Confession: I've never actually met a Jew. Well, maybe I did. Growing up in the Bible Belt, the "Jesus" I practically had tattooed across my forehead may have scared them away. So I haven't knowingly met anyone Jewish, anyways. My experience with Judaism extends to the Bible, a Seder meal at church, and what I've seen on television. (Fiddler on the Roof used to be my favorite movie!) If I did, they probably wouldn't have liked me very much. While I didn't feel I was superior as a person, I did feel that my religion was superior.

See, we weren't anti-Semitic, per se. I did not hear many of the racial slurs and ridiculous rumors until I reached adulthood, or nearly so. On the contrary, growing up in a conservative branch of evangelical Christianity, we loved Judaism. I remember someone pointing out a Jewish woman at a church service I attended, and I was filled with awe: so that's what one of G-d's chosen people looked like! Though because I didn't actually meet her, I can still say I've never met anyone who is Jewish.

As respectful of Judaism as we were in some ways, we weren't quite in others. Instead of racist, we were more religionist, if you will. We were evangelical Christians. So while we backed, almost fanatically, Jewish causes in the Middle East and looked up to Jews, we still thought that Jews were going to hell. See, somehow, to us, Jews used to be G-d's chosen people, but when they rejected the Salvation He provided for them, Christians became G-d's chosen people. (See the parable of the banquet found in Luke 14.) As annoying it may be for non-Christians, it really is well-intentioned, if not sorely misguided.

Fortunately, I got out of that situation and am no longer an evangelical Christian, but an atheist. So how did that happen? How did I go from on fire for G-d, conservative Baptist minister's wife to active, passionate atheist? Not just an atheist, but one who has gone on a sort of crusade against the beliefs I once held very dear? I am not against religion in general, or even Christianity in general, but fundamentalism. Of course, there are people who are happy in their fundamentalist lifestyle, but it damages so many people, both in and out of conservative Christianity.

I would say I was the ideal Baptist girl, but I wasn't really. Not mainstream Baptist, anyway - the Good Christian Girl who never got into any trouble. I was caught somewhere between conservativism and ultra-conservatism, which meant I didn't really fit in anywhere. I bought everything handed to me hook, line, and sinker: Christianity, salvation, purity, and men's superiority. At the age of 18, I felt the "call" into the ministry.

I got into ministry because, at the time, I really just loved the Lord. I wanted to share that with people, Jews included. I thought Jesus made me happy. I didn't realize, like so many people don't, that allowing Jesus into your life seems to help solve all of your problems at first, but later creates them if you allow yourself to fall deeper into conservativism. It isolates you from friends, family, the outside world, creating more loneliness and more need for Him.

At the age of 19 - having never been kissed, having never had a boyfriend - I met my future former husband. A ministry student at my conservative Christian college, I thought he was The One. We were married eleven months later. After finishing my degree in 2006, I settled in to become a stay-at-home minister's wife, and, that July, a stay-at-home mother as well.

Things were not going as well as Jesus promised. My husband did not understand the word "no" or the concept of boundaries in the bedroom. Having the level of purity I walked in to marriage with didn't make me attractive once there, because I was so naïve. Many things he wanted made me feel dirty and used. I did them, as a submissive wife and because saying "no" didn't really matter: eventually, we did what he wanted. Usually, when he wanted, too.

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"Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh," we say to You in prayer, three times over. "Holy, Holy, Holy." And now I find myself before You, at thrice the age of a boy who has had his bar mitzvah. I cannot count the times over all these years that I have awakened and called out to You, still in my bed, that I stand before You, God. I have thanked You for the purity of my soul, for the wonders of my body. I have praised and exalted You, over and over again, in words of my own, in synagogue, joined with my people in common prayer, Sabbath after Sabbath, festival after festival, fast day after fast day. I've read psalms and even written them to You, as all of my friends have, calling out to You, O God of Israel.

When I was twice the age of a bar mitzvah boy I remember asking the rabbi of my youth this question: "After all of these years of calling out to God, why hasn't He called back?" The rabbi's answer was simple. "To the prophet Elijah He spoke, we are told, in a still small voice." I knew nothing of still small voices. Our household was always filled with people, and our prayer halls are always jammed and noisy from men's prayers. Curious about how I would ever hear that still small voice, I asked my Christian friend Rolando about silence, for I had heard that Christian monks spend long periods of time alone, silent, in prayer. He told me what he knew, gave me a book of his to read, which invoked the same passages about the still small voice. So I found places to still myself, in the attic, the cellar, in the synagogue at times when no one else was there. Once, feeling very brave, I asked Rolando if I could go to church with him, and he took me, at a time when mass was not being offered. He led me to a tiny chapel, where candles flickered before an image of a saint. I was nervous and yet curious. He knelt and I stood in silence. But I did not hear Your voice, God, although we remained there a long time, and I have tried, in the middle of the night, when I wake, to feel my way to You in the silence, to open myself up to You, in the silence. But You never spoke back to me, God, not one single time in all of those years.

Once when we were boys, and he had just come back from mass, I remember Rolando telling me about the mystery of Jesus, how he was God Himself, come to earth, come into a human body. That he was born, suffered, and died for our sins. It did not make sense to me, why the Creator of all that is would have to do that. But it makes sense to me now.

The first time I saw him, God, come into a room, I felt as if a comet had shot its way down from the heavens, down across the sky, sending its fiery tail out behind it, illuminating the night. I felt as if that comet had flared its way across the sky and then careening downward, had slammed into my chest with the force of a gigantic cannon ball, crumbling my defenses, smashing through all of my protective walls, setting me on fire. Each time that I saw him, God, walking in the city, in the market, in the bathhouse, I burned. And if I saw him with any other men, such rage flamed up in me that I feared for my actions. And I ran from him, turned my back and fled each time I saw him. I am not a boy, God, as you know, and this foolish youthful passion is unseemly.

So why did You do this to me?  Why didn't You just speak, as You spoke to the prophets, directly, or spoke to the rabbis of old, in a lesser voice, which we call the daughter of a voice? God, I would fall to my knees before You if you spoke to me in the great great granddaughter of a voice, in a voice so tiny that it would make a whisper sound like waves crashing on the shore, or the crack of lightning shattering the sky, or the thunder of horses across a plain, pulling iron chariots. Instead, you have come to me this way, turning me into a Christian. For now I understand what Rolando was telling me all of those years ago. You do enter the world. You can be born. But this time it is me who suffers, me who is dying, me who yearns to sin and live for my sins. What madness, to be twice a heretic, for now I believe like a Christian and not a Jew. But I cannot join their church for I do not believe that Yesu was Your only begotten Son, but Abdul.

Abdul ibn Rachman, the son of a minister to the king. Abdul ibn Rachman, even his name sends shivers through me. I ran from him. You know that I did. I turned and ran, double heretic that I am, falling in love with a Muslim. And now yesterday, in a voice so loud that I could not deny it, You called out to me through him, and I ran to You. A cart out of control, thundering down the Street of the Tailors, just as I was passing. I heard it before I saw it, and I threw myself up against a wall as it passed. But there ahead, there was a crowd. They too did the same, all of them, press themselves flat against a wall. But the horse was wild, and the cart was rocking from side to side, and a single man with his back to me was struck as the cart shuddered by. I saw it rip into his shoulder, and I heard his scream. Being a physician I ran toward him, as he fell into the street, holding his shoulder, in agony. A woman beside him began to scream for help, as I fell to the ground beside the fallen man. "I'm a doctor," I said to him, as I lay a gentle hand upon his back. "You're going to be all right." I did not know that. It's something that we always say. You know that. So I said it, as I slipped a hand down his back and slowly lowered him to the street.

You did this to me, God. This is the way that you have answered all of my years of prayer. For when I turned him from his side to his back, it was those same dark eyes looking up at me, now in terror. I pulled my shawl off, rolled it up and quickly put it beneath his head. He smiled at me weakly, upside down. I told him I had seen what had happened, and asked him how his shoulder was. He winced as he tried to move his left arm toward his right, to feel from the outside what I knew from his grimace must be very painful. Was his shoulder dislocated, broken, torn? Blood was seeping through his clothing. I was about to say something else when two servants came running through the crowd which had gathered. They were servants of his father's. But You know that. You know how they gently lifted him and carried him back to his father's house, and how I followed them. And You know how all the way there he clenched my hand and would not let go, and how each time the servants slipped or loosened their grip on him, he would shudder, wince, cry out in pain. Later, when I had examined him and found out that nothing was broken but skin, nothing dislocated but our hearts, he told me that he was ashamed that he'd cried out. And I said to him, "Every cry is a prayer." And he said, "This is the first cry of mine that has ever been answered." Surely this is a sign from You, that two men find each other who have been looking for You without success, who find You in each other. And so I say, thank you.

Author Benyamin Cohen's bestselling book My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith is now out in paperback. Why should you buy it if there's a recession on? Cohen appeals to our Jewishness, pointing out that paperbacks are cheaper than hardbacks. Besides, it's totally what Jesus would do. Check out his book trailer here:

 

 

Wear black.  A little purple or green is okay, too.  But just a little.

 

As a joke, I've heeded Rodney's sarcastic advice, and I'm clad in black pants, a lavender shirt and black vest.

"I've never seen you wear black," Rodney says in the taxi down Columbus Avenue. 

"You told me to."  I repeat back his fashion dictate. 

He laughs and pulls out a vintage, second-hand strand of peach and ivory beads and hands it to me.  "I saw these and thought about you."   

"It's lovely!"  They are indeed my kind of colors and I'm touched that they reminded him of me. 

We're on our way to a Broadway play, "Everyday Rapture," a one-woman, semi-autobiographical play with music about a woman from a Mennonite family who comes to New York City to be an actress and singer.  Since Rodney grew up as a Mennonite, and I grew up in a fringe fundamentalist Christian group, we both spent every day of our childhoods fearing and imagining the "rapture," the time when Jesus would return and swoop us up to escape the Tribulation here on earth. 

Rodney remembers coming home after school with his sister and, on discovering the house completely empty, they feared their family had been raptured and they'd been left behind. I tell Rodney that to this day, when I don't answer the phone, my sister Mary will leave a message, "Where are you?  Did you get saved and leave without me?"  Since I'd believed that the next world was just around the corner, and having a future was improbable, it had always been hard to commit to this world or to believe in the value of doing anything meaningful.  "I think the church encouraged a kind of passivity.  Wait until Jesus returns.  Just - wait."   Back then, I would never confess it, and I felt horribly guilty and conflicted about it, but I wanted to continue living in the devil's world.  I wanted to grow up and see the world and do something.  Have a life and live in the world while, of course, not being of the world.

