REview of Passion

I just re-joined Metatuning after a LOOOOOONG hiatus, so maybe someone
posted this, but I thought it was a very well-written critique:

A GOSPEL OF LOVE AND HOPE: HOW TO RESPOND TO MEL GIBSON'S "PASSION"
By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun Magazine

Mel Gibson unlocked the secret of why Americans have never confronted
anti-Semitism in the way that we did with the other great systems of
hatred (racism, sexism, homophobia) when he told a national t.v.
audience on February 16 that "the Jews' real complaint isn't with my
film (The Passion) but with the Gospels." Few Christians today know
the history of anti-Semitism and the way that the Passion stories
were central to rekindling hatred of Jews from generation to
generation. Many are embracing Gibson's movie and not understanding
why Jews seem to be so threatened. Gibson knows that for many
Americans it is simply unimaginable to question the Gospels.

Those who wanted to purge hatred of Jews from the collective
unconscious of Western societies after the defeat of Nazism in 1945
faced an impossible dilemma. The dominant religious tradition of the
West was based on a set of four accounts of Jesus, each of which to
some extent is riddled with anger at or even hatred of the Jews. The
Gospels were written, many historians tell us, some fifty years after
Jesus' death at a time when early Christians (most of whom considered
themselves still Jewish) were engaged in a fierce competition with a
newly emerging rabbinic Judaism to win the hearts and minds of their
fellow Jews (some of whom were becoming Jewish Christians, retaining
their Jewish practice but adding to it a belief in Jesus as messiah)
and the minds of the disaffected masses of the Roman empire (some
Christians already having given up on converting Jews and beginning
to think that the real audience for their outreach should be the
wider world of the Roman Empire).

The Gospels sought to play down the antagonism that Jews of Jesus'
time felt toward Rome, so they displaced the anger at his crucifixion
instead onto those Jews who remembered Jesus as an inspiring and
revolutionary teacher but not much more (not a messiah, not God). The
result: an account that portrays Jews as willfully calling on the
Romans to kill Jesus, rejecting the supposed compassion of the
Romans, and thereby earning the hatred of humanity for the Jews'
supposed collective responsibility for this act of deicide.
Conversely, Jesus' Judaism, his viewing the world through the frame
of his Jewish spiritual practice and Torah-based thinking, is played-
down or at times completely obscured, so that the message of these
professional "convert the non-Jews" thinkers would not be undermined
by a covert message (still advocated by some of the Jewish Christians
at the time of the writing of the Gospel) that to be a Christian one
should also become a Jew.

When Christianity gained state power in Rome in the 4th century of
the common era, it quickly began to pass legislation restricting
Jewish rights. And as Christianity conquered Europe in the ensuing
centuries, spreading its story that the Jews were responsible for
killing Jesus, the Jews became the primary demeaned other of Europe
for the next 1700 years. Jews came to fear Easter--because the
retelling of the Crucifixion story often led to mob attacks on
defenseless Jews who were blamed for having caused the suffering of
Jesus.

In the aftermath of WWII, many principled Christians recognized that
the Holocaust was possible in part because Hitler was able to draw
upon the cultural legacy of hatred toward Jews nurtured by this kind
of Christian teaching. The Catholic Church and some Protestant
denominations have sought to distance themselves from this long
history of demeaning the Jews. But although anti-Semitism became
unfashionable, only a few Christians were willing to take
responsibility for the devastating impact of the hateful
representations of Jews that suffused the Gospels and culminated in
its historically doubtful account of the Roman imperialists, who
ruled with an iron fist and crucified thousands of Jews, bowing to
the will of a hateful Jewish mob determined to kill Jesus.

Even when the Catholic Church officially banned teaching hatred of
Jews, it never ordered its dioceses to teach about the role the
church itself had played in creating and sustaining those negative
stereotypes.

Liberals and progressives in the late 20th century did an impressive
job of confronting and educating the public about the literary,
intellectual, and cultural sources of racism, sexism and homophobia.
But they tended to shy away from anti-Semitism, both because of the
mistaken assumption that it was no longer a real problem (after all,
Jews were economically and politically flourishing in post-WWII
America) and because such a confrontation would have forced a
challenge to the dominant Western religion at the core of its most
dramatic story: the crucifixion.

Nevertheless, ever since the 1960s there have been thousands of
sensitive Christians, who, to their credit, have created a Christian
spiritual renewal movement which rejects the teaching of hatred in
the Gospel by allegorizing the story and giving greater focus to the
Resurrection than to the Crucifixion. Returning to Jesus' Jewish
roots, and refocusing attention on the bulk of the Gospel, with its
stories portraying a Jewish Jesus who builds on and elaborates the
ancient Torah commandments to "love your neighbor as yourself"
and "love the stranger," the Christian renewalists tended to see the
two-thousand-year history of Christian anti-Semitism as a distortion
of the deeper truth of the Gospel. Easter became a holiday to
celebrate the rebirth of an ancient Jewish hope--that the forces of
hatred and cruelty manifested in the Crucifixion could be overcome by
a triumph of the forces of love, generosity and kindness whose
Resurrection and ultimate victory were celebrated at Easter.

