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Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
Jesus
in Jewish-Christian-Moslem Dialogue
By Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
from Paradigm Shift
The
article on Jesus was my review of Dermot Lane's book The
Reality of Jesus (Paulist Press, 1977). The issues dealing
with Jesus are painful ones in the Christian-Jewish dialogue,
and often the responses come from a panic reaction. We have
it between the rock of wanting to maintain our belief in the
Mashiach and the hard place of our history with those
who wanted to force us to accept Jesus as our Messiah. The
arguments tend to raise more heat than light. I attempted
to show where there were possibilities for further dialogue
that would allow some permeability to the person and the teaching
of Yeshua ben Miriam of Nazareth that would not result in
an automatic rejection response... I believe that there still
is some mileage left in the dialogue and/or disputation over
these issues. Most of the time, they are addressed by Jews
who come from legal-rational quarters. I sought to speak from
a place that recognized the soterial-mediating function of
the tzaddik in Hasidism and who access the inner reality...in
the cosmos...
Treat
this discussion as an exercise in hope. I would for this moment
only suspend past pains and disappointments and suspend also
my conviction that where we are now as Jews and Christians
is better than any other place - better because it is our
reality. Further, I also believe that the separate voices
of our official religions will ultimately contribute more
in the unanimous peace in praise of God than a plain chant
in which all blend.
There
is little that a Jew can say upon reading Lane. This book
puzzles me. Here is a man who documents how all of present-day
Christology hangs on a hair. The further he returns to the
past the more traces of the unique, special, the second person
of the Trinity vanish, and what remains is a teacher of aggadic
Pharisaism who differed from the other teachers of halakhic
Pharisaism.
Lane's
method is a sort of last-ditch stand when a person encounters
the conflicting claims of historic material and of creedal
dogma. The two are not compatible, and the means of the low-ascending
theology are just not able to sway the historian while the
believer is threatened by the historic stuff that makes his
or her lush creedal affirmation look inflated and exaggerated.
But if the believer cannot assign the special unique creedal
significance to his or her Christ who pales into one of the
many teachers in the Sitz im Leben that the historian gives,
then why bother believing? I cannot believe that just another
rabbi teaching aggadah to fisherfolk would excite the
regular Christian to participate in a Mass done in Jesus'
memory. So who is Christ?
Call
him by his Hebrew term, the Mashiach, anointed one,
and claim his descent from David in order that there will
be fulfilled that "a sprout come forth from Jesse. .
." and you run into the trouble of (a) the job description
given to that messiah has not been fulfilled by him. The irenic
order of universal Shalom has not yet arrived. As we
are told of R. Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk who, when he lived
in Jerusalem, once heard a madman blow the ram's horn on the
holy Temple mount. When people came to him and said, "The
Messiah has arrived; he blew the ram's horn," R. Mendel
opened the window, looked out, and said, "No. He has
not come. Everything is still as it was before." The
state of exile continues unrelieved and for us Jews aggravated
by inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, and extermination camps.
One might cry out: "If it is as you say that you are
saved - how come you make us suffer so much?" No, the
seat of the Davidic Messiah has not yet been occupied by his
rightful descendant, and that is that. And (b) what sense
is there in the genealogy that traces Joseph's descent from
David if Joseph had nothing to do with the biological event
of Jesus' birth? So, even if the Shalom order had arrived,
Jesus could not be billed as the Davidic Prince of Peace.
Both on the fact of exile and on the theory of Davidic descent,
we have no Messiah as yet. To some extent I feel ashamed to
raise those old disputed issues, but somehow the Christologist
is not ashamed to lay the heavy claims on Jesus, and there
is after all this tradition that we Jews experience in countless
ways as leaning on us and urging us to accept this Christ
as the Messiah we expect, and we can only push back by retorting:
We will accept a biological descendant of David as the Messiah
when through him the Shalom order is established.
But
wait, is there only one Messiah spot for Jesus to occupy?