In the theater waiting for the play to begin, we eat our almond M&Ms and continue the conversation we began in the taxi.  We talk about how, within our religious traditions, wanting something for oneself, wanting to be recognized for our individual talents was considered prideful and thus sinful.  Pride was the opposite of humility, and humility was what we were supposed to strive for.   For we were really nothing - we were worms.  Everything we did should be for the glory of Jesus. 

The lights in the theater go down, then come up to reveal a blonde-haired, 40'ish woman wearing jeans, a fuchsia shirt and a black vest.  She opens by confiding that an old Jew once told her to keep two pieces of paper in her pockets: on one is written, "I am a speck of dust." And on the other, "The world was created for me."

Rodney and I look at each other.

Throughout the 90 minute production, we involuntarily turn to each other several times and exchange "How I relate!" glances.   The actress, who says she is from a half-Mennonite family from Kansas, talks about how she yearned to follow her dreams and ambitions and be something, a desire that was at odds with her religion's precepts.  She recalls being told to harmonize as a part of the group, not attempt to belt a solo. 

Rodney is gay and an artist.  He loves to gain recognition for his art, and he also wants to be recognized for who he is, individually.  Like the Mennonite community, the New York art community has a penchant for black and an inexplicable faith in something ephemeral and unknown.  But Rodney doesn't view it as having exchanged one for the other:  "They are two unique things.  One is the soul community I can never leave completely; the other never really penetrates the heart.  It's like networking not even friendship, certainly not a sustaining community which will rebuild my barn!  The Mennonites perhaps prepared me to become my true self in the world, though I did not move towards it because of what the art world had to offer.  Yet they sought to do so with a mold and making the community inescapable.  This in fact may finally be what creates people who appear to have a real sense of place (in their heart) which permeates their search as well, the search to leave and grow." 

The show is threaded together with songs, from Mr. Rogers' "You are special" to Aretha Franklin's "Killing Me Softly."  The lyrics, "Singin' my life, with his words" so clearly sing our lives.   We, too, recall our Midwestern childhoods where the earth was dark at night, while the stars and the moon - God's creation - lit up the sky; it is the reverse in New York City: there are no lights in the sky, but the streets glow with artificial, man-made light.  

We, too, felt we had to choose either/or.  We had to walk the tightrope between this world and the next, between all of those seeming polarities in life.  Though, in truth, we weren't even supposed to walk a tightrope.  We were either in or out.  Our love for Jesus couldn't be lukewarm.  Being rebellious to God's ways was as dangerous as pride.  "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, brethren.  Do not be like those who have fallen away from the church and are now of the world," I recall my minister exhorting.  Pride and rebellion could bar you from the Kingdom.  

It took both Rodney and me a long time to disengage from our pasts, and then commit to the lives we wanted to live or, as the actress says to "live inside a song."  Today, you will no longer find me trying to make sense of why, because of Eve's disobedience in taking the forbidden fruit, all women are to blame for sin in this world.  Instead, I attend a lecture in which a female rabbi asserts that, "Jewish feminism is good for God, for we've taken God off the pedestal," and a female scribe, who has written two Torah scrolls, declares that the Biblical text seems "irrelevant" and hardly the work of a Deity.

After the play, we sit in a small restaurant off Broadway and over drinks, talk about how the "self" and one's will is so threatening to some strains of Christianity.  Rodney says that he's come to a new thing in his art - he has managed to get himself out of the way.  His will is central and present, but it's not about him.  "I believe in letting go and letting it change." 

He confesses, "I don't know about you, but I have had moments of - for lack of anything else to call it, grace." 

I agree with him. 

"And I'm still trying to figure out the meaning of everything," he adds.

"Me ,too."

It hasn't been a nostalgic walk down memory lane looking at the things we left behind, or at least seem to have left behind.  It's been a shared look up at the purple-black sky that is strewn with iridescent, whimsical, worldly, unique, silver-peach beads masquerading as stars.  It's been an evening of pulling out of our pockets crumpled pieces of the past:  my will/Your will.  Dust/the world.  Blend-in-black/stand-out-and-be-seen-gold.  We no longer view the rapture as one, big, orgasmic moment in time.  Every day offers numerous opportunities to be enraptured. 

"You're going to write about this," Rodney accuses, and I laugh and say, "Of course." 

"I expected you would.  Or I should say...I was hoping you would!" 

When I worked in the Jewish world, I was at first surprised, then annoyed, and eventually amused to find that my motives for being there were often suspect. People sometimes wondered if I was some kind of missionary, which to me was the greatest laugh of all, since if I was to convert anyone it would only be to the restless, wishywashy agnosticism that was my creed at the time. As far as I was concerned, I was a harmless novelty, harmlessly enjoying a novel experience.

Except I wasn't so novel. I didn't know it then, but I had stumbled into a long and fraught history of Christians mucking about in Jewish linguistic waters.

Not too long ago, "Missionary Yiddish" was a common term used to refer to the attempts of Christians to use the language of Eastern European Jews in their evangelizing efforts. In the 1920s, the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago even began offering its own program in Jewish Studies. No strictly scholarly pursuit, the program was created for the purpose of educating evangelists in the basics of Jewish culture and language. The missionaries' hope was that the first voices Jewish immigrants heard as they entered the New World would missionary voices speaking in Yiddish - stilted, classroom Yiddish, but Yiddish nonetheless.  

If there is a funny part to all this, it is that these missionaries had no idea that the language they were appropriating to spread the gospel had already inoculated its speakers against the faith.

In Yiddish as in no other langauge, the basic assumptions of Christianity were undercut. By the time Moody began teaching it, Jesus had long been a figure of both fear and derision in the Yiddish speaking world.
The savior was regularly referred to by dismissive nicknames like Yoizel, Getzel, and most creatively Yoshke Pandre. The layers of meaning in this last name are amazing: Using the diminutive Yiddish suffix "-ke," Yoshke might be translated as "Little Joe," tweaking Jesus's non-biological relationship to the credulous husband of Mary. Pandre, meanwhile, is Yiddish for "panther," a reference to the allegations dating to Origen (and repeated in the Talmud) that the father of Jesus was neither God, nor Joseph the carpenter, but a plundering Roman soldier called Pantera (Latin for "panther"). Thus the name slyly makes Jesus's birth illegitimate and those associated with it either rapists or fools.

Thanks to the multilingual flexibility of Yiddish (and to its capacity to add insult to injury), this nickname was further elaborated upon. Taking the first part of Pandre as the Russian honorific Pan ("Sir" or "Lord"), and adding a letter to the second syllable to form the Yiddish drek, Yiddish speakers spoke derisively of Yoshke Pan Drek, applying to Jesus Christ a name roughly equivalent to a vulgarized version of Joe the Plumber: "Little Joe, Lord of Shit."

I'm still not a Yiddish speaking missionary, but I must admit I feel for those hapless fellows speaking about Jesus in Yiddish. The poor shlimazels thought Jews didn't know about the messiah they were peddling. In fact, Jews knew him well. They just didn't like him.

Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned. 

Baptism or Bris: which is freakier?We know for sure we’re having a boy.  Got the amnio results.  All is good news, even the news that it’s a boy. 

I mean right?  We already have a girl, and a boy and a girl is every mom’s dream.  And boys love their mommies.  There is that special bond that only happens between boys and their moms.  And what is more important in the world than raising a sensitive, feminist, gun-hating man?  A man who loves women.  A man who can be a modern-day Jesus, as this Jew understands Jesus.  A man who can befriend the sick and destitute and end world hunger and create peace between warring nations.  And there’s really no difference between a boy and a girl in the gender neutral world this boy will create. 

That’s why this is such good news.   

But what about the penis?

Now we have serious decisions to make. 

Since Victoria is totally FOR circumcision, and since she wants to baptize, I came up with the best idea.  I said, “Let’s have a baptism/bris.”  As soon as I mentioned it the idea seemed even better than ever.  Here would be a way to honor both of our religions at the same time.  ”We’ll invite our friends and family and someone will sprinkle a little water and then someone’ll do the snip.” 

Victoria said, “What’s a bris?”

I explained that a bris is a circumcision done buy a special rabbi called a Mohel.  The Mohel comes over with his special snipper and the family gathers around and I think it’s customary that the father hold the baby, so naturally, I would hold the baby and we’d give him a little wine, the baby, that is, to help numb the pain and then the Mohel does the snip.

Victoria said, “AT HOME?  That’s freaky.”

I said, “Baby, there’s nothing freakier to a Jew than a Baptism, except for maybe those statues of the man nailed to the cross that hang over everyone’s beds.  Why do they put those in the bedroom?  Is that a sex thing?”

She ignored my last question.  She said, “I don’t want to cut my baby’s penis in front of other people.  That’s freaky.”

I see her point. Religion is freaky.

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

The Windsor Hills Baptist Church of Oklahoma City gave away a gun at its annual youth conference, held last week. The youth conference included a shooting competition (Jesus loves a good target range, after all), and the winner received an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle donated to the church. I know it sounds bad, but don't worry: the church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, explained that the main thrust of the conference wasn't about guns but rather "teens finding faith.”
Nothing Says Faith: Like an AR-15
He said, “I don’t want people thinking ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn’t respect it who are then going to go out and kill. That’s not at all what we’re trying to do.”

I’m thinking I might start a USY chapter that has an annual event where we play with knives, set fires, and practice punching crash test dummies in the gut. But in between the violence, we’ll give tzedakah, and sing David Melech Yisrael. Then it’s okay. 

Welcome to Arkansas: The entrance to the play Over seven million people have seen the Great Passion Play of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, since its opening in 1969. The play was founded by a Midwestern preacher and politician, Gerald L.K. Smith, whose thrice-failed bid for president promised “the preservation of our Christian faith against the threat of Jew Communism.” It has been re-written several times since Smith’s death in 1976, and I wanted to see if it still reflected its anti-Semitic roots—not only was Smith an avowed foe of “Christ-hating Jews,” but Passion Plays as a genre have a troubled history dating back to the Middle Ages. The most interesting way to see the show, I decided, was from the inside. So I volunteered as an extra.

While researching Rapture Ready, my exploration of Christian pop culture, I planned always to identify myself and my intentions honestly. But The Great Passion Play has had some bad experience with the media so I decided, just this once, to go incognito… and just avoid any outright lies. I called the 800 number and asked if there were any openings.

The man who answered seemed disappointed that I hadn’t seen the show. “We usually ask people to be familiar with the play first.”