Yet that renewal movement is now being effectively challenged by a
Christian fundamentalist movement with deep ties to right-wing
politics. In post 9/11 America, many people have given up on the
hopeful vision of social change movements. They have turned to a deep
pessimism in which the idea of a world based on love, cooperation and
generosity to the Other is alternately ridiculed and disdained as
unrealistic and dangerous. A cynical realism holds sway in the media
and mainstream American culture and political institutions, placing
American progressive and visionary thinkers on the defensive. No
wonder, then, that many Christians are attracted to interpretations
of their religious tradition which emphasize the danger and cruelty
in the world while sidelining aspects of the Gospel which teach
compassion and solidarity with the oppressed.

I've written about this struggle in another context (see my book
_Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation_). Inside the
Jewish tradition there has always been a struggle between those who
have heard God's voice as the voice of accumulated pain and cruelty
of the universe passed on from generation to generation, and those
who have heard God's voice as a voice of love, compassion, generosity
and transcendence. Even in our Torah there are moments when the
people hearing God's voice are hearing it through the frame of their
own accumulated pain and hence hear a voice that talks a language of
power, domination and cruelty, and other moments when the people
hearing God's voice are hearing it through the frame of their own
capacity to respond to God's revelation of love and generosity. And
so it is through history that we find in virtually every religious
tradition the people who distort the message of love of their own
traditions and instead portray God as the voice legitimating
domination, power over others, cruelty and violence. The George W's,
the Osama Bin Ladins, the Ariel Sharons are found in every tradition.
And they don't even need the frame of religion (some people like to
blame these distortions--but the truth is that the Nazis,
Stanlinists, and Vietnam-war mongers of the US did not need religion
to act out the legacy of pain and cruelty in the world). There is no
religious tradition, no ideology of liberation (including Marxism,
psychoanalysis, feminism, etc.) that cannot be appropriated by a
distorted consciousness and transformed into its opposite, that is,
into a mechanism or a justificatory ideology to dominate and act out
of cruelty.

So let's understand that the attempt to revive Christian enthusiasm
around the part of the story that is focused on cruelty and pain is
not only (or even primarily) a threat to the Jews, but rather a
threat to all those decent, loving, and generous Christians who have
found in the Jesus story a foundation for their most humane and
caring instincts. It is these Christians who are under assault by Mel
Gibson's movie, and by the particular form of Christian
evangelicalism that it is meant to stimulate. Yet, in a deeper way,
the Gibson movie is likely to stimulate a broader assault on all of
us who seek to build a world based on caring and love, cooperation
and generosity, by giving strength to the part within each of us that
despairs, the voice within each of us that tells us that cruelty is
what is "really how the other is, really how the world is," the voice
inside each of us that feels that there is no point in struggling to
transform the world because it is too hopeless and too dominated by
craziness (and that is the point of the Jews in the Gospel calling
for Jesus to be killed, because it is saying "even the Jews, his own
people" do this, because evil is dominant in the world and always
will be, and the only way out is to believe in Jesus and find
salvation in another world, and despair of changing this one). So,
part of the struggle is to reclaim and reaffirm the Jewish Jesus, the
Jesus who retains hope for building love right here, the Jesus who
unabashedly proclaims that the Kingdom of Heaven has arrived (which
is to say, that it is here on earth, that the world right now can be
based on love and kindness, and that we don't have to wait for some
future time or "the end of days" as described by Isaiah, because it
is here now, we can make it happen right away by the way that we live
our lives). And it is this voice of Jesus that The Passion movie
seeks to marginalize or make invisible.

I hope Christians will take the lead in organizing people of all
faiths to leaflet every public showing of Gibson's film with a
message that runs counter to the anger at Jews that this film is
likely to produce in at least some viewers. I hope that every
morally sensitive Christian minister and priest will use the weeks
ahead to preach about the history of Christian anti-Semitism until
most parishioners can understand why Jews would feel worried about
the popularizing of the Gospel story. But I hope also that the
discussion isn't reduced to that--that Christians take on the
underlying challenge and affirm their commitment to the Jewish Jesus,
the Jesus that preaches that a world of love is possible right now,
right here, through our actions.

The best hope to avoid a new surge of anti-Semitism will not come
only from de-coding the anti-Semitic themes in Mel Gibson's film, or
the Gospel on which it was based, but rather by re-crediting the
ancient Jewish vision of Jesus--that in place of the Old Bottom Line
of money and power, a New Bottom Line of Love and Generosity is
possible. People of all faiths need to shape a political and social
movement that reaffirms the most generous, peace-oriented, social
justice-committed, and loving truths of the spiritual heritage of the
human race. It is only this resurrection of hope that can save us
from a new wave of global hatred.

Please take this message and ask your local newspaper to publish it.
Send it to your friends and anyone on your email lists. Please
approach local Christian groups to take the lead to create this
discussion publicly. Or, failing that, please have your local Tikkun
Community create a public discussion of these issues (we are doing
that in the Bay Area on March 14th--check our calendar of events at
www.tikkun.org a few days before). We will also discuss these issues
in greater detail at the annual Tikkun Community Conference and Teach-
In to Congress for Middle East Peace April 25-27 in Washington, D.C.--
because at a deep level they underlie the entire enterprise of
building a world of peace (if you despair of that, then you stop
thinking about how to build more cooperation and the Ariel Sharon and
George Bush strategy of domination over others is what you are left
with).

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, national chair of the
interfaith peace and justic organization The Tikkun Community
(www.tikkun.org), rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco,
and author of _Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation_
(HarperPerennial) and most recently, of _Healing Israel/Palestine_
(North Atlantic Books, 2003). RabbiLerner@...