The double-speak in the Canadian Rabbis Statement in response to the United Church of Canada's recent report on the church's work for just peace in Israel and Palestine rendered it incapable of contributing to peace in the Middle East.
On the one hand, the rabbis say, “we believe that Christian organizations seeking to advance the well-being of the peoples of the Holy Land must begin by ensuring they acknowledge and recognize historic tendencies that demonize the Jewish people.” And yet, when the United Church Task Group attempts to do just that they are excoriated for showing disrespect towards Jews by presuming “to know better and more about Jew-hatred than we do.”
This is a condemnation the rabbis seem pleased to exercise because it is included in their parting shot where the United Church is urged to “never veer toward hubris by presuming to know more about anti-Semitism than we Jews do.” Nowhere in the Task Group document did I see this.
During the last couple of months I re-read Niall Ferguson’s (2007) The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. The historical events described in the section on the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust are so grotesquely evil that one wonders why it was not seen coming and stopped in its tracks. Probably because there were not enough pastors such as Schneider and Bonhoeffer to speak out against the demonic anti-Semitism that permeated the Nazi program (and too many pastors who uncritically absorbed the implicit anti-Semitism that can be drawn from many New Testament texts).
Given the anti-Semitic history – much of it tangled up with a misreading of the crucifixion by Christians – there cannot be enough serious, unsentimental, tough anti anti-Semitic speech.
But let me turn to a second disturbing point in the rabbis rebuttal. It implies the bizarre logic that if you are not with us in belief you are anti-Semitic. If, for example, you do not hold objectively that God entered into a unique and enduring covenant relationship with the Jews and affirmed this by giving them the land of Israel for their perpetual possession then you are an anti-Semite. Jews may carry “a special memory and love of the land of Israel,” but this is a matter of biblical interpretation and personal faith.
One may not share this faith but certainly not be an anti-Semite. Jews are free to embrace these convictions provided this does not harm other people. I, for instance, have written a couple of books on a Muslim sect and have lived among them but I am not a Muslim nor was meant to be. I do not hold what is central to this group, namely, that God raised up a uniquely authoritative leader of the Muslims in the late nineteenth century in the Punjab. But I certainly am not an anti-Muslim.
The rabbis, on the contrary, urged the United Church not to negate the divine covenant with the Jewish people.
But what if I do not believe He made one?
Does this make me an anti-Semite?
It is a matter of personal faith.