Preface

In the aftermath of Vatican II, I was both puzzled and pleased that my church had “come clean” and had identified the tragic poison of anti-Judaism at the heart of my Catholic upbringing. I was only too ready to embrace the bishops’ fresh perspective that Jesus of Nazareth was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died as a Jew. This perspective, in itself, opening up a brave, new world in which I, as a Catholic, was for the first time officially encouraged to esteem Jews and Judaism in the very act of venerating Jesus of Nazareth as my Lord and my Redeemer. By honoring one Jew, I was accordingly urged to honor all Jews.

During the 80s, I became comfortable with the idea that the mainline churches, for the most part, had been healed of the poison of anti-Judaism. The explorations narrated in this book, however, prove just the contrary. In my own case, my initial contact with a single Jew in 1955 set me on a path to experience Judaism, not only as it is described in books, but as it is felt by living Jews. These contacts over a period of fifty years enabled me to detect the poison at the heart of my Catholic upbringing so deeply, so tenderly, and so honestly as to address even the pain and the distrust that Jews experience when they remember the smoke of the burning children in the camps. For Christian believers (including pastors, teachers, and theologians), my pioneering explorations will reveal how deeply anti-Judaism has gone underground--disfiguring not only the role of Israel in God’s plan of salvation but also horribly twisting the faith, the forgiveness, and the salvation that Christians celebrate as coming to them through Jesus Christ. These revelations will be distressing and painful for some. Others will discover that this is the necessary first step for our mutual healing. And still others will come forward praising God “for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).

How We Got to Where We Are Now

Three boundaries are very clear. The first is that Jesus was personally committed to Judaism and that he trained his disciples to interpret the law of Moses (Torah) in anticipation of the kingdom of God that was ready to break into history. At no point did Jesus or his first disciples renounce their Judaism in favor of establishing a new religion. If the Jesus movement had consistently retained this legacy of Jesus, it would undoubtedly have remained a sub‑group within Judaism to this very day. But it did not.

This brings us to the second clear boundary. By the mid-second century, Gentile‑dominated segments of the Jesus movement retained their self‑definition as "the true Israel" while, at the same time, rejecting all forms of Judaism that were not absorbed into their own movement. History after this, Jacob Neusner reminds us, was marked by the intimacy and the bitterness characteristic of a "family quarrel":

We have ample evidence for characterizing as a family quarrel the relationship between the two great religious traditions of the West. Only brothers can hate so deeply, yet accept and tolerate so impassively, as have Judaic and Christian brethren both hated, and yet taken for granted the presence of, one another. [1]

The third clear boundary is also very clear. In the early 1960s, the antagonisms fueled by this family quarrel were, for the first time, being rigorously reexamined because the smoke of burning children of Auschwitz was in our nostrils. Since then, a small measure of mutual understanding and healing has been achieved. Official and unofficial dialogues between Jews and Christians have emerged nearly everywhere. After nineteen hundred years, Christians and Jews are again listening attentively to each other with respect. The painful topics that had been brushed under the rug for centuries can now be publicly aired.

Yet, much remains to be done. And the time is short. For, as the geo-political realism of John Paul II reminds us, "in order to be a blessing for the world, Jews and Christians need first to be a blessing for each other." May this volume facilitate this end!

Progress and Decline

Catholics officially abandoned the inflammatory rhetoric defining Jews as “Christ-killers” during the last session of the Vatican Council in 1965. Expanding upon that prophetic impulse, the Vatican's 1985 Notes on the Correct Way to Present Judaism told Catholics, point blank, that "Jesus was and always remained a Jew" ( Notes 12) thereby putting an end to the imagined claim that Jesus himself rejected Judaism as a defective religion. In this same document, Catholics were also made familiar with the ways in which Jesus shared common ground with the Pharisees of his day and were warned that "an exclusively negative picture of the Pharisees is likely to be inaccurate and unjust" ( Notes 19). In 1998, Catholics were instructed: "No one can remain indifferent [to the Shoah/Holocaust], least of all the Church, by reason of her very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people" ( We Remember 1). Finally, in 2002, by virtue of "Reflections on Covenant and Mission," Catholics were asked to consider whether Judaism‑-"the faithful response of the Jewish people to God’s irrevocable covenant"‑-ought to be regarded as "salvific" for Jews quite apart from any relationship with Jesus.

Each of these steps forward was the triumph of grace. Each step forward, however, was hindered by the troubling tension Christians felt between their own fierce acceptance of the crucified Christ and the overwhelming Jewish rejection of Jesus. Christian preachers, consequently, routinely exalted the wisdom and grace that has come to them through Jesus and Mary; meanwhile, seldom, if ever, did these same preachers draw any significant attention to the wisdom and grace that came to them through the children of Abraham and Sarah. Even the Vatican's 1985 Notes on the Correct Way to Present Judaism said many wonderful things about Jews and Judaism but then turned around and starkly declared that the "Church and Judaism cannot then be seen as two parallel ways of salvation" ( Notes 7). Even Jews, therefore, who "remain very dear to God" ( Nostra Aetate 4) appear to be, like the followers of other world religions, "objectively speaking . . . in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation" ( Dominus Jesus 22). Those who reject Christ, meanwhile, are frequently harassed by evangelical Christians bent upon converting them before the end times begin.

How This Book Began Fifty Years Ago

The reflections of this book began as I myself was torn by the love-hate relationship between Catholics and Jews in an ethnic suburb of Cleveland. My early religious training within Catholic schools and my early cultural training at the outbreak of World War II made it quite natural for me to pity, to blame, and to despise Jews. Had I been bombarded by Hitler's speeches blaming and shaming Jews, I would undoubtedly have cheered him on. The greater part of my family and neighbors would have done the same. In point of fact, however, I never had contact with a single living Jew. "Let them stay where they belong" was my Dad's favorite line. But, then, in an unexpected moment, a real flesh and blood Jew, Mr. Martin, made his way into my life.