“I understand,” I said, seeing my opportunity slip away. “but I was really hoping to do this.” And then I heard myself say, “It’s something I felt called to do.”

“Do you have your own sandals?” he asked.

“You the fella from New York?” A man wearing a security badge gripped my hand and led me through a gate into first century Jerusalem. The effect of the set, which stretched the length of two football fields, was stunning: Sand and grit swirled around a dense row of buildings. Jars of clay rested alongside a stone well. It was as if an entire street had been lifted out of time and plopped down at the base of an Arkansas hill.

The guard pointed me backstage to a small, bunker-like dressing room crowded with men and women in period dress sipping Diet Cokes. The room’s matron sized me up for a costume — a pile of rough, earth-toned linen and rope – and introduced me to a big man with a warm, snaggletoothed smile. “My name’s Danny,” he said.

People get ready: Radosh's book“I’m Daniel.”

“Well how about that!”

I liked Danny immediately. He explained that as an extra, my job would be to enhance the illusion of a bustling city, carrying props and making appropriate gesticulations in crowd scenes. I would not have any lines, but then, nobody would, really. All the dialogue in The Great Passion Play is pre-recorded and played through loudspeakers at the front of the seats. Actors lip-synch their dialogue with broad gestures. The audience, 20 feet above the set and at least 400 feet from where most of the action takes place, is too far away to actually hear anything, so Danny could talk me through scenes as we do them. “Some nights I play King Herod,” he said wistfully as I belted my mantle. “Tonight I’m just a traveler, so you can be my assistant or something.”

“OK, your attention please, everybody.” The matron came out from behind her counter. “A few quick announcements. We’re a small group again tonight, so when Jesus comes out, please do not all run over to him. We need to keep the stage populated. If you feel the need to go to Jesus, at least try not to bunch up.” She went on to an issue that was apparently related to the reduced number of volunteer actors. “The office has made an important decision about next season. Starting in the spring, we’ll have Monday nights off too. Now let’s pray.”

A few minutes later I was outside, waiting with Danny at the dark end of an alley for our cue. “We’ll follow the sheep,” said Danny. A couple of giggly children in shepherd costumes slapped each other playfully.

The music began. The kids chased a dozen sheep onto the set and we set off after them. Around us, women fetched water from the well, priests climbed the temple steps, and everyone made way for a man leading a camel. I followed Danny confidently through this chaos to the far side of the stage, where we stepped into the semi-darkness and stopped again. My first scene was over.

While we waited offstage again, a spotlight came up on a palace, where the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish priests, was holding an urgent discussion.

“What are we to do? This man does many miracles.” The priests waved their arms for attention as their lines played through the loudspeakers.

“If we do not intervene, all men will believe in him!” Considering that the dialogue needed to be recorded only once, you’d think it would have been done by professional actors. This did not seem to be the case.

In the next scene, Danny and I stepped out through a stone arch and were confronted by two teenage centurions in red cloaks and crested helmets. “Halt!” boomed a voice over the loudspeaker. The unamplified soldiers pawed at our satchels. “What do you got in there, drugs?” one asked. We ambled over toward Herod’s palace where we pantomimed a sales pitch for earthenware pots until the king and queen threw oversized wooden shekels at us. “I want a receipt,” the queen joked.

The greatest story ever acted out via loudspeaker: The stage at the Great Passion Play The main action, of course, was taking place elsewhere. But it was difficult to hear the speakers from where we were, so I had very little idea what was going on until Jesus rode in on an ass and everybody ran over to him, just as we had been instructed not to do.

He began grasping outstretched hands like a politician working a rope line. “Did you touch him?” Danny asked me. From his gestures, I gathered this was meant to be in character.

"I couldn’t get close enough.”

Danny nodded. “He’s our best Jesus. We’ve got three, but he’s the one who really looks the part.” The crowd dispersed as Jesus began healing lepers. “That’s a good role,” Danny continued. “He gets a lot of lines.”

As the action moved back to the temple we stayed off to the side, populating the stage. Danny asked me, “So, do you go to church up there in New York?”

“Uh… Yeah, sure.” It’s not exactly a lie, I told myself. We just call it “synagogue.”

“What kind?”

“Nondenominational.” OK, that was a lie, but at least it would end this line of questioning.

“Church of Christ?”

Fuck. I mentally riffled through the books I’d been reading about evangelicalism. If he asked, does it mean he’s Church of Christ? “No… Uh…” Danny smiled kindly waiting for me to go on. And then, just at that moment, Jesus saved me. Not in his usual manner, but by causing a distraction — kicking over tables on the temple steps.

Hey, that lamp-thing in the corner looks familiar: The Sanhedrin, via the Great Passion Play website By my next scene, the tide had turned against Jesus. “Shake your fist or something,” Danny advised. Jesus was paraded past us in chains, and it fell to Danny’s character to turn to a neighbor and deliver the line that would express our growing antipathy toward this false prophet. Raising his arms, Danny caught a buddy’s eye. “I just realized,” he mock shouted, as the loudspeaker blared his actual dialogue. “With the new schedule, not working Monday nights, we’re going to get to see every single NFL game!”

Off stage again, Danny and I watched a guilt-ridden Judas hurl his blood money to the floor. “He’s a pilot for Wal-Mart,” Danny said. “Whenever one of the executives wants to fly somewhere, he’s the guy that takes them. He makes good money doing that.”

“Well he’s making good money here tonight.”

Perhaps for the best, Danny missed my lame thirty-pieces-of-silver joke. “Nah, not so much,” he replied. “He makes maybe twenty, thirty dollars a night. The Christ figures, they make a hundred and twenty.”

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“Ministry,” he said quickly and earnestly. We looked back at the stage. “And put a little extra money in my pocket,” he added. “Plus we get free tickets to all the shows in Branson.”

Danny stood. “Big scene coming up,” he told me. We navigated toward the alley where we would make our next entrance, avoiding the audience’s sight lines. Along the way, we passed three women in their early 20s gossiping happily. “These girls are from Texas,” Danny said as we stopped to say hello. “Daniel here is from New York.”

“New York?” gasped one, laughing. “Get a rope!” From her hasty, “Only joking” I gathered that she was indeed proposing a lynching, and that she thought this was something to joke about. Much later, a non-New Yorker informed me that she was probably parroting a catch phrase from a regional salsa commercial. That might have made a difference.

A palace in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago. Outside, a crowd has gathered. Pontius Pilate steps forward as his soldiers drag a beaten Jesus behind him. “As you can all see, this poor man has been punished severely,” he tells the onlookers. “Therefore it is my desire, in expression of the goodness of Rome, to release him.”

The crowd explodes. “No! No! He must be crucified!”

“But why? Clearly this man has done nothing to deserve death. Therefore, I propose to let him off with a flogging.” Two soldiers tie Jesus to a post and begin lashing him as the crowd screams for blood. When it is over, Pilate stands above him. “Behold your king. He has been flogged, beaten, ridiculed, spit upon. What more can you want?” “He must be crucified!” The crowd shrieks as one. “Crucify him! Still, the compassionate Pilate can not believe his ears. “Crucify him?” “Crucify him!” Pilate calls for a bowl of water. “My hands are clean of this innocent man’s blood. I ask you one last and final time, what would you have me do with him?” “Crucify him!”

Another Great Passion Play attraction: Christ of the Ozarks I don’t know how this scene played in the audience. No doubt the hammy acting, the stiff dialogue, the church-pageant costumes and cornball music all worked mightily against any emotional engagement. But as I stood in the jostling crowd on that dusty set, some strange alchemy took place. There were spectators out there somewhere, but all I could see was inky darkness. The sky, far from any city, was black and dizzy with stars, exactly as it must have been two thousand years ago. All around me, dozens of presumably well-meaning Christians were representing themselves as Jews and acting out a scene that for centuries has been used to justify hatred and oppression.

Not only was I feeling sick about being along for the ride, but I started to have this mad hallucination that I had fallen into some eternal retelling of this story — that I was back at the actual moment of Jesus’s ordeal; or rather, at the moment when whatever in fact happened on that day was first re-experienced as a story of persecution by a Jewish mob. I was under the gaze not merely of a few hundred contemporary Americans but of all past and future generations. I was at a lynchpin of history, and I had choice: be complicit in this grotesque distortion of events — or try to change it.

“Maybe we should reconsider this!” I shouted desperately. “Maybe a flogging is enough!”

Danny laughed. He hadn’t heard that one before. The audience couldn’t hear me, of course, but they could see me. The rest of the cast shouted and shook their fists. From behind me, four Jews emerged with masks over their faces and cudgels in their hands, pushing through the crowd to get in a few more shots at the fallen Jesus.

I waved my arms for them to stop. I turned away, burying my face in my hands. I exaggerated every movement so that even from 400 feet away the audience might see something that they had never witnessed before, never considered: a compassionate Jew who was not willing to accept Jesus as the messiah, but who didn’t want him tortured to death either.

The jeering crowd followed Jesus offstage as he dragged his heavy cross and set off up the hillside to Golgotha of the Ozarks, and I genuinely felt like I’d failed. Danny put a hand out to stop me. “It’s pretty steep up there, and we don’t have insurance for volunteers.”

Watching the end of the drama unfold, I felt glum. My silly gestures hadn’t made the Passion play any less offensive, and as for dispelling the stereotype of cunning, manipulative Jews — I fiddled with the digital recorder I’d hidden in my pocket and tried to count the lies and half-truths that had brought me here. I imagined the look of disappointment on Danny’s face.

But I don’t think I deserved to be lynched.

Excerpted from Rapture Ready! by Daniel Radosh, published by Scribner.

Ann Coulter: wants to perfect jew Last Friday in the New York Times, on page A13, the World Evangelical Alliance took out a full page ad headlined “The Gospel and the Jewish People: An Evangelical Statement.” The ad expresses their "genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people,” and acknowledges the history of anti-Semitism. The declaration of friendship with Jews is repeated a number of times, leading up to the real purpose of the ad. Are you ready?

“At the same time we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and scriptural expression of our friendship towards the Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.”

Over the years I've been skeptical when evangelical Christians have suggested that their support of Israel is strictly for the good of the state and the Jewish people, and has no bearing on End-Time beliefs or a hope for the eventual conversion of the Jews. I have also had a number of conversations with evangelical and born again Christians who insist that their love of the Jews stems from the Abrahamic underpinnings of their own faith, and that God has a special plan for the Jewish people.

