Kosher Jesus' Lack of Historical Context (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)

To turn to Rabbi Boteach's treatment of Christianity. Considering that this is a book that is about reconciling Jews and Christians, one would expect Rabbi Boteach to take a positive view of Jewish-Christian relations. And there is much within the Christian tradition to support such a view from Augustine's witness doctrine to the active philo-Semitism of early modern Protestant millenarians. This is not to let Christianity Pontius Pilate itself from numerous crimes against Jews, but there is certainly room, particularly for American Jews who have benefited so greatly from American Christian society, to be charitable to Christianity and see its crimes as crimes of Christians instead of Christianity. The account that Rabbi Boteach delivers is absolutely crude, in a sense even worse than his treatment of the Romans. For example, he calls Augustine an anti-Semite. Calling John Chrysostom an anti-Semite is one thing as would calling the later writings of Martin Luther, but to accuse Augustine of anti-Semitism is to render the very term meaningless. By this logic any Christian who ever believed that Judaism is a historical relic and that Jews are better off simply converting to Christianity is an anti-Semite. That would render almost all Christians anti-Semites and leave any Christians not interested in making radical changes to his theology no reason to work with us. We would also be left with no word to describe those with a psychological obsession with Jews as incarnations of evil and wish to cause them physical harm.

If we are to accept Rabbi Boteach's narrative of Jewish-Christian relations, it all started with a misunderstanding over who killed Jesus. Early Christians for political reasons decided to blame the Jews instead of the Romans. Christians soon came to believe their own nonsense and for nearly two thousand years, before Vatican II and the publication of Kosher Jesus, have unfortunately hated and murdered Jews. Rabbi Boteach does not paint a clear picture of this history, something about Crusades, pogroms, and Pope Pious XII working arm and arm with Hitler to carry out the Holocaust. It is like Rabbi Boteach is giving a summary of Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg's Devil and the Jews, possibly through vague recollections of anti-Christian polemics heard in yeshiva, without any of the nuance, which Trachtenberg did not have much of in the first place.

Now that the misunderstanding has been clarified, thanks to Rabbi Boteach's brilliant efforts, Jews and Christians can finally come together in the recognition of their common heritage. Jews should forgive Evangelical Christians because they support Israel and uphold traditional values in American society. What Rabbi Boteach likes about Evangelical Christians' efforts to uphold traditional values is unclear, because he also attacks them for causing divisiveness and for focusing too much attention on gay marriage. So it is mainly for taking right-wing positions on Israel I guess. Catholics are nice too mainly because, unlike Rabbi Boteach's Evangelical friends, they are not trying to convert us these days, passed Vatican II and the two recent popes have visited synagogues. Of the greatest importance, Rabbi Boteach has personally met with Pope Benedict XVI, shaken hands with him, and can assure us that he is a really nice guy.                

I try to place myself in the place of Rabbi Boteach's assumed audience, Christians, and picture how I would react to this book if I were a Christian. I would be offended by the mere fact that someone from a different group has the nerve to tell me what to think about issues critical to my faith, attacks what I believe in ways that sound suspiciously like the pot calling the kettle black, and is dishonest enough to deny that he is even doing any of this. And this would be before I actually opened the book. At which point I would add that he has the hypocrisy to accuse me of blaming him for killing my Lord and the same time as he blames me for killing his grandparents. The fig leaf about not blaming people for the sins of their parents would not count for much as Rabbi Boteach himself clearly does not believe it as demonstrated by his obsessive insistence that Jews (the real ones and not the fake traitorous Jews, who obviously have no Jewish descendants alive today) did not kill Jesus. I would come away thinking that Jews are arrogant, self-righteous, think that the entire world runs around them and that only their interests matter. In other words what Aspergers are routinely accused of applied to form a mild anti-Semitic neurosis.

What was Rabbi Boteach thinking when he wrote this book? From his presentation, it is clear that he is an excellent public speaker and would make for an effective politician. Thinking of him as an entertainer with political ambitions, I think, explains a lot. He is not running for public office, (though he does want to be Chief Rabbi of England) but as the rabbi for Christians. In this, it is only a relatively minor annoyance that the Jewish community has yet to accept him in this role just as long as non-Jews think that he represents Judaism or at least see him as representing what Judaism should be. It says something that Rabbi Boteach brags not just of meeting the pope, but of being good friends with Christian missionaries and of having spoken at missionary training schools. Tuvia Singer at least has to make up his Christian alter-ego to present Christian missionary tactics to a Jewish audience. The fact that Rabbi Boteach wrote a book about Jesus for Christians instead of Jews also says a lot. Add to it the almost messianic tone in which he writes about this book as if he expects that this one book will change Jewish-Christian relations forever. As a politician, Rabbi Boteach does not really think in terms of ideological positions to be supported, but in personal relationships to be maintained. Ideology is a role to play in order to get on stage. The point is to get on the public stage and secure the best possible position and ideology must not be allowed to get in the way. Now that Rabbi Boteach has his public role as the rabbi he is free to use his personal charisma to make as many friendships and gain as much influence as possible even from the people he is supposed to be in opposition to.