I was an impressionable boy of sixteen in 1955. Mr. Martin agreed to employ me part‑time as a stock‑boy in his dry goods store on East 185th Street. I desperately needed a larger income than my Cleveland Plain Dealer route had been able to afford me; hence, I felt lucky to have landed this new job. But I was also anxious since Mr. Martin was a Jew, and I was a committed Christian. Would he want to exploit me? Would he treat me fairly? Would he want me to work on Sundays or other religious holidays?

Over the months I was testing Mr. Martin and, unbeknownst to me, he was testing me as well. One evening, after closing, I was sweeping the floor when I found a crumpled twenty-dollar bill under the counter. My starting salary was fifty cents per hour, and twenty dollars represented a lot of money for a teenager in 1955. Yet, without thinking twice, my Christian instincts prompted me to turn the money over to Mr. Martin "lest someone come asking for it." It didn't even occur to me that the money would be mine if no one claimed it or that I might receive a handsome reward if someone did.

As for my tests, Mr. Martin passed with flying colors. He was genuinely sensitive to my religious convictions and school obligations when it came to scheduling my work hours. He treated me fairly, at times even generously, and this disarmed all my reservations in working for a Jew. In fact, I came to admire Mr. Martin, and this admiration presented me with a new problem, a theological problem. I knew that God had slated all Jews for eternal damnation because of what they did to Jesus. I also knew that Jews couldn't go to confession to obtain pardon for such a grievous sin. On the other hand, it seemed unfair, somehow, that God should hold Mr. Martin guilty for such a crime. If he did not harm me, even in little ways, how could he have ever consented to handing an innocent man over to Roman torturers two thousand years ago? Thus began my soul-searching journey to try and find a way to rescue just one Jew from the fires of hell.

As it happened, the righteousness of one Jew, Mr. Martin, ignited a fire in my brain that refused to go out. This book, accordingly, is dedicated to the man who set me on the road to discover a world of Judaism that I would have never have imagined existed. I was sixteen then. Now, I am sixty-eight. It took me fifty years to gain the wisdom and the experience to write this book that fulfills the tacit promise I made to Mr. Martin‑-namely, that I would free him from the fires of hell to which my childhood religion wanted to consign him. [ii]

Details of What One Will Find in this Volume

This book is not for the faint-hearted. Most readers will come to this topic with the perspective that the poison of anti-Judaism is found only in a few isolated doctrines and biblical passages (wrongly interpreted). The thesis of this volume is that the poison of anti-Judaism has misrepresented and disfigured not only the centrality of Israel in God’s plan of salvation but that it has horribly twisted the faith, the forgiveness, and the salvation brought to us through Jesus Christ as well. Accordingly, this volume will systematically unravel how the major aspects of Christian theology and spirituality have been shaped by eighteen hundred years of systematic propaganda that has carefully concealed the primacy of Israel and carefully engineered an image of Jesus Christ that promotes an understanding of salvation designed to portray Judaism as totally bankrupt and entirely superceded by Christianity.

The reader of this volume should prepare to be distressed and afflicted by the depths of the distortion that has secretly shaped the Christian soul. This pain, however, is the first step toward a coming clean and acknowledging how our ancestors have distorted both Jesus and his Judaism. The healing, then, will follow as day follows night. At each step of the way, this volume will endeavor to build bridges of mutual understanding that will serve both Christians and Jews to cross the chasm of distrust that has infected both church and synagogue over the centuries. In the end, both Judaism and Christianity will be understood and admired as sister religions that have a common bond that intimately unites one to the other in God’s drama of salvation.

This volume will explore the following issues:

· How legalism and grace function within Judaism as well as within Christianity. How Jews familiarly experience God as Father independent of Jesus.

· How the history of salvation formulated within traditional Christianity overlooks and distorts the decisive Jewish contribution to God's plan of redemption. How Jews find divine forgiveness independent of Jesus. How the theology of the atoning death of Jesus puts Jews and Judaism at risk.

· When and why the church broke its ties with Judaism. Superficial myths regarding the origins of the church are challenged and replaced. How the Christian Scriptures retain a firm attachment to the priority of Israel in God’s plan.

· Why Jews object to the messianic character of Jesus and how Christians, in response, are groping toward a more honest assessment of Jesus as their Messiah. How the Jewish "no" to Jesus was providentially necessary in order that Gentiles might find their way to the Father.

· How programs of Christian evangelization have and continue to terrify Jews. Reflections on why such programs are not what Jesus and the early church intended. Examination of the mission that God continues to assign to Israel.

[1] . Jacob Neusner, "The Jewish‑Christian Argument in the First Century: Different People Talking About Different Things to Different People," Religious Studies and Theology 6/1‑2 (1986) 9.

[ii] Upon further reflection, I don't precisely know why I was chosen to write such a book. Was it the isolation and pain that I felt for Mr. Martin? Maybe so. Maybe, moreso, it was the havoc wrecked upon the Jewish community age after age in the name of Jesus Christ. Maybe it was the grim experiences of hearing Holocaust survivors or hearing the fear of college-age Jews reporting that "friends" dropped them at a moment's notice as soon as they discover their Jewishness. Maybe it was American Jews confiding to me that they never felt "truly and entirely safe" prior to the time when they visited the Land of Israel. In any case, I honestly don't know any book quite like this and, believe me, I having been looking for a book like this all my life. My disappointment, in the end, may be the real reason why I was chosen while other pursued less arduous and less dangerous paths.