Reverend John Hagee: friend of the jews? On an episode of Donny Deutsch’s show The Big Idea last year, Ann Coulter discussed how Christians want Jews to “be perfected.” This message was seen as intolerant, bigoted, and smacking of anti-Semitism. No one wanted to accept that this is what Christians really believe—not even many Christians. Meanwhile, just last week in the New York Times Magazine, the ever-deposing Deborah Solomon interviewed the televangelist Reverend John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel. Solomon asked him if their mission was completely noble -- simply support for Israel out of Christian love for their Jewish cousins. He replied, “Our support of Israel has nothing to do with any kind of 'end times' Bible scenario. My support of Israel is based on a recognition of the enormous debt we gentiles owe to the Jews.”

We seem to be receiving some mixed messages, and last week's New York Times ad from the World Evangelical Alliance is no different. You see, they didn't just take out a $60,000ish (yes, these things can cost tens of thousands of dollars) full-page ad to let everyone to know they love Jesus. Instead, the ad goes on:

“We believe it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World.”

So there it is. Finally. And if you think that support of Israel can still be enacted by evangelical Christians without any future desire for a total Jewish conversion, note the last line of the ad:

“It is our profound respect for the Jewish people that we seek to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them…for we believe salvation is only found in Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and savior of the world.”

It is impossible, as someone like Rev. John Hagee would like us to believe, to divorce the theology of the Christian messiah from End-Time and rapture theology. And evangelical Christians cannot hope for their own salvation with the coming of Christ without the implicit necessity of the New Testament prophecies regarding Israel and the Jews.

Now, in a clear, unashamed, and unabashed message, evangelical Christians are admitting to Jews that they do not believe salvation is possible for us without Jesus. I am pleased about this admission. It openly confirms all the things I intuitively knew to be true. But what is disturbing about this ad is that is fails to recognize that the very idea of unredeemed Jewish people is bigoted, and foments anti-Semitism. I am not saying many signers of this document are anti-Semites but surely it is not enough to say in the ad “we do not wish to offend our Jewish friends."

Jesus: the jews are all right, and this lamb is cute, too. Every year on Yom Kippur Jews all over the world gather in synagogues and shuls to pray fervently for redemption—redemption promised by God in the very same scriptures that Christians use to support their own history and their own promised redemption. To suggest that Jews cannot be redeemed without Jesus is not only theologically unsound; it removes the very bedrock of the Christian religion. The Jews, Christians have always maintained, are God’s chosen people and are secured a place in God’s plan through Torah and mitzvoth. Jesus never reneges on this, and arguably would have believed it himself.

But enough with the theology lesson. Now we can finally reach across the religious divide and feel the joy buzzer in the evangelical handshake. This is a watershed moment in evangelical Christian and Jewish relations. Many liberal Jews have looked with skepticism at some Jewish leaders’ willingness to go to bed with evangelicals over things like Israel and other policy issues.

How will it feel now, knowing with certainty that the people who claim to want nothing but the best for their “Jewish friends” really only want to see our eventual “completion"?

According to NPR, one Christian woman went looking for a way to add a little spark to her waning marriage “without compromising her Christian beliefs.” The result was the creation of this website, which sells all sorts of sex toys and other “intimate” products, but only for married couples.

 

And, apparently, the people who run this site are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and not because they actually need to use any of these products: " Wilson says she and her husband are blessed with good health, but that God has shown them that other couples might need help from a particular toy." I give to you all things holy: including the Jelly Rabbit.

That is very good to know. So how do they know which products to include?

"We pray about things before we add them to our site," she says. "We live our lives very openly in front of Jesus, so we just kind of pray for direction about which way he would have us go, and I have to be honest with you — he's really surprised us. ... Almost our whole entire 'special order' page has come about from that."

Of course I clicked on the “special order” page. Wouldn’t you be curious about which products Jesus “surprised” the couple with? She says their site steers clear of certain types of sexual activity that they believe are unholy. Hmmm . . .

I’m not married, and so technically I shouldn’t be browsing this site that exists for “married couples” only. But it was difficult not to be curious about what constitutes “sin-free” sex toys as opposed to . . . well, that’s just it—as opposed to what? Sinful sex toys?

What I discovered, however, is that apparently any sex toy can be “sin-free” as long as it’s used by a married couple. It’s unclear whether the pleasure device retains its “sin-free” status if enjoyed by a married individual by him or herself. But since we all know that masturbation leads to blindness, one imagines that it’s best not even to experiment with this idea.

I'm not slamming the site. So many religions—or at least the more orthodox manifestations of various religions—define themselves more or less on what they do not do, as opposed to what they do, in fact, do. In other words, it’s not uncommon to hear a religious mother say, to a child who has questioned an unquestionable tenet of the said faith, something along the lines of, “We’re Christians. We don’t engage in premarital sex,” or, “We’re Jews. We don’t eat pork, and we don’t drive over Shabbas.”

If only we defined ourselves according to our actions, rather than our inactions: “We’re Christians/Jews/Muslims. That means we love our neighbors.”

But, back to this scandalous Christian sex toy site. Maybe, I mean to say, this site is a positive thing. Maybe it’s positive because it’s as if they’re saying, “We’re Christians. We have good sex,” instead of, “We’re Christians. We don’t have certain kinds of sex and you shouldn’t either.”

What I can’t quite figure out is this: Are they using Jesus to sell sex? Or, are they using sex to sell Jesus? Is this a really creative attempt to proselytize? Either way, I’m sure it’s a win-win situation—as long as you’re married, that is.

Forget the Farm Workers Endorsement: you want J-dog on your sideIn describing her stance on immigration policy during Thursday's Democratic presidential debate, Senator Hillary Clinton dropped a subtly sly Jesus-bomb. Was the namedrop heartfelt and coincidental, or was it simply good planning? Half of those surveyed in a recent poll commissioned by the American Bible Society said they wouldn't vote for a candidate who doesn't believe in God, and a whopping 78% percent of those questioned said they like their candidates citing Scripture. So, you tell me: Is Clinton spouting words or turds?

When the House of Representatives passed the most mean-spirited provision that said, if you were to give any help whatsoever to someone here illegally, you would commit a crime, I stood up and said that would have criminalized the Good Samaritan and Jesus Christ himself.

I have been on record on this against this kind of demagoguery, this mean-spiritedness.

And, you know, it is something that I take very personally, because I have not only worked on behalf of immigrants; I have been working to make conditions better for many years.

 

Previously: Mike Huckabee on Gay Marriage, Fried Squirrels 

According to the Associated Press, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee -- who has become a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination -- won't say whether he believes that non-Christians can enter the pearly gates. After delivering a sermon at a South Carolina megachurch on "how merely being good isn't enough to get into heaven," Huckabee refused to answer reporters' questions about the salvation of Jews, Muslims, atheists, etc. "I have deep convictions about who goes and who doesn't," Huckabee said, "but as far as who makes that decision, it isn't me, it's God. I'm going to leave that up to him."

What are these "deep convictions"? We left a message with Huckabee's press secretary and will let you know if we hear back. (We would have called God directly, but we don't have His digits like some people.)

We have spoken about love for the Bible. But let me lift up the larger aspect of this love and refer you toward the end, to one of the most beloved passages in the beloved book: I Corinthians 13, the Ode to Love. Here Paul has to deal with the question, How can diversity and pluralism be an asset instead of a liability? How can we learn, as some of the feminist theologians have taught us, to turn the old statement around and say, How much diversity do we need? How much unity can we afford? We are used to asking, Can the center hold? How much unity do we need? How much diversity can we allow? Paul has an image that love is measured by how much diversity can handle. And he had to learn it hard, because in Galatia, in an earlier part of his ministry, he thought that by stamping his foot, he could get his way. You remember what he says in Galatians I: If anybody preaches and teaches otherwise than I do, be it so an angel form heaven, damned be that one. That's chutzpah. But now he knows in Corinth that he is one of the many, and he is even, perhaps, low man on the totem pole, so he gets ecumenical.

It's so moving. Oh, how I love that book which tells me these things. It's so moving: he says that we now see like in an old-fashioned bad mirror, in a glass, darkly. And now our knowledge is only partial. That's called relativism. It is when he thinks about the diversity that he has to tell us: Don't be so cocky about the truth. You have your insights, but you are just at the beginnings. And then he ends by saying, so there remains those three: faith, hope, and love, and greatest of them is faith. Well, that's what he should have said, according to his own thinking.Love: It's the best The basic line: He is the apostle of faith, everything depends on faith. But here, suddenly, there is a breakthrough in his thinking, and he says: And the greatest of these is love, agape, esteem of the other, not "insisting on its own way," as the RSV puts it.

So, it is proper for me to end these five points where the Bible teaches us to deal with it-as a friend, not to give it honor by just inflating it, but to hear it as that strange way in which the divine has broken in through human thought and human words and human experience.

Finally, let me leave you with a word which is the one that, in my own long love relationship to this book, I want to have in my mind when my end comes. It reads, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, like this: "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the spirit."

Ultimately, I came to learn that there are at lest three quite distinct symbol systems, or paradigms, for Christian theology coming out of the Bible. One is dominated by the idea of God as the judge, and what is going to happen to us on the day of judgment.God is the judge: Arnold is the bailiff

Everything circles around God's judgment, and sin and forgiveness and redemption and the cross-that's Western Christendom in Catholicism and Lutheranism. Then there is God as Lord. And that has to do with God as Lord and we as subject, and the world is full of covenants-that's Calvin and also the Jewish tradition. And the model gave the basic model for the federal structure of the United States; foedus in Latin means convenant. It's the sociopolitical model of God.

And then there is the third, the Johannine. It's all about life. Sin is sickness, not primary guilt. It's not about obedience and Lordship. It's life: He came that they should have life, and have it abundantly. In him was life. Out of his innermost parts, streams of living water will flow (John 7). And everything is to be born anew, born out of water and blood (John 3). That's John, and that's Eastern Christendom. There is no crucifix in an Eastern church; there is the icon, where the divine life shines through the human image.

These are three different ways of thinking about God. What a richness. And you don't see them until you lay them apart. Of course they flow into one another, in all our traditions. But it is by studying the scriptures to get the integrity of each of these that they come to life. It is a little like the Gospels: if you mix them, you don't get the feel of how many theologies there are in scripture. It's like with homogenized milk: when you homogenize milk, you can't make whipped cream anymore.Dairy products: Thick like Scripture And for sermons, that's a deadening thing.