Reading Kosher Jesus as a politician's speech explains why Rabbi Boteach thinks he can get away with offending both Jewish and Christian audiences. He had to know that Jews would be offended by the concept so he wrote a book that is in practice very Jewish in the hope that any Jewish readers would be assured of whose side he was on. On the other hand, he hoped that Christians would just focus on the premise of a rabbi who likes Jesus. Like any good politician, Rabbi Boteach works in generalities in the hopes that each part of his audience will only hear the part they would already be inclined to hear. Keeping things as shallow as possible is critical because it hinders anyone from taking him seriously intellectually and criticizing him. How can you criticize ideas that are not really there? It is the sentiments that count anyway and the beauty of sentiments is that, unlike ideas, they can contradict each other without there being a problem.

Rabbi Boteach could have written a valuable book, making the case to Jews to rethink Jesus and by extension their Christian neighbors. To defend himself he could put in something above the grade school level of scholarship that he did and presented himself as just a humble representative of a tradition. Instead, Rabbi Boteach needed to be the rabbi for Christians, something unique and incredible to match his inner vision of himself; in essence, he needed to be his own Kosher Jesus.   
     

What Would St. John Chrysostom Do? Some Thoughts on Attending the Columbus International Festival

This past weekend, I attended the Columbus International Festival. It was a rather dull event, brimming with cheap feel-good liberal slogans and advertisements for the United Nations. Not the sort of event that I would have bothered to go to on my own, but I was there a volunteer chaperone for the Columbus branch of Yachad.

I did have one interesting encounter, though, with a woman manning a booth for the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. The fact that someone would put up a booth under the name of St. John Chrysostom at an event like this, with its emphasis on peace, love, tolerance and implicit ecumenism, struck me as a little odd. For all of you who are not familiar with St. John Chrysostom, he was a fourth century Church father, and without question one of the most important Christian thinkers to have lived between the time of the New Testament and St. Augustine. To students of Jewish-Christians relations, Chrysostom is a central example of early Christian anti-Semitism. His Adversus Judaeos Homilies make for very interesting reading. Some choice examples:

The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews are soon to march upon us one after the other and in quick succession: the feast of Trumpets, the feast of Tabernacles, the fasts. There are many in our ranks who say they think as we do. Yet some of these are going to watch the festivals and others will join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts. I wish to drive this perverse custom from the Church right now. My homilies against the Anomians can be put off to another time, and the postponement would cause no harm. But now that the Jewish festivals are close by and at the very door, if I should fail to cure those who are sick with the Judaizing disease. I am afraid that, because of their ill-suited association and deep ignorance, some Christians may partake in the Jews' transgressions; once they have done so, I fear my homilies on these transgressions will be in vain. For if they hear no word from me today, they will then join the Jews in their fasts; once they have committed this sin it will be useless for me to apply the remedy. …

But do not be surprised that I called the Jews pitiable. They really are pitiable and miserable. When so many blessings from heaven came into their hands, they thrust them aside and were at great pains to reject them. The morning Sun of Justice arose for them, but they thrust aside its rays and still sit in darkness. We, who were nurtured by darkness, drew the light to ourselves and were freed from the gloom of their error. They were the branches of that holy root, but those branches were broken. We had no share in the root, but we did reap the fruit of godliness. From their childhood they read the prophets, but they crucified him whom the prophets had foretold. We did not hear the divine prophecies but we did worship him of whom they prophesied. And so they are pitiful because they rejected the blessings which were sent to them, while others seized hold of these blessing and drew them to themselves. Although those Jews had been called to the adoption of sons, they fell to kinship with dogs; we who were dogs received the strength, through God's grace, to put aside the irrational nature which was ours and to rise to the honor of sons.

Not that I hold this against Chrysostom. I am not inclined to moralize about his “intolerance” nor would I ever attempt to lecture Christians about him or tell them that they cannot venerate him as a saint and a great thinker; Jews say plenty of nasty things about Christians and I have no intention of throwing stones in a glass house. As far as I am concerned, Christians have no need to be apologetic about Chrysostom. He was a great thinker and orator, who lived in his own time and place and had his opinions. This is still no reason, though, to bring him to a celebration of different cultures and religions. So I went ever to the woman manning the booth and asked her if she thought that Chrysostom would have approved of this event. She tried to dodge the issue but I kept on pressing the matter. Finally, she responded that he probably would not have thought that such an event could be possible.

I am sure that Chrysostom would have wanted to attend this event. He would have stood around at his booth talking to the people passing by: “Hi there. You are going straight to Hell. You are going to Hell and you and you over there in the back, Satan is putting on the flames just for you.” Unfortunately, the woman manning the booth was not acting in this spirit. She was being really nice; she was not threatening anyone or raising any fire and brimstone. I think I would have liked having Chrysostom there. We could have ecumenically hated the event together.