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THE TEACHING OF CONTEMPT So the question that confronts us is this: How could such horrors come to pass? How do we penetrate into that which seems unfathomable? How could so many millions of Christians raised in Christian families and professing a devotion to the compassion and tenderness of Jesus the man and a faith in the boundless love and grace of Jesus Christ the Risen Lord, how could they have actively participated in the genocide of the Jews, or stood aside and through their silence and indifference acquiesced to it? It is here that I wish to turn to the relationship to Christianity with which I began. I believe that the teaching of contempt within much of Christianity toward the Jews over nearly 1,900 years was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the Holocaust to happen. Without the way having been prepared by centuries of prejudice against the Jews and Judaism by Christendom, Nazi anti-Semitism would have never been able to so murderously inflame the passions of entire nations which had been Christianized for centuries. The phrase "the teaching of contempt" comes from the Jewish historian Jules Isaac (1964). It consists of three fundamental teachings. The first and most pernicious is that "the Jews" killed Christ. Notice the phrase: "the Jews." The hideous crime Of deicide, of the murder of God, is here leveled against an entire people. Flowing from this comes the second teaching: that the Jewish exile is dMne punishment for the rejection and crucifixion of Christ. Indeed all of Jewish suffering and travail came to be regarded in Christianity as divine punishment for rejecting Christ and evidence of the depraved status of the Jews. The third element of the teaching of contempt is the idea that the Judaism of Jesus' day, in its entirety, was rigid, legalistic, fossilized, dead--hence without spiritual and redemptive value. Finally, to these three we may add a fourth teaching: that because of the rejection and crucif~on of Jesus Christ by the Jews, God's covenant with Israel was abrogated and was superseded by a new covenant with the new Christian Church, the new Israel. In effect, Judaism was invalid and Jews were to be cursed for their collective guilt in killing Christ. In time the charge of deicide came to be used not only as an explanation of Israel's exile and suffering, but as justification for centuries of Christian violence and discrimination against the Jews. Over many centuries the Jewish experience of living in Christian lands was all too frequently characterized by slander and humiliation, discrimination and ostracism, forced conversions and expulsions, pogroms, and ultimately genocide. The basis for these anti-Jewish teachings are to be found in the foundational document of Christianity--the New Testament. Within the New

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Testament a polemic against Judaism and the Jews was established and, we might say, sanctified. This became the basis of modern anti-Semitism. This anti-Jewish polemic, this hateful, centuries-long teaching of contempt, most assuredly helped to pave the way for the horror of the Holocaust. Let us turn to some passages from the New Testament that comprise the central elements of this polemic. In Matthew's version of the passion of Christ, he depicts an insistent Jewish people pressing the reluctant Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, to crucify Jesus. Then he places that infamous line, which will stand for eternity, into the mouth of the entire Jewish people: "His blood be on us and on our children." Matthew tells us that Pilate goes before the multitude of assembled Jews and asks them whom they want him to release, the notorious prisoner called Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ. Here is what Matthew says: But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitudes that they should ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said to them, "Which of the two do you want me to release to you?" They said, "Barabbas." Pilate said to them, "What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ'?." They all said to him, "Let Him be crucified!" Then the governor said, "Why, what evil has He done.'?" But they cried out all the more, saying, "Let Him be crucified!" When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude saying, "I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it." And all the people answered and said, "His blood be on us and on our children." Then he released Barabbas to them; and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified. (Matthew 27:20-26)

And in the First Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses the Church there: For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they do not please God and are contrary to all m e n . . . (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16)

The idea of deicide and the exile as punishment were stated unambiguously in J. E Stedman's My Lenten Missal, published in 1956, a few short years before Vatican II stated that the Jews should not be held collectively accountable for the death of Christ. Here is what Stedman's missal says: "In these modern days the Jews are still dispersed in every nation in a condition worse than exile. They have been atoning these 1900 years for the greatest of all crimes committed when an entire nation rejected, crucified, and shed the Blood of the Son of God" (Gilbert, 1967, p. 91).