So when the preacher preaches Luke, it should sound like Luke. And even the Lutherans should not mix in a little Paul to make it kosher. So, not so uptight. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Richness. Plurality. Plurals. Yes, meanings is better than meaning. Isn't that, in a way, what the Trinity is about? Isn't that odd, these confused monotheists who speak about the Trinity: We couldn't quite settle for something which was just oneness, we had to have more of a fullness of an interplay, of a giving and receiving. Do you remember how it is with the oneness in John 17, where Jesus prays that they all be one? And you, father, are in me, and I am in you, and they are in us. It's like the biological world: Everything is interdependent. It's a giving and receiving. It's a oneness that is not a glob, but a living interplay. Plural.

Which leads me to the fifth point: Not so universal. And here I come full circle. I said in the beginning that I read the Bible as if it was just about me. And now I say, the Bible, my beloved Bible, it is indeed my Bible. There might be other holy scriptures-and that might not be as threatening as some people think. Not to claim universality and uniqueness? I always felt that to speak about the uniqueness of Christianity or the uniqueness of Christ does more for the ego of the believer than it does for God. Has God Only One Blessing? is the wonderful title of a recent book. How can I sing my song to Jesus with abandon, without telling negative stories about others? What one religion says about another religion, what one beloved scripture claims to be over against other scriptures, comes pretty close to a breach against the commandment "Though shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." What we say about the others is usually self-serving. We say, Is it self-serving? Oh no, it is just giving God honor. But think about it. Think about the scriptures themselves. Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before people that they see your good deeds and become Christian." That's not what it says. It says, "Let your light shine for people so that they see your good deeds and praise your father who is in heaven" (Matt. 5). Your father-so that people have a reason to be happy that there are Christians in the world, instead of getting irritated at them, if not worse. Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth." But who wants the world to become a salt mine?

We are born as a minority religion, as a religion among religions. And we are heirs to the Jewish perspective on these things: that's what I learned from the scriptures. It says, to Israel, that Israel is meant to be a light to the nations. That's what Jesus speaks about: a light to the nations. The Jews have never thought that God's hottest dream was that everybody become a Jew. They rather thought that they were called upon to be faithful and that God somehow needed that people in the total cosmos. What a humility, but we called it tribalism. From the enlightenment, everything had to be universal. But when Christianity started its universal claim, and got power, it led to the crusades. We couldn't really think that it was not God's hottest dream that everybody be like us. So I say, no, the Bible is my Bible. The milk of salvation: Suckling from the gospelsThis is the breast that I, as a child of God, have been nourished from. And for the little child, when the child is born that's the whole world, the mother's breast. But maturing means to recognize that other kids have sucked other mothers' breasts. That belongs to growing up.

Now this is my Bible. It was given to me as a gift, and it is full of love, for which I am grateful. If I have found a doctrine, that is my doctrine. I don't need to bad-mouth all others. This is theology for the next generations. Paul was on to that. Paul, late in his mission, had to learn to deal with plurality.

PART FOUR: Final Thoughts 

To give reasons for one’s love feels awkward. You might be able to give reasons for your choices, but before I fell in love with the Bible, I never went to the library to read the Holy Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita, or even the Book of Mormon. That’s not how love happens—because love does happen; it happened to me.

What else can one do—what else can I do—but tell my story, the story of my love for the Bible: how to read, to study, to ponder, to preach the Bible; how it became my professional, even professorial, career, as that study watered, even lubricated, my soul.

For the longer I live, the less adequate and less useful become all those stifling distinctions between academy and church, faith and reason, the intellectual and the spiritual. There is such an interplay between those fabricated distinctions that one cannot live without the other. So here is the story, the story of my love relationship with the scriptures.

PART 1: GETTING HOOKED

Somehow it did not start with the Bible. In my home, the Bible was supposed to be a little too Methodist. It started with Jesus, mainly as he had come to me through the hymn book, which is used as a spiritual guide in the piety of the Church of Sweden, and which we read a hymn from on Sunday morning. To go to church was a dangerous sliding into Phariseeism, as I was brought up. Somehow, what I had gathered about Jesus spoke to me, fascinated me. The image I had was of an incredibly interesting mixture of strength and kindness—strength so different from the bully world of the school yard.

Jesus became not my hero, but rather my friend. I guess I was 12 or so when I sneaked away to church on Sunday mornings—in spite of the risk of Phariseeism—to be where Jesus was supposed to be. But then in fall 1935, I was invited to something called a Bible study group. And I was given a pocket New Testament, both as a symbol and as a text, and I was told to read it as if it was all about me—my life, my conscience, my duties to God and to my neighbor. I was hooked, for life.

Not about him: The Prodigal Son

The old principle tua res agitur—it’s all about you, or, it is your case—carried me for a long time. And I got a language for my faith; I got words for my feelings; I got pictures for my dreams. And my image of Jesus became more multifaceted.

When I thought I understood, there was always more and more and more. I had begun to feed on the mysteries of God. And it was intellectually a most stimulating awakening. That way of reading served me well, for a while. This was the time when I was naïve and arrogant enough to identify with the people I read about, or whose writings I read. I felt like Peter and I felt like Paul—especially when they had negative feelings. I felt like all the disciples. I felt like the Prodigal Son—I had not yet learned that the story in Luke 15 was actually about the older son, who is the one who is like church people, those who stayed on the farm (somebody has to), but couldn’t take it unto himself to be grateful when his brother came home. I wanted to become more like Jesus, wondering what he would say or do had he been where I was.

That way of reading lasted for a while, and who would say that it isn’t the way I still read and feel from time to time. But my love for the scriptures led me to ways of reading that were so much less ego-centered. The Bible was really not about me. It was many other things—in the long run, much more interesting things. It was about many things in distant lands, from many distant ages.

I came to read it more and more like a book, perhaps more as a “classic.” Now it spoke to me from a great distance, of centuries and cultures deeply different from my own. And it began to be, just by its difference, that the fascination grew, that it had a way of saying to me, there are other ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and believing than you have taken for granted. And it just added to my love—for love is not just fascination.

When I short-circuited my reading in those earlier days of having it just be about me, I slowly learned that this was a greedy way to deal with the richness of the scriptures.

PART 2: FIVE WRONG WAYS TO READ THE BIBLE

So let me share with you as a tribute to the Bible—and perhaps in a strange way—five “no” statements. It is usual when one is describing love to describe it in positive and glowing terms. But my friendship with the Bible gave me the joy, and the courage, to express my love in five statements of “not.” The first one I have pointed at: It is not primarily about me. Second, it is not always as deep as we think. Third, even Paul isn’t always totally sure. Fourth, don’t be so uptight. And fifth, it is probably not as universal as we think.

Friendly debate: In the Jewish tradition, God likes the argumentative

It is perhaps odd to express my love in such negative terms. But it is also perhaps in the line of that wonderful word of Jesus in chapter of John: I do not call you any longer servants, but I call you friends. Somehow I became friends with the Bible. In the biblical tradition, and in the Jewish tradition, to be called the friend of God, you had to be one who argued with God. Abraham, arguing about Sodom and Gomorrah, was called a friend of God. Job was called the friend of God. To me, Jesus is the friend of God, because he argues with God. And so, these five “no’s” of mine I bring to you as a sign of love and friendship.

The first “no” is the one which became the watershed in my love story with the Bible: It is not about me. In Galatians 3 it says that the law became, as many people translated, the tutor unto Christ. And I had learned, in good Lutheran theology—and John Wesley was on that line, too—that the law was for the preparation of my conscience. The law was the tutor, and tutored me so that I could fully understand not only what I should do, but also that I couldn’t live up to it, and hence needed a savior. The law was a tutor unto Christ, preparing, tendering my conscience, so that my need for forgiveness would become so great.

Then I learned Greek. That sometimes has its value. And it seemed to me very clear that the text actually said something quite different. It said that the law for the Jewish people had been a kind of harsh babysitter who saw to it that they did not raid the kingdom until it was Gentile time, so that the Gentiles could also be in on the deal. That’s what the text actually said: The law had been tutored until it was time for the Gentiles to come in. That was confusing. Then I looked in my concordance, and I found that what the preachers had been preaching about when they preached about Paul, the forgiveness of sins, was never mentioned by Paul in either Galatians or Romans.

It's all about me: Uh, no it's not

I started to recognize that when Paul spoke about justification by faith, he was really giving the argument in favor of his Gentile converts. He had to come to grips with how, in God’s word and God’s mind, his mission to the Gentiles fitted into God’s total plan. It was about the Jews and the Gentiles and not about me. What an awakening. And I read in Romans 7: I cannot understand that I act as I act, because the good things I want to do, I don’t, and the bad things I do not want to do, I do. I, wretched human being—who is going to rescue me? And I thought that at least it was about me. I mean it was psychologically sound and easy to show that that’s the way it is. But then I found that Paul said: If I act as I do not want and I do not act act as I want, then it isn’t I who do it. That’s what the text says. Then he said: Then I agree to the law that it is good. This sounded strange. He wasn’t very bothered, was he, by his inner conflict. He described something quite different. He used this wonderful psychological example to prove that the holy law and the commandment was holy, righteous, and just. I hadn’t cared about that, because I thought it was about me. And then I read: We have the God who justifies the ungodly. And Abraham believed, and it was counted him unto the righteousness (Rom. 4). And I thought that this had to do with God’s grace, by which we are forgiven. But it seemed that the point here was quite simply that Abraham was a gentile when he believed, because the circumcision didn’t happen until chapter 17 of Genesis and we were only in chapter 15.

So, Paul had found a wonderful exegetical key to the mystery of his Gentile mission. It wasn’t about me. And I read in Chapter II in Romans where Paul says: You Gentiles had gotten a little uppity toward the people of Israel, and I’ll tell you a secret, lest you be conceited, and that is that all of Israel will be saved, so that’s none of your business. So it was about Jews, about people.

And, imagine, I read these things during the end of the Second World War, when the camps in Auschwitz and Dachau opened up, and I still thought that Romans was a theological tractate about my soul. And I didn’t feel that it was about people. And I didn’t feel that Paul had fathomed that this Gentile condescension toward the Jewish people had started to happen already in his own time. How come the greatest missionary of the Bible warns his converts of missionary zeal? Isn’t that strange? Or, is it not so strange? Paul had been burned once. It was out of religious zeal that he had committed his only sin-—no, perhaps not his only sin, but the only sin he ever mentioned that he committed, namely, that he had persecuted the church. And he saw that now perhaps it started all over again with the Christians toward the Jews. Oh, that we had listened to him instead of to the tradition that didn’t see the Jews, but just made them a kind of brick in the game of interpretation.