Ever since the break between Judah and Joseph, the Kingdom
of Israel from the Kingdom of Judah, there has been a claim
for the coming of a Messiah, son of Joseph. This Messiah comes
not to redeem sinners - this belongs to the Davidic Messiah-but
to redeem the righteous and to teach them that they too need
to come to Teshuvah (turning - metanoia). Being
a descendant of Joseph the tzaddik he, as the
Midrash (Vayosha 24) has it, will, after having
served as a leader of the Jewish troops, be killed by a warrior
from the West named Armilus (Romulus). He is, as the Jewish
tradition places him, the righteous suffering servant of Isaiah
53 who is to be martyred. Let's put this together. An Ephraimite,
a descendant of Joseph who comes from Galilee (no need
for the census story at all), who lives an exemplary holy
life (perhaps there is an underplaying of other companions
he may have had in favor of fisherfolk, publicans, and sinners,
which may have helped in making converts among the Gentiles
of the Roman Empire, but not in Jerusalem, where Nicodemus
and Joseph of Arimathea become more important), and is martyred
by "Romulus" could very well have become the Mashiach
ben Joseph for Jews.
If
Christians had spoken of Jesus then the chances are that Jews
would have been able to join Christians in the Good Friday
lament and count Jesus as one of the ten Martyrs of the State
and included his death with that of Rabbi Aqiba in the dirges
of the Yom Kippur martyrology. Jews could have even added
the extra bite of bread at the conclusion of the meal as a
memorial and have had a cup of thanksgiving - Eucharist -
for the same intention and prayed in the daily liturgy for
the resurrection of the Josephite Messiah that he might lead
us to meet the Messiah ben David. But . . . the Gospel writers
were prisoners of hope. Too impatient to postpone their hopes
for the salvation of this world, they pushed it up to heaven,
and as soon as the temporal order was in their hands Christians
became triumphalists in an unredeemed world. Not content to
assign the dignity of Messiah Ben Joseph to Jesus, claims
were made for the New Adam that the world's condition refused
to substantiate and all the transubstantiations subsequently
did not change the accidents of wine, bread, death, and martyrdom.
But
why identify the second person of the trinity with the messiah
and come with inflated claims when we can, instead of turning
to the synoptics, turn to John? His formulation of Jesus as
the Memra, the Logos, the Word that was God,
was with God, was made flesh, creates the more significant
Christology. Of the three tasks so well described by Rosenzweig
in his Star of Redemption - Creation, Revelation, and
Redemption - the real claim was made that Jesus is the revelation.
That equates Jesus with Torah, not with Mashiach. If
there be a being who so lives as the Creator in Heaven wishes
the being to live that he or she becomes a living Torah, at
least Jews of a mystical, aggadic, kabbalistic-hasidic persuasion
seem to have a stronger theological warrant for dialogue.
The tzaddik is God's possibility, for humanity
in a physical body. The tzaddik is Torah, who
decrees and God agrees; for the tzaddik's sake
the all was created. "God does not need a world,"
the Magid of Mezeritch teaches, but since tzaddikim
like to lead worlds, he creates worlds for them. tzaddikim
can heal and help, but most of all those who see them utter
the blessing: "Blessed art Thou Lord our God King of
the Universe who hast apportioned of thy wisdom to them who
fear thee." The tzaddik, at once an archetypal
model for behavior, is also an accessible model and anyone
who will follow the tzaddik- in the older sense of
imitatio - can also become a tzaddik. There are tractates
of all other commandments in the Talmud, but for Love, Faith,
Awe, and Devotion only a living tzaddik can serve a
generation as the tractate of the duties of the heart.
The
tzaddik is the Sinai event for all those who stand
in a positive relationship to the tzaddik. The tzaddik
serves the souls of the disciples and devotees as a general
soul that is for the disciple the interface to God's grace,
light, and love on this plane. Now all those teachings are
more compatible to the soteric claim of Christianity. The
Paraclete, the mediator, the WAY to the Creator, all these
are what the tzaddik is for mystical Jews and the Torah
is for all Jews in general. The Christian can say that, fulfilling
the Torah, Jesus became the Torah now immanent in his heart
and soul without making at the same time the extravagant claim
for Jesus to be the fulfillment of the redemption. For, although
the Torah was given at Sinai, no Jew expected that this would
so transform the whole world that it would usher in the irenic
realm of God's Kingdom. It is on the contrary a revelation
- a survival guide and handbook of how to manage in a world
that is not yet redeemed.
