Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic

That was what a Jewish colleague said to me in describing many of the Christians he works with regularly.

It seems a strange designation, but it should challenge Christians to think more deeply about their relationship with both Jews and Judaism, and how their attitude toward Israel may be the other same of the same bad coin.

Let’s start with the easy part. Christian discourse about Judaism is almost always anti-Semitic. The reason for this is that it almost always characterizes Jews and Judaism in Christian terms, inevitably creating some form of religious other in order to better define what it means to be Christian. There are three main forms:

1. The worst form of appears in the “Christ-killers” discourse that began, if not with John’s gospel then the earliest interpretations of it. It continued through the early church, inspired and justified pogroms and expulsions all through European Christian history, and most recently animates and inspires white supremeist attacks on Jews. 
2. More subtle, and still pervasive in Protestant Christian preaching, is comparing Judaism as religion of law versus Christianity as the religion of grace. The more subtle form of this is comparing any kind of Christian legalism to the teaching of the Pharisees, or of any kind of sacerdotalism to the religion of the Sadducees and priests. Jews and Judaism othered in the form of the cartoon caricatures of Jewish religious leaders found in the New Testament. 
3. Finally, and most difficult for those who have recognized the explicit and implicit anti-Semitism in the forms above, is characterizing Jews and Judaism as “just like us” except that Judaism doesn’t acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. Of course this is a big step forward from either 1 or 2, but it still defines Judaism in Christian terms. So, for example, when Christians recognize that Judaism really is a religion that recognizes God’s grace and love we are still defining it in terms of our centers of validity. 

One can argue that defining others in one’s own terms is inevitable. We all process human relationships in terms of our own point of view and values. Who a person, group, or religion is to us is inevitably who they are for us. But the problem with all three of the above characterizations of Jews and Judaism is that they define Jews and Judaism in terms of what came before us. By comprehending Jews and Judaism in Biblical categories found in Christian theology we are defining them in terms of what is supposed to precede Christianity and which Christianity therefore inevitably supersedes.

Even when we find in Judaism the foundations of our own religion; whether in theology, ritual, ethics, or prophecy we inevitably become a crushing weight built upon it and thus never allow it to be for us something new, something truly different from ourselves. 

And this is both historically false and demeaning. What I have learned these last 10 years in dialogue with Jews in both Dallas and Israel is that contemporary Judaism, whatever common foundations it may share with Christianity historically, is in many ways a post-Christian religion with its own integrity. The Judaism of the oral Torah, remembered and elaborated in the ongoing process of the Talmud, speaks to us with an independent voice that we cannot comprehend within the limited framework afforded us by Christian theology. We cannot speak about it, except to report what we have heard from it. 

And this requires of Christians that our theological understanding grow in the process of Jewish-Christian dialogue. We can't approach dialogue to find something we forgot about our scriptures but the Jews somehow remember.  We must approach dialogue with the expectation of learning what we never knew and never could know from a people with their own distinct knowledge of and relationship with God. 

But this requires that we recognize that our relationship with God manifest in creeds, rituals, and ethics be regarded as a sufficiency but not a plenitude. We know all we need, but never all that there is to know about God. 

And that gets us to the problem of Christians who are “pro-Israel,” or more generally understand Israel in geo-political terms. Almost inevitably the Christian concept of the modern nation-state of Israel consists of one or more three American Christian fantasies. 

1. The first is a fantasy in which modern Israel re-iterates our own American struggle to found a burgeoning, modern, democracy in a new land. As persecuted Christians fled Europe for the New Jerusalem, so persecuted Jews fled Europe to re-take the old Zion that was always rightfully theirs. Was the land already occupied? Well so was the New World. But just as Christian civilization would displace or convert the Native Americans so modern European Jews would turn the fallow soil of Israel into a gardens and vineyards, quite naturally displacing the Arabs who happened to already live there.
2. The second fantasy is the imagined Christian end of history in which apocalyptic end-times prophecies of the restoration of Israel usher in the return of Christ. Never mind that this scenario spells war, death, and destruction of countless Jews as the world’s armies gather on the plain of Meggido and the great tribulation takes place. From the safety of their post-rapture view of history Christians will be able to cheer the salvation of the righteous remnant before the creation of the New Jerusalem. 
3. The third, doppleganger of the first two, imagines that Israel is nothing but an extension of the American "empire" and indeed of some metaphysical "Empire" down through the ages. 

In either or all of these fantasies Israel as a Jewish nation is once again the “other” against which Christians define their place, now not theologically, but historically. So even when they are nuanced they are both simultaneously pro-Israel and anti-Semitic. John Hagee believes that Jews are “just like us” and do not need to convert to Christianity to be saved, but his understanding of Israel formulated in terms of the return of Christ is still anti-Semitic in the sense of which I speak.

And again, what Christians, particularly American Christians must do is to let Jews generally and Israelis specifically tell us who they are and how they understand history and their place in it. Instead of putting Israel into the context of a Christian reading of history we need to ask how Jews understand Israel in a Jewish reading of history. We might learn something. Because just as our Christian understanding of God is sufficient for salvation but incomplete, so our Christian understanding of history is sufficient to secure our hope but incomplete when it comes to political and social relations. To be complete it must take into account the understanding of history, and I emphasize the post-Christian understanding, found in Judaism. 

In normal interpersonal and inter-community relations the problem of “othering” is always present and must be worked out as each side listens and increasingly takes the other’s self-understanding into account of what can become a shared experience and understanding of reality. But the case of Christians and Jews isn’t normal. Christians and Christianity are directly responsible for centuries of oppression and ultimately the attempted genocide of the Jews. Since 1948 even Christians who have strongly supported Israel do so from a historical understanding of the nation that robs it of the agency of self-definition. 

So today it is urgent that Christians simply stop speaking about Judaism, Jews, and Israel, and even less at Jews and Israel, and instead simply listen. We don’t have to agree with what we hear, but we do need to take Jews, and indeed all those who are other but should never be othered, seriously.