I learned that it was not about me, but it was teaching me about God’s way of dealing with the world, with people, with tensions between people of different faiths. What an insight. What a wonderful book that I had claimed for my own soul game instead of feeling the big drama of God, in which I was very little.

PART TWO: How Not to Read the Bible 

For my generation of writers, Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th of renal failure, was the ultimate father figure. We measured ourselves against the sweep of his brilliance—for it must be conceded that even his lesser books had the sweep of brilliance—our whole adult lives. He was the giant who dared giant leaps and, more than occasionally, giant pratfalls. Thus my drive to his brick house on the very end of Cape Cod in Provincetown, Mass. some months ago had the excitement and dread of a pilgrimage. Beside me on the passenger seat, the author photo on his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, drilled into me with a father’s intensity—equally admonishing and exhortatory—until I finally had to cover it with my hat. But I took my hat off when I entered his house and started asking questions.

Whatever else that can be said about it, this new book is written with the vigor of someone half your age.

Good to hear. But every time I hear compliments, my feet start doing this [twitching].

Not the shy, retiring type: A first edition of Advertisements for Myself You want to run away?

I’ve never learned to take a compliment graciously.

How come?

Damned if I know. My father, an elegant man, always took compliments very well. But I, being rough hewn, loved messing his hair. Maybe I defined myself in opposition to him.

In this book, the relationship between young Adi (Adolph) and his father is very fraught—more moving than I expected it to be.

I’ve been thinking about how many of my books have that recurring theme. My relationship with my father was very interesting. Not hostile, but never near. I couldn’t reach him. He was an exceptionally complex man. He was very proud of me after “The Naked and the Dead,” which he must have read ten times.

Did he “get” it?

Oh yeah.

So you were able to communicate on that very deep level.

Yeah, he didn’t go in for long speeches, but he would look at me and say,“This is good.”

Was it from him that you got your grit?

My father was a very bold man in his quiet way. And my mother was a remarkable woman—not only strong but also loving.

You demonize Hitler here, quite literally—the demon narrator is there at the conception. Aren’t you thereby letting mankind off the hook?

It seems to me there have been two exceptional births in human history: Jesus Christ and Adolph Hitler. Hitler is the devil’s answer to Jesus Christ.

Oedipal shmedipal, as long as he loves his mother: Mailer's Hilter had some Freudian issuesYou like making large statements, don’t you?

Drives wives crazy.

I can only imagine.

I make them for the sheer joy of making them.

When you read younger novelists today, are you impatient that they don’t seek to go larger?

I don’t read them. Which I think is one of the reasons they’re not particularly in love with me.

Whom do you read for pleasure?

I find I can’t read good novels anymore—not when I’m working—because they’re too disruptive. I get excited by them, and go off in all sorts of directions. How would I do if I were writing it? And I get off my own work. I’m immensely single-minded, I’d even say dull, about sticking to my own work. For the last ten years I’ve always felt I’ve got one book left, one book left, one book left.

If there’s still one left after this one, what will it be?

A sequel to this one about Hitler. In this last, after all, I only take him to age 16. I think there’s a little more to him …

Are you impatient with some of your contemporaries for not contending with the larger questions?

Look, for better or for worse, I have that kind of mind. They have [theirs]. I used to be very competitive. By now I’m sick of it, in the sense that it has no meaning. Either one of us will last, or ten of us, who knows. History can wipe all of us out.

I wasn’t expecting to hear such mellowness from you.

It’s not mellowness, it’s shared amusement. After competing with someone who used to be a rival, in the end we have a shared conversation. I respect Roth, I respect Updike, DeLillo, Vonnegut, I could name ten of them, they’re all good writers.

One book left?: The pugilist in his last daysSalinger?

Salinger I’m pissed off at, because he had such a glimpse into America when he was young, and he didn’t use it.

Any theory as to why he went silent?

No theory worth airing.

At your age [of 83], are you more prudent not to air a theory if it’s half-baked?

I’ve gone off half-cocked so many times in my youth that yes, now I’m a little older…

So you’re still actively growing?

Better growth than decrepitude.

It’s marvelous that you have this capacity…

Well listen, we’ll see. But I can guarantee you one thing: At the moment there are 20 writers, male and female, who feel that they are the best living American writer. And I of course am one of them. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

You deal in opposites a lot, don’t you? You like the way the world is balanced.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

So how do you finally measure up on the wisdom scale?

I’d probably give myself a very good mark.

Care to offer a numerical grade?

[Chuckling] No. That would not be wise.

As a man, are you ever intimidated?

Not anymore. The best thing about old age is that you’re no longer intimidated by anybody. There’s a real cool that comes in with old age.

* * *

NEXT: Read Shvitz post From White Negro to Jewish Hipster: Jews Still Acting Black in 2007, by Eric Goldstein

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Michael Weiss wrote an obituary for Mailer, Abe Greenwald compared him to Bono, and Stefan Beck called him an example of the free pass we give literary rock stars of a certain age.

[This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

 

Does anyone now doubt that Osama bin Laden routinely scans U.S. newspapers and magazines, searching for his half-baked appeals to the American people to see him not as a theocratic fascist but as a sort of misunderstood uncle whose punishments hurt him more than they hurt them? Binny's latest proclamation is well worth reading, less so for its allusions to Noam Chomsky or Michael Scheuer, but for its revivalist salesmanship to good, God-fearing Christians. Would it be such a shock to the system for them to "embrace" Islam?

And did you know that the name of the Prophet of Allah Jesus and his mother (peace and blessings of Allah be on them both) are mentioned in the Noble Quran dozens of times, and that in the Quran there is a chapter whose name is "Maryam," i.e. Mary, daughter of Imran and mother of Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah be upon them both)? It tells the story of her becoming pregnant with the Prophet of Allah Jesus (peace and blessings of Allah be uon them both), and in its confirmation of her chastity and purity, in contrast to the fabrications of the Jews against her.

One has to the admire the "inter-faith" cosiness of this passage, and Christians should indeed look up the chapter "Maryam" and the other dozen references to her, mainly to see if they recognize their blessed virgin in the Koranic recounting.

In sura 19.28, 29, Mary is approached by the people of Nazareth and told, "O Mary, now you have done an extraordinary thing! O sister of Aaron! Your father was not a bad man, nor was your mother a whore!" In sura 66,12; 3.31, Mary is referred to as the "daughter of Imran," as Bin Laden refers to her above. Still later the reader is informed that "We gave unto Moses the Book and appointed him his brother Aaron as vizier."

Those with Sunday School, let alone Hebrew School, backgrounds might be scratching their heads at this point. As the great atheist Ibn Warraq puts it in one of his countless examples showing the Koran's manmade and highly fallible origins,

It is pretty obvious that Muhammed has confused Miriam the sister of Moses, with Mary the mother of Jesus.

Surely a sacrilege to pious Christians, since Miriam was struck with a nasty case of leprosy -- albeit the virginally-tinged kind that turned her "white as snow" -- for speaking Lashon hara against Moses' Cushite bride. And though she was considered a prophetess -- incidentally, one much adored by today's Jewish feminists, not the usual demo for Al Qaeda recruitment -- it's quite clear that she was not immaculately conceived or assumed into heaven with her body and soul united.

What an exegetical pickle. These confusions and more could be easily remedied if jihadists abandoned the text-literal monotheism altogether and stuck to a more "open source" script, like Borat's Kazakh metaphysic. "We follow the hawk."

Right on, man.

Mashiach Now!:: only You can prevent false messiahsWhen my younger sister, Grace, took up Israeli dancing a few years ago, I was thrilled. What could be better than the blending of Jewish culture with exercise and socializing? She initially encountered and took her first lessons during a summer session at BCI, and upon returning home, immediately began dancing two nights a week with David Dassa and a motley Jew crew. Her new friends had names like Orly and Lior, and if I'm not mistaken, there were a handful of Sara(h)s and Rachels and even an Ezra. Grace regularly demonstrated her newly learned moves to me, dancing to burned CDs of her favorite songs in our shared living room. "Yemenite left and pivot turn together," she'd chant as she danced, still something of a novice. One day, in the course of a conversation about the latest goings on with her "dance" friends, she mentioned that a girl she'd become especially friendly with--one of the Sarahs--had said something befuddling while the two were shooting hoops. For the past few months, they'd been attending Friday Night Live together. Now Sarah wanted to know where else my sister attended services.

"At our family temple," Grace had replied. "Temple Israel of Hollywood. What about you?"

Sarah had clammed up, slightly, and then brought herself to say, "Ahavat Zion. It's a Messianic shul. You should come with me, sometime."

"Oh," said Grace, because she didn't know what else to do.

***

Continue reading...

So, I don’t know how reliable this source is, but according to The Religious Write blog, written by Barney Zwartz, an Australian religion reporter for The Age newspaper, Catholics are no longer interested in converting Jews. Here are the details:
If You Don't Accept Jesus Into Your Heart: I'll sic the pilgrims on you again, mothefucker.

The Catholic Church officially no longer tries to convert Jews to Christianity, according to Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the Australian who became the third-highest prelate in the Vatican. Addressing a mostly Jewish audience of several hundred at the Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick on Tuesday night, Cardinal Cassidy said the Vatican II council of the 1960s ended the charge of deicide against the Jews over the death of Jesus Christ, but it had taken decades to work through the church. (It was rebutted in a famous Vatican II document Nostra Aetate.)

"Campaigns that target Jews for conversion are no longer theologically acceptable," said the now-retired cardinal, 83, who was president of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity.

The Catholic Church taught that salvation is found only in Christ through the church, but Cardinal Cassidy said it now accepted that the Jews were saved by their (Old Testament) covenant with God.

"There have been many reflections in the past decade, including a deepening Catholic appreciation of the covenant between God and the Jews and their role as witness of God's faithful love," Cardinal Cassidy said.

Full Story. Emphasis mine.

While I’m relieved to be off the hook in terms of the Jesus thing, I’m thinking a lot about missionary work in general, and also about how important it is to me to never ever missionize.

Catholics, if I’m not mistaken, have been pretty heavily involved in missionary work in the past. And in the process they’ve done lots of good, and some bad, as well. You may recall the Inquisition, for instance.

I do recognize the desire to share your faith and community with another person seeking friends and comfort. When I invite someone over for Shabbat dinner, that’s pretty much what I have in mind. But missionizing, the idea of going out there and trying to get more people for this Jew Team…blech! It’s cheesy and depressing, right? It seems like a disingenuous thing to do if you’re not a hundred percent confident about your faith, and I don't know too many people who are that confident about God. 