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The demonization of the Jews is graphically illustrated in a passage from John, where Jesus purportedly says, as he is speaking to some assembled Jews: . . . If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me. Which of you convicts Me of sin? And If I tell the truth, Why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears God's words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God. (John 8:42-47)

We again find this demonization of the Jews and the corollary disparagement of Judaism in the following passage from Matthew, in which Jesus is purportedly talking to the scribes and Pharisees: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others u n d o n e . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness... Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will know and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. (Matthew 23:23, 27, 28, 31-35) 9

And finally, in Acts we again meet this same calumny against the Jews: You stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers. (Acts 7:51-52)

Passages such as these, especially passages from John and Matthew depicting the passion of Christ, are often read in Christian churches on Good Friday and Easter without any commentary or explanation. It was not without cause that Jews typically lived in fear during Holy Week in

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many Christian countries, because the ugly passions aroused by these passages often resulted in violence against them. There is a critical context which to the uninformed is missing when reading the New Testament. The movement begun by Jesus, which eventuaUy, under the influence of Paul, grew into the Christian Church, can best be understood as a reform movement within Judaism during Jesus' own lifetime. Jesus and his disciples were Jews and did not, I believe, have an understanding of themselves as members of a religious community in opposition to Judaism. The term "Jews" in most of the Gospels ought to be taken to refer to the priestly class and those spiritual leaders of the Pharisees who opposed Jesus' claim of being the Messiah. In other words, this is originally a dispute within Judaism. It is an indictment of Jews by a Jew. The missionary movement of Paul was essentially a Jewish mission to the Gentiles. But eventually the synagogue and the Church began to separate. And as the Church became more and more comprised of Gentiles converted to Christianity, the criticism of the Jews changed from being a matter of self-criticism within a family dispute to becoming a virulent criticism of the other. I want to say just a few words about the charge of deicide against the Jews which has caused us so much pain and violence. First, if there was any involvement of the Jewish people in Jesus' death it was the involvement of the priestly class and Jewish aristocracy. But let us remember it was Jesus' claim to being the Messiah that made him a threat to the Roman empire. As the Jewish scholar Ellis Rivkin (1967) points out" "People were referring to him as the descendant of David, which to High Priest Caiphas and the procurator suggested a dynasty, the replacement of Roman rule. What could the kingdom of God mean except the end of the Roman kingdom? Jesus was arrested, not because he was preaching violence but because he was identified with the Davidic dynasty, the Messiah, the kingdom of God, and, as such, threatened the whole Roman system" (p. 36). Moreover, we must remember that an enormous part of the Jewish people did not even live in Palestine. They had long been part of the Babylonian exile and hence knew nothing of Jesus. It is scandalous and unjust to hold people not present, and generations not yet born, collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. But since the mission of the new church was among the Gentiles of the Roman Empire, it was politically expedient, and certainly far less dangerous, to hold the Jews responsible for Jesus' death instead of the Roman authorities. But even if one were to take all the words in the New Testament at face value, even if those Jews present at Jesus' crucif~on did say, "His blood be on us and on our children," we are, nonetheless, left with a very

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disturbing question: why did not Jesus' own words, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," soften the heart of the Church and its people toward the Jews? Why did hatred and contempt for the Jews ultimately prevail in the Church over love and forgiveness, which Christians proclaim as the quintessence of Jesus' life and teachings?

THE GREAT DIVIDE The polemic against the Jews and Judaism was the logical result of a critical dilemma faced by the new Church. As the contemporary Roman Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether (1977) tells us: Christianity saw itself as the heir of Jewish Messianic hope, and believed that in Jesus that hope for the coming of the Messiah was fulfilled. But since the Jewish tradition rejected this claim, the Church developed a polemic against the Jews and the Jewish religious tradition, to explain how the Church could be the fulfillment of a Jewish religious tradition against Jewish rejection of this claim. At the root of this dispute lies a fundamentally different interpretation of the meaning of the word "Messiah" (Christ) in Christianity, which gradually separated it so radically from the meaning of this word in the Old Testament and Jewish tradition that the two traditions became incapable of communicating with each other. (pp. 79-80)

Jewish religious tradition of Jesus' time held that the Messiah was to be a human being, descended from David, who would usher in the Kingdom of God through establishing justice and peace and overcoming evil. The Christian assertion of the divinity of Jesus Christ created the great divide between these two religions; or as my religion professor in college, Roy Eckardt, said, between the elder and the younger brother. The essential difference between our two religions can, I believe, be boiled down to this. Christianity holds out the promise of human salvation from sin through faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, while Judaism urges upon us the redemption of the world from sin and brokenness through the mediating action of human love and the pursuit of justice and peace. Christianity is, in one sense, a universal religion in that it holds out salvation to all equally. But from my perspective, it is what I call a "particularizing universality" in that there is one path to salvation. Salvation comes only through Jesus Christ--through faith, belief, and acceptance into one's heart of Jesus' redeeming death and resurrection. But if this does not comport with one's experience, one's belief, one's faith, then according to the traditional teachings of the Church, one is precluded from salvation. The internal logic of this teaching inevitably transforms Christianity's universalism into exclusivism. Indeed, in the hands of those Christians who are not truly touched in their core by Jesus' exemplary life of love and

