This year Holy Week for Christians (Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox) coincides with Passover for Jews and comes shortly after the conclusion of Ramadan for Muslims. The convergence of sacred times for Christians, Jews, and Muslims is a three-fold blessing. When I lived in Jerusalem from 1978 to 2002, I rejoiced whenever the holy days of the three monotheistic traditions came together, creating overlapping rhythms of consecration.
This year also marks the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the declaration by the Second Vatican Council that ushered in a new era in Christian-Jewish, especially Catholic-Jewish, relations. By decrying the sin of anti-Semitism and repudiating the deicide charge against the Jewish people that had haunted relations between the two faith communities for many centuries, the Catholic Church took a major step in cleansing its official theology of both anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. The Protestant and Anglican churches followed suit in subsequent years.
As a Jew active for decades in the field of interfaith engagement, I recognize how historic and transformative Nostra Aetate was, and still is. I know that some Christians, especially in the Eastern Orthodox churches, are slow or reluctant to embrace the new paradigm in Jewish-Christian relations. But for the majority of Catholics, Protestants, and Anglicans, Jews no longer serve as the foil, if not the demonic enemy, in the Gospel story of Jesus’s Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. This profound transformation, or (to use a Greek word from the New Testament) this metanoia in Christian faith-understanding, is to be celebrated. No longer do Jews have to tremble in fear on Good Friday, lest a local priest incite his followers to hatred and violence against their Jewish neighbors for the alleged crime of killing God on a cross. (Crucifixion was a Roman method of execution; but the Jews, not the ancient Romans, were tragically scapegoated as “Christ-killers” over the course of two millennia). For the Jews of Europe before 1965, Good Friday did not bring any good news. The cross, seen by faithful Christians as a salvific symbol of Divine reconciliation with humanity, was turned into a weapon to murder and terrorize the members of Jesus’s own people during the centuries of politically empowered Christendom. Christians and Jews alike can be thankful to God that this painful paradox has finally been supplanted by more inclusively compassionate, and historically accurate, Christian interpretations of what happened on the hill of Golgotha almost 2000 years ago.
Surmounting this theological hurdle has opened up exciting possibilities for Jews and Christians to learn from one another.* The two communities, while retaining their spiritual identities and loyalties, can now appreciate how their respective stories of liberation and redemption can be mutually instructive, even inspirational. We can read the Passover and Easter stories without imposing self-referencing interpretations on one or the other. We can explore together the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah 52-53 and hear why Christians see Jesus on the Cross in that portrayal, while Jews (basing themselves on earlier references in Isaiah to God’s servant Jacob) tend to see the People Israel allegorized in those prophetic texts.
Such a more inclusive and generous approach to sacred stories, and to discipleship nurtured by those scriptural accounts, is a truly liberating opportunity that our ancestors were denied by the limitations of history and restrictive communal identities.
I try to appreciate the Lenten journey undertaken by my Christian sisters and brothers as such a path of discipleship, a devotional act of imitatio Christi. Similarly, I view Ramadan as a profound spiritual practice, one of the pillars of Islam, that brings the worldwide umma together in a synchronized observance of sacred time, just as we Jews observe Shabbat together even as we are separated in the spatial dimension.
Even though I do not view Jesus as divine or as the messiah anticipated by most Jews, he is nonetheless one of my most influential Jewish teachers. I see him as a Galilean rabbi and faith healer at the radical edge of the Pharisaic spectrum, calling his fellow Jews, in particular “the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” to a more heart-centered way of living out the Torah. I resonate with such an understanding of the Sinai covenant and its imperatives for us as Jews, and as human beings. Unfortunately, many Christians still see Torah, which means Divine teaching, as a legalistic framework that was supplanted by the Gospel of Love. (The translation of “Torah” into New Testament Greek as “nomos,” or law, helped to engender this misunderstanding). In my view, the misperceived dichotomy between Law and Love remains the greatest stumbling block in healing the tragic divide separating Christians and Jews.
As the variegated Children of Abraham approach the One God through different means of worship and celebration, let us appreciate the saving grace in all three faith traditions. For all of them are blessed by God, in ways we cannot fully fathom. The survival of the Jewish people, as a prophetic and priestly community dispersed throughout the world, is an amazing miracle. The global witness of both the universal Church and the Islamic umma, as vessels for sacrificial service to humanity, is also a manifestation of transcendent love and goodness. Sadly, at this critical moment in history, both Jews and Christians are being targeted by Islamist extremists who do not understand their sibling religious communities in this way. Conversely, Muslims are viewed generically by many Christians and Jews as inherently hostile and threatening. This painful reality of mutual antagonism compels us to uphold simultaneously two faith responses that are often in tension:
first, compassion for misguided adversaries who, in the words of the dying Jesus, deserve forgiveness for “they know not what they do”; a proactive strategy to counter negative stereotypes of the religious Other is to design and implement educational programs that promote interfaith literacy, a vital asset for all citizens, especially clergy and religious educators;
second, a commitment to inclusive justice and the protection of vulnerable human beings who are endangered by murderous hatred; individuals and groups facing threats of violence need strong allies outside their scapegoated communities who will advocate for them and, when necessary, show up in force to pre-empt harmful attacks by hateful extremists (especially when government and law enforcement officials are derelict in their duty to ensure the safety of all).
If we believe that God is the Source of both love and justice, then Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others can together exemplify imitatio Dei by combating hatred and violence perpetrated by anyone in the name of religion. In so doing, we can ensure that the lives and the dignity of our fellow human beings, created in the Divine Image, will be enshrined as sacred values above any theology, any creed, any professed devotion to God.
This year, during Ramadan, Lent, and Passover we Muslims, Christians, and Jews have an opportunity to renounce our self-centered worldviews that privilege our understanding of holiness over others’ and that too often prevent us from acting out of inclusive love and compassion when the wellbeing of others is threatened. May the Holy One of Blessing help us to forge an alliance of all believers to preserve the true image of God as Cosmic Lover, Guardian, and Savior in a time when this image is being desecrated by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim supremacists throughout our war-weary world.
*Among the many helpful resources now available, I would recommend the following books for joint study by Christians and Jews: The Synoptic Gospels Set Free: Preaching Without Anti-Judaism by Daniel Harrington, SJ, and The Gospel of John Set Free: Preaching Without Anti-Judaism by Fr. George Smiga (both from Paulist Press), Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus by Harvey Falk (from Wipf & Stock Publishers), The Jewish Annotated New Testament edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (from Oxford University Press), and a more recent book co-authored by Levine and Brettler: The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (from HarperCollins).
YEHEZKEL LANDAU, D.Min., is a dual Israeli-American citizen, interfaith educator, and author active in Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations and Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding for over 40 years. He directed the Oz veShalom-Netivot Shalom Israeli religious peace movement in the 1980s and co-founded the Open House peace center in Ramle. He then taught Jewish tradition and interfaith relations at Hartford Seminary, where he held the Abrahamic Partnerships Chair. See www.landau-interfaith.com.