I also tend to find missionary work to be manipulative, offensive, or rude. Missionaries get shipped off to teach natives about Jesus, which they do with the help of shiny new western tools and tricks. Once the natives are addicted to whatever the missionaries have brought they’re very willing to buy the Jesus story, too. And those guys who pass out pamphlets in the subway or stand in Times Square with a megaphone screaming about how we’re all damned…they irritate and offend me. Random guys on the street don’t get to tell me I’m going to hell. And I wonder how effective they are, too.

On the other hand, it does seem like a lot of people change for the better when they find religion. Certainly there are some great missions out there doing good work aside from converting the masses.

So what do you guys think about missionaries? Any great strategies for dealing with pushy Jesus-freaks (though at least now if they’re Catholic we don’t have to worry)?

• Jesus and his concubines. Collect them all! [CNN]
  
• Pirates of Cape Cod: treasure chest of gold, or 30 cannons, discovered beneath ocean floor. [The Boston Globe]
• Republicans welcome "Diaperman" Vitter back to the Senate. [The Hill]
• New regulations: big sugary food corporations can't market to little tikes. [Reuters]
• Cheney unplugged; plus liveblogging the Senate all-nighter. [The Washington Monthly]
• Ellis Weiner of The Huffington Post roasts Times' stalwart Bush excuser, David Brooks. [The Huffington Post]
• It takes a nation of millions to hold us back: blacks, Jews and hip-to-the-hop. [Jewcy]
  

I've been pining for that perfect Jesus and Mo cartoon that'd find a way to skewer Judaism, too. Wait for Moshiach, the 12th Imam or the Riz all you want, but I wait no more (hat tip: the Trots):

See Peter Singer's response to this post, here!

I donated $1000 to “Idol Gives Back” the other night. Check it out, here’s the charge on my Mastercard.

Trans Date: 04/28/2007
Post Date: 04/30/2007
Description: IDOL GIVES BACK(Other)Scrambling for Status: Author boasts of past donations, predicts future ones
Transaction Number: 25536067120000001175409
Amount: $1,000.00

I don't want to say this makes me a better, classier person than you, but...well, who are we kidding? A thousand dollars is a buttload of money! And remind me again how much you gave?

When I first learned that the One campaign and American Idol were opening an ambitious new front in the war against extreme poverty, I thought I'd give $250. Then I considered that half the money goes to the most impoverished children in this country (in Appalachia and downtown Los Angeles, where children are undernourished and have little access to education), and the other half to the most impoverished on the planet (in sub-Saharan Africa, where the mortality rate for children under five exceeds 33% in some countries). So I decided to give $500. And still I felt unsatisfied.

How did I became so charitable, so deeply decent? I don't have an answer for you. Was it my quality upbringing? The well-developed social consciousness that came with my fine education? Or have I just been blessed with a natural empathy, that instinctive sensitivity to suffering that seems so essential a part of my nature? I suspect it's a combination of all these things and more. Regardless, I donated $1000. More than all of you combined, I'm sure.

Do you find all this self-satisfaction nauseating? Of course you do. I don't like it either. We encounter arrogance and self-promotion all the time, but it's jarring to hear someone even discuss the dollar value of their charitable contributions, much less boast about it. How could it be otherwise, when we've been indoctrinated with all that insufferable Judeo-Christian twaddle about good deeds being noblest when done quietly, without public display or recognition? It's Jesus's favorite talking point. The Pharisees couldn't walk an old lady across the Cardo without sending the Lamb of God off on another tiresome rant about the hypocrisy of good deeds done for public display.

And it wasn't just Jesus. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides broke charity down into eight forms, and the more selfless your intentions, the more noble the charity.

It's all a bunch of destructive hippy-dippy bullshit. The real hero is the person who gives, and then struts and preens in public like they just fucked the prom queen.

Because yep, verily, the highest form of charity is that which is given in the spirit of smug one-upmanship. The future of the planet will be vastly better if only we can learn to properly exploit the insatiable status hunger of people like us.

In Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen marveled at the middle-class's indefatigable clamoring for signifiers of class and status. So intense was the desire to improve in social standing relative to one's peers that Veblen thought it almost spiritual in nature. No bauble was too useless, no gizmo too costly, if it helped accomplish this. He called this "conspicuous consumption."

And that spiritual drive for status, Jewcers, is the way and the path. Unlike Jesus or Maimonides (or Marx), we live at at time when vast quantities of disposable capital have accrued among middle-class social climbers. So if we wish to end the most grievous injustices on the planet--say, the annual death of six million children from severe malnutrition and associated opportunistic infections--we have three options: We can pray for human nature to change such that self-sacrifice is more natural than self-seeking; we can fantasize about a revolutionary reordering of the global economy; or we can harness our status anxiety in the service of humanitarianism.

When charitable giving becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, when saving the life of a child confers half the social status of, say, a cute pair of shoes, human history will be forever transformed. Another world is possible, and middle-class status anxiety can get us there.

So forget Maimonides' antiquated "levels of charity." Ignore Jesus's tired rants against hypocrisy. We need more Pharisees, and fewer saints. Whether we like it or not, the most effective charity is that which is accompanied by a sneer at the lowly neighbours. Everything else is tied for last.

See Peter Singer's response to this post, here!

[The author futzed around a bit with this post since it was first published, including to make the satire of the opening section more explicit.]

Continue reading...

The Icon Says: Good Luck Understanding this!I’ve begun to notice that a lot of Jews don’t really know anything about Christianity. Which is not to say that we should, but I’m a little surprised that we can live in this “host” culture, be constantly surrounded by Christians, spend our growing up years learning the words to “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” by osmosis… and still not know the basics.   

Oh, you think you do? Then tell me…  

What does “nondenominational really ” mean”? 
Are all Methodists linked by one common umbrella organization? 
Which is freakier, Church of God or Church of Christ? 
Can you define (Christian) Orthodoxy?  

I’ll try to be brief and honest, and I apologize in advance for the fact that I’m going to oversimplify.  In fact I’ll probably offend someone a little.  Brevity and etiquette don’t often go together. So I suggest you use the links I’m offering too. 

For now (and for the sake of dividing these posts), I’m going to split all Christians into two categories:  Protestants (I’m including the Anglican Church here, though many would argue with me) and “the rest”. 

We’ll begin with “the rest” because they came first.

 It started with us, right?: Early Christianity 

Yeah, Christians all trace their roots back to Judaism, to Jesus. But “Christianity” didn’t really start out to be a “religion”.  After Jesus died, a bunch of Jews splintered off so they could talk about how awesome Jesus was… but there were a lot of little sects, and it took a long time for things to get streamlined.  Most of these people still thought of themselves as Jewish, and many Jewish Christians thought Jesus would be right back down to earth. 

It wasn’t until the apostle Paul (who studied with Gamaliel—remember, most of these dudes were Rabbis) started preaching to non-Jewish communities (and basically invented Christian mission) that “Christianity” began to solidify.  Paul brought these first Christians the critical mass they needed by suggesting that there was no need for gentiles to become Jews (and undergo adult circumcision) to become followers of Jesus.  This was all happening shortly following the death of Jesus, in the decades before the destruction of the second temple. 

Then these new Christians wandered around, wrote some stuff down, and waited for Jesus to come back.  This took hundreds of years.  A lot happened in that time, but we can skip ahead now, to 325, to the Council of Nicea. There, for the first time, a unified “Christian” doctrine was established.  It was determined that Jesus was “of the same substance” as God (which is, of course, an absolute theological wall for Jews and Christians).  So now we see the beginnings of “an organized religion.”

 

(tune in later for The Great Schism!!!   Ooooh!)

 

WWJRD: What Would Joey Ramone Do?Does this scream “The Matisyahu Effect” to anyone else?

Underground music scene: check. Funky-ass beards: check. High degree of religiosity combined with secular audience street cred: check. Only a matter of time until these guys sign a deal with JDub, yo.

(Overlooking, please, for just a moment, the wrenchingly bassackward afternoons these brothers are described promoting “life” outside an abortion clinic...)

To pare it all down, nice and punk and universal: It don’t matter how hard the religious elders try to foist their musty relational tactics upon the young ‘uns. Spiritual reckoning and renewal cannot be packaged and sold. The revolution will not be broadcast via synagogue newsletter. Take your outmoded ideals and shove ‘em. The kids are all right. And so on. Amen.

Today’s Washington Post has an article about a program run by a church in Alexandria that provides free pizza for lunch to kids from a public school every Wednesday.

Jesus: Is the Secret Ingredient Here are the highlights:

Jesus Pizza, as the students call it, is warm. It's good. It's free. And it's available to T.C. students for lunch every Wednesday at the First Baptist Church of Alexandria. Some weeks, as many as 150 or more students trek the half-mile down King Street from the school to lounge on old couches, thumb through Bibles or play pool while waiting for free slices and sodas in the church basement. The only cost is that they have to listen to a prayer and a short sermon before digging in.

and then later

Some might call this proselytizing, this allure of easy, free food to those with young, impressionable minds, hungry bellies and empty pocketbooks. "They're trying to brainwash you!" insisted Rachel Goldfarb, a T.C. student who refuses to go to Jesus Pizza.

To others, such as Tommy Clark, who are devout, it's a great place to come for fellowship. "I've had people say, 'I love to come here. Everyone is so nice. I feel so welcome,' " said Clark, who runs a Jesus Pizza group on the Internet. "It's pretty cool to see the biggest stoners and drug dealers come, too.'"

Still, when the morning announcements at the public school include an invitation to come to Jesus Pizza could that blur the bright line separating church and state?

"They come in. If they want to hear what we're saying, they stay. If they don't, they can leave," said Mary Rhoades, who works with youth at the church.

Free food has always been a big draw for religious groups. Friday night dinners at Hillel, L’chaims with Chabad, and falafel brought to you by AIPAC on campus are all common occurrences in the Jewish community, and I don’t see a problem with it. But then, universities are one thing and public high schools are another.

What would you do if you found out your kid was doing lunch with Jesus and his pizza?
If you wanted him or her to stop, what would you do? Have your own pizzas delivered to the school? Open your own group? What if you couldn’t afford to do that?

Religious bribery is a really tough thing, because it can work so subtly, and it’s hard to pin down exactly where it crosses the line. Can we trust Jewish kids to go into the church and tune out the Jesus-speak?

When I was in high school I regularly bribed my friends to come to USY events, and I know NCSY and NFTY people did the same. Free food, cute boys, and big Tvs in the youth lounge was usually all it took. And do I regret this? No, because some kids showed up for the pizza, stayed for the Jewish content and came back for the shabbaton.

