Letter to my Jewish Friends and Michael Oren
A clarification regarding Christians and Jews
I read Michael Oren’s piece with complete sympathy. My heart breaks over the pervasive, never-ending, irrational and murderous hatred of the Jews, now on grotesque display.
However, I wish to clarify an assertion in his piece. He refers to: “…a Christian belief that all Jews were present at, and responsible for, the crucifixion. More than Pilate, more than Judas, … the Jews were damned for deicide.”
Those—and I suppose there are some—who claim to be Christian, but who also blame the Jews for the death of Jesus, are seriously confused and need to go back to confirmation class. (The notion that all Jews were present at the crucifixion is something I’ve never heard.)
Jesus died because that was God’s plan. Jesus was “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” [words spoken by John the Baptist in John 1:29]. Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover with his disciples, knowing full well that it was God’s plan that he, Jesus, fully man yet also fully God and without sin, would be the perfect sinless lamb offered to finally defeat sin and death. The night before his death he prayed fervently that “this cup might pass” from him; but his prayer concluded with “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” [Luke 22:42]
Isaiah wrote of Jesus without fully knowing the identity of the suffering servant, but nevertheless understanding that God would send a redeemer into the world whose suffering would pay for all sin for all time. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” [Isaiah 53:5]
Of course Jesus was Jewish, and his chief opponents were the Jewish religious leaders who recognized that he threatened their power. So it is true that the Jewish leaders goaded the people into demanding that Pilate have Jesus crucified.
But consider what happened in another situation where the death of Jesus appeared imminent: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him over the cliff. But Jesus passed through the crowd and went on his way.” [Luke 4:29-30]
Jesus, being God, could control any circumstance; in the case of his crucifixion he endured it because it was God’s plan for the eternal salvation of humankind.
You made the point that I sometimes make—that most of the people in the area were Jewish, the crowd were Jewish, etc. Their Jewish identity does not need to be the focus of any complaint that they chose to save Barabbas, etc. They were just people who happened to be Jewish.
Where I agree with the point that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus is my belief that the death of American democracy is the fault, not of democrats but Republicans who have been gutless for generations. Republicans who have continued to talk about working across the aisle whilst Democrats have knifed tham in the back.
I am not a Christian believing in the Great Spirit that came from all my ancestors.
My thoughts are with the people of Israel because in 1973, I agreed to follow my girlfriend out to a kibbutz (not being Jewish I just saw it as an adventure). She left and I was to follow the week after...as it turned out the week that the Yom Kippur War broke out. What was I to do? I had given up my job and my apartment. I agreed to go.
I was sent to the youngest kibbutz in the country at the time, Kibbutz Grofit near Eilat. A kibbutz that had sent most of its young community to war. I felt I was helping.
My point is that I remember that this was the second time in five years that Israel had been attacked, and I know from being there that in 1973, the Syrians came very close to sneaking into the main cities of Northern Israel and probably the destruction of the country all together.