Having
stated the foregoing from a Jewish position, is this not also
close to the Christian one? The final redemption still awaits
another COMING. In the meantime, there is the word made flesh,
the paradigm of the fullest God in the fullest human, the
soter, reconciler, connector to the Creator. On the
Jewish side such an open and clear statement gives possibility
to the notion that Jesus is for Christians who follow in his
footsteps, pray in his name to the Creator, love one another
as he had loved his disciples, and await the redemption with
the light of the world having poured itself- kenosis
- into the souls of his followers. He is the word that the
Christian hears spoken of the Creator in the tongue of the
man, the rebbe from Nazareth. His followers once named Nazarenes
can now be seen by Jews as Nazarener hasidim in the
same way as Jews who follow the Satmarer Rebbe are Satmarer
hasidim, and those who follow the Belzer are Belzer
hasidim.
There
is yet a deeper aspect of Christology worth considering from
the principle of dialogue. There is the experience of the
Christ (I do not mean the Messiah aspect, but the Son of God
aspect) that is the confidant, the compassionate, the Holy,
the one who is all sacred heart, who is the love of God that
is also the God is love and he who abides in love abides in
God and God in him. True, this aspect is far from the ken
of the exoteric Jew but close to the esoteric one who is a
hasid or who follows the Kabbalah. I remember a conversation
I once had visiting the late Thomas Merton at Gethsemani.
Merton responded to my question what the Trinity meant to
him by quoting the Greek Fathers who said that God in awesome
might and creative power is the Father. God as loving and
compassionate and working to bring all souls to their reconciliation
and salvation is the Son. God as this love is revealed to
the human mind and gives human being the revelation of God's
will and wisdom is the Holy Spirit. I responded to this that
I believe that God creates, and, if this dimension of an infinite
number of dimensions is talked about under the name "Father,"
this has not only enough biblical and theological warrant
for Jews but is no point of quarrel. That God loves and in
this capacity is called the Son also makes a certain amount
of sense to a Kabbalist.
For
in the Zohar the Tetragrammaton is interpreted to mean YHVH
as follows: Y is the Father - Hokhmah, wisdom. H is
the Mother - Binah, understanding. V is the Son-Z'eyr
Anpin, the heart and the compassion, the one really pointed
to in the word YHVH; and H at the end is the Daughter - the
Shekhinah, the sabbath, the Divine Presence and, yes,
the Ruach HaKodesh -the Holy Spirit. As long as we
do not exclude the other manifestations by declaring that
there are only three, we have further room for dialogue and
understanding. Now it is also true that the Kingdom of the
YHVH has not yet begun on this earth and, as Zechariah foretold,
that will happen on "THAT DAY on which YHVH will be one
and His name ONE."
What
this calls for is a willingness to admit that all our formulations
about God are nothing but tentative stammerings of blind and
exiled children of Eve responding to the light deeply hidden
in the recesses of their nostalgic longing for the untainted
origin in which one needed not to look through the glass darkly
but could see. This can even make us proud of our traditions
and heritage as the storehouse of those stammering of the
souls that were filled by God with the grace of that holy
moment that defied definition and that was forced by ecclesiastical
lawyers to be encapsulated in a stateable wording. The mistake
that was made was to take the ecstatic exclamations of the
overwhelmed souls and to make them numbered articles of creeds
instead of acts of faith made in fear and trembling.
It
is this move that, for all the balance in Lane's book, he
did not make. It is indeed difficult to say that the magisterium
of the church -that the Torah and all its commentaries - are
deo gratias what we do have and treasure, but only
as the human snapshots of moments of God's nearness; that,
although we cannot improve on the divine that flows into our
vessels, we can and must take responsibility for keeping these
vessels clean and transparent and not at all as essential
as the light they contain. Perhaps we are as dogmatists small
souls of small faith who do not dare trust that God will be
with us as God was with our forebears and that God will not
abandon us nor forsake us.
It
then behooves the poor of the spirit of all creeds and denominations
to support each other in the desperate acts of faith that
we make in the face of the exile and the holocausts and enter
into a dialogue among fellow servants and children of one
Creator.
Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
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