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compassion and tenderness, Christianity can become a kind of religious imperialism. AS the Christian existentialist Nicolas Berdyaev said, "Those who rejected the cross have to carry it, while those who welcomed it are so often engaged in crucifying others" (Joez, 1981, p. 55).

FINAL THOUGHTS As I approach the end of this article, I want to acknowledge the important step which the Roman Catholic Church took in 1965 toward rectifying its centuries-long polemic of contempt against the Jews. At Vatican II, in what has become known as "the Jewish Declaration," the Church affirmed its spiritual bond with Judaism and repudiated the charge of deicide against the Jews. In words long awaited, the Church declared: "True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ... Still, what happened in His passion cannot be blamed upon all Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today... Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God as if such views followed from the Holy Scriptures" (Abbott, 1967, p. 85). Despite what is welcome in this statement, there remains much that is disappointing. We see the perpetuation of the doctrine of supersessionism in the identification of the Church with "the new people of God." This hierarchy of righteousness leads to an arrogant Christian exclusivism and a religious imperialism which is sorely in need of being transmuted by genuine tolerance and appreciation for other religious paths. Moreover, what is glaringly missing in the Vatican II statement is any acknowledgment of the part which the Church's anti-Jewish teachings played in the discrimination and violence visited upon the Jews over many centuries in Christian lands. Especially with regard to the Holocaust, this is a profound disappointment. But staggering as the Holocaust was for the Jews, it could not extinguish our spirit. The following inscription was found in a cellar in Cologne, Germany where Jews had hid from the Nazis: "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love when feeling it not. I believe in God even when God is silent." As we contemplate the staggering evil and the overwhelming agony of the Holocaust, we ask with broken hearts, "When will the w o r d be reconciled and humankind redeemed?" My personal answer is that reconciliation and redemption will come when we recognize the sanctity and interconnectedness of life. When we recognize and honor the common humanity of all peoples. When we look upon others as we would have them

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look upon us and grant to each the rights we claim for ourselves and the considerations we desire for ourselves. When justice, tempered with mercy, prevails; and love and understanding and compassion obtain. When we rid the world of violence and peace reigns over all. I would like to end with two quotes. The first is a passage from a Jewish Yom Hashoah service, though I cannot recall the source: "We live in two worlds: the one that is, and the one that might be. Nothing is ordained for u s . . . We can, if we will, change the world that is, into the world that may yet come to be." The second quote is from Anne Frank, who says, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world" (benShea, 1993).

REFERENCES Abbott, W. M. (1967). Vatican Council II: A Catholic View. In L Edelman (Ed.). Face to Face: A Primer in Dialogue (pp. 83-89). V~ashington, D. C. B'nai B'rith. benShea, N. (1993). Great Jewish Quotes. New York, Ballantinr Books. Conway, J. (1968). The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945. London. Gilbert, A. (1967). Vatican Council II: A Jewish View. In L Edelman (Ed.). Face to Face:A Primer in Dialogue (pp. 90-99). Washington, D.C.: B'nai B'rith. Gilbert, M. (1985). The Holocaust. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Glick, D. (1994). David Glick: Stories of Spirituality and Interfaith Dialogue. Chimes, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 12-13. Hausner, G. (1966). Justice in Jerusalem. New York: Holocaust Library. Holy Bible (1986). New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc. Isaac, J. (English translation, 1964). The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Jocz, J. (1981). The Jewish People and Jesus Christ afterAuschwitz. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. Rivkin, E. (1967). The Parting of the Ways. In L Edelman (Ed.). Face to Face; A Primer in Dialogue (pp. 33--41),Washington, D.C.: B'nai B'rith. Ructher, R. R. (1977). Anti-Semitism and Christian Theology. In IS. Fleischner (Ed.). Auschwitz; Beginning of a New Era (pp. 79-92). New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.