Am I just being a hypocrite? Would I be pissed if it was Moses-Pizza? Is JSU trying to start a Moses-Pizza movement?

Easter is the most brilliantly spooky of Christian holidays. Jesus the Zombie busts out of his grave and struts around for a couple days—some call this theology, I call it the stuff of nightmares. I prefer to think of Jesus as he was at the Sermon on the Mount, all fresh-faced and sweet. The risen dead belong in George A. Romero films, not in scripture.

But if an undead Jesus scares me, Lord help me when the Moshiach comes. Jewish eschatoIn the Flesh: Fresh-faced, pre-zombie Jesuslogy involves what is possibly the weirdest End-of-Days scenario ever cooked up. And it includes lots and lots of undead Jews.

According to the Talmud, once the Moshiach bursts onto the stage like Elvis in Aloha from Hawaii, the corporeal (though badly decomposed) bodies of Jews, housed comfortably in pine boxes, or simply dead on the streets of Boca Raton if we missed the warning signs entirely, will be resurrected. According to the Midrash, the process here involves a few complex, magical steps:

1. Our decomposed bodies will be flushed with the “Dew of Resurrection,” a sort of yeast of rebirth.
   
2. Our bodies will then reform around a bone in the spine called the luz, which is generally considered to be the coccyx.
3. We make time toward Israel to hook up with our souls.

The first two steps are hard to visualize. Rabbis haven’t traditionally been much help, basically saying that all will be clear once it happens. But the texts are clearer about the whole “making time towards Israel” part, and, sadly, it doesn’t involve a Lincoln Town Car.

The Talmud says resurrected Jews will literally roll their way to Israel through a series of underground tunnels and caves to be reunited with their souls, turning Israel into a frolicking undead playground. The Talmud predicts thaStrong Buy: Messianic Age likely to see steep rise in Dramamine stockt all this rolling will hurt, to say nothing of the nausea.

The only way to avoid the pain of rolling from, say, Palm Springs to Israel, is to be a righteous Jew at the time of death; though even the righteous have to wander through the tunnels and caves, which sounds messy, what with the need to sidestep the rolling (and probably vomiting) un-Orthodox masses. When everyone’s finally in Israel, the Mount of Olives will open up and resurrected Jews will stream out—presumably in search of Dramamine.

If you find all this hard to fathom, you’re not alone. The idea that Israel turns into an eternal dance sequence from the “Thriller” video has scared the hell out of me since I first encountered Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones: “Behold, I will open your grave, O My people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, O My people. And I will put My spirit in you and ye shall live, and I will bring you in your own land, and ye shall know that I the Lord have spoken and performed, saith the Lord.”

If you need me, your basic bacon-eating Jew, I’ll be the one cowering in my grave, gripping a shotgun Valley of Dry Bones: The Prophet Ezekiel said the trippiest thingsand blasting away at the flesh-eating zombies.

The belief in resurrection likely goes back to the 4th Century B.C.E., when Jews were influenced by Babylonian concepts of religion. But it is Ezekiel’s vision that thousands of years of Jews have embraced as the definitive statement on the End of Days—though not without some discussion of the actual process, which is how we got this whole idea about rolling, with the Angel Gabriel leading the way.

Perhaps Ezekiel’s vision should be taken metaphorically. Though I’ve always been told we’d roll to Israel after death, what this really must mean is that we’ll metaphorically rise from the grave and metaphorically roll to Israel, right? Right? Right?!?

Well, no.

The Orthodox, at least, are quite literal in their belief that Jews will rise from their caskets and plunge en masse through the center of the Earth towards Israel. It is, according to Orthodox Rabbi Raleigh Resnick of AskMoses.com, one of the 13 principles of our faith.

The state of our bodies, however, is up for discussion. It’s reasonable to assume that if the power exists to resurrect the dead, the same power would exist to make us look decent, lest we live through eternity in differing states of decomposition. As a person who had hair like Robert Smith of The Cure through about 1990, I’d like toPhysical Perfection, circa 1990: Author will be restored to this form when resurrected have a choice regarding how I look. After resurrection, will I look as I do at the time of my death (probably even worse than 1990), or will I be in some perfect state of myself?

Rabbi Resnick, and Orthodoxy in general, believe that we will return in our prime, at our most vibrant, in a perfect state. This is why Jews do not typically practice cremation. To burn the body would be to desecrate it, which would prevent us from returning to the physical state, never mind the State of Israel.

This prompts a larger question: Won’t space in Israel be a little tight once all of the newly re-minted Jews take their rightful place on the 8,500 square miles of Holy Land? (And let’s not forget the issue of coordinating a few thousand years’ worth of undead Jews all the way to Israel. Last Thanksgiving, for instance, it was nearly impossible to coordinate the 14 living Jews who were coming to my house for a simple meal; I shudder to think what it would be like wrangling the totality of the Jewish dead halfway around the world.)

Fortunately, it seems like the Israel in question isn’t necessarily Israel as we know it. Rabbi Resnick says there are statements in the Midrash and also within Jewish literature which assert that the whole world will have the status of Israel, or that that the boundaries of Israel will expand to accommodate all of the Jewish people. Specifically, the Midrash teaches that in a Time to Come, “Jerusalem will diffuse its sanctity over the whole of the Land of Israel, and the Land of Israel will diffuse its sanctity over the whole world.” Should this come to pass, rolling to Israel should be a significantly less trying ordeal—what without the oceans, mountains, and molten center of the Earth to contend with—though there’s nothing in the literature which makes note of auxiliary Mounts of Olives opening up worldwide.

But as the rabbis say, we’ll know when it happens. I recommend brushing up on your somersaults and investing in some knee and elbow pads; it could be a long journey.

Goldberg, P.I. would like to thank Rabbi Raleigh Resnick and Rabbi Mayer Green. Other sources include To Live and Live Again, by Rabbi Nissan Dovid Dubov, and Holy Mountain: Two Paths to One God by Raphael H. Levine.

Got a Jewish question? Send it to goldbergpi@jewcy.com.

Sculptor Cosimo Cavallero and his 6ft chocolate ChristCatholics are up in arms over a 6ft chocolate sculpture of Christ that will go on display in New York over Easter.

The work, called "My Sweet Lord," will be on view in a window of the Roger Smith Hotel's Lab Gallery on E. 47th Street. The sculpture is made of almost 200 pounds of dark chocolate.

According to the New York Daily News, because the statue is "anatomically correct" (which I think is shorthand for 'stark bollock naked') some Catholics believe it is in bad taste:

"It's an all-out war on Christianity," fumed Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. "They wouldn't show a depiction of Martin Luther King Jr. with genitals exposed on Martin Luther King Day, and they wouldn't show Muhammed depicted this way during Ramadan. It's always Christians, and the timing is deliberate."

Chocolate Christ sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro, who is himself a Catholic, said giving Jesus a loincloth would be "ridiculous."

"This person is talking from a very narrow window," he said of Donohue. "They're not allowing themselves to open their hearts. ... If it makes them feel better, I'll ask for their forgiveness and do 10 Hail Marys, but they should just lighten up and be more accepting of people."

Sort of like Akbar and Jeff, only messianic. And gayer. (Hat tip: Harry's):

No Forethought: A photo would have made things so much simpler!�In case you’re one of the people who thought I was a moron for posting about the Jesus Tomb, you’ll appreciate this article at Beliefnet, which debunks the whole Jesus Tomb story pretty effectively.

It gets into many reasons for why this is just silliness, among them some historical inaccuracies:

• The ancestral home of Joseph was Bethlehem, and his adult home was Nazareth. The family was still in Nazareth after he was dead and gone. Why in the world would any member of Jesus' family be buried in Jerusalem other than James and Jesus?
• One of the ossuaries has the name "Judah, son of Jesus." We have no historical evidence of such a son of Jesus. We have no historical evidence he was ever married.
• By all ancient accounts, the tomb of Jesus was empty—even the Jewish and Roman authorities acknowledged this. Now, it takes a year for the flesh to desiccate, and then you put the man's bones in an ossuary. But according to historical record, Jesus' body was long gone from Joseph of Arimathea's tomb well before then. Are we really to believe it was moved to another tomb, decayed, and then put in an ossuary? It's not likely.
• In order to argue that Jesus remained buried after his death, you must accuse James, Peter and John (mentioned in Galatians 1 and 2, our earliest New Testament document) of fraud and cover-up. Are we to believe that they knew Jesus didn't rise bodily from the dead but perpetrated a fraudulent religion, for which they and others were prepared to die? Did they hide the body of Jesus in another tomb? The James in question here is Jesus' brother, who certainly would have known about a family tomb.

It also goes into why DNA testing  is silly, and how common the name Jesus was back in the day… And if you want even more, you can check out the author’s blog.

But I’ll say in defense of my initial post… I never claimed to BELIEVE any of this stuff.  I just thought it was interesting, and I like when public outcries and  bad TV (which both go well with popcorn). 

Do we have to fight about the inaccuracies of WifeSwap too?

The Jesus Tomb: One big happy...

I absolutely understand why Christians will be upset by this story in the Jerusalem Post (and the documentary it describes) but what do Jews think about it? I find it fascinating myself… and will be glued to the set next week when the flick airs!

And I will absolutely be following the “furor” it “sparks”. This is my kind of news!

Basically, a crack team from the Discovery Channel has put together a documentary about the “Lost Tomb of Jesus” in Jerusalem… and they’re going to reveal great truths to us amateur theologians out here in TV-land. Namely, that Jesus was buried with his wife Mary Magdalene, and their SON, Judah!

They’re doing DNA tests on the remains and shit! Jesus DNA!

See, this is a big big BIG deal for Christians for a number of reasons. Jesus wasn’t supposed to be getting it on with Mary, and certainly he wasn’t supposed to be making babies. But mostly, he was supposedly resurrected and taken up into heaven by God. Bodily. He shouldn’t have left any remains for DNA testers, besides maybe some toenails clippings.

So if there should be the least little shred of credibility (which I can’t honestly imagine there will be) attributed to this cable-TV insanity… it’s going to be OFF THE CHAIN!

Of course, I’m expecting a lot of Jews to get upset too, because Jews don’t like Jesus. They don’t like to talk about Jesus. But religiously, it doesn’t matter to us, does it? After all, to us, it should be like someone finding the tomb of Shabbatai Tzvi and his baby’s mama… Though I’m not sure The Discovery Channel would bother with that.

Of course, there’s always the fear that people will say this is a “Jewish conspiracy” (You know, like evolution)… but at least it’ll be interesting.