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Letter One
So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you...letters. There are some things in them hard to understand...
2 Peter 3:15 16
Dear Paul,
You are, without question, one of the most fascinating and influential Jews who ever lived. Yesterday, I was wandering through the stacks of a Christian seminary library looking for yet another book about you, another scholar's effort to reconstruct what you said and why. Suddenly, I imagined you standing beside me, "a man small of stature with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness"1 (if a second century description of you is correct). You were viewing quizzically the aisles upon aisles filled with lengthy books on "Paul's theology," " Paul's life," "Paul's view of the law." You, who chose never to write a philosophy text, a theological treatise, or an autobiography, are now the subject of thousands of analyses. What you did write were letters to the churches you helped to found. We devour these letters for clues, even though our parents taught us not to read other people's mail. Everything we know about you is based on the seven letters in the New Testament which bear your name and which the experts consider to be genuine. (The Book of Acts purports to tell us more about your career, but we treat it with skepticism since its author, "Luke," had his own agenda.) As I scanned the shelves in search of the book I needed on you, I imagined you beside me, smiling indulgently.
It is obvious why Christians need to figure out what you meant. Your radical marginalized Jewish sect ultimately became a powerful religious community involving over one third of the men, women and children on this earth. Christians view your letters to churches around the Mediterranean written in the early decades of their movement as foundational sources for Christian belief. Indeed, "Christian theology is a series of footnotes to Saint Paul."2 But why do I, a Jew, want to get to know you better? Most of my co-religionists, from your era right up till mine, see you as the archetype of the Jewish heretic, the prototypical Jew who abandons the faith and then unjustly criticizes it in a way our enemies can use against us, to put it bluntly a traitor. In the last century, some Jewish scholars have begun to "reclaim Jesus," taking pride in this great teacher who lived and died a devout Jew. You, on the other hand, are still viewed by most Jews as foreign and dangerous. I have to confess that part of my attraction to you is simply that: how could somebody hated that much by the establishment of my community be all bad? The iconoclast in me reaches out.
But there is more. I have always marveled at the Jewish scholars who line up to embrace Jesus as their "brother." I find Jesus difficult to relate to. His life was so different from mine--he was rural, I am urban, he lived in the Jewish homeland, I in the Diaspora, he worked and taught among Jews, I live in two civilizations. Most important, he embodied a purity of soul and an intensity of ethical conduct which led many Jews who knew him to believe they were in the presence of no ordinary human. l might--just might--get a glimpse in my life of one tenth of a percent of the holiness he lived out. Had I lived in his time, I might well have been his follower, but it's difficult for me to identify with him. You, on the other hand, were urban and multilingual, a Jew of the diaspora trying to mediate between Jew and Gentile, unsure of your relationship with Jewish law, loving the Hebrew Bible, especially Psalms, struggling with your own very human recalcitrant self. I can relate.
Knowing you is crucial for Jews who want to fill in the gaps in their own history. Like all Jews today from Orthodox to Reform, I am an heir of the Pharisees, the only Jewish group to survive the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. You are one of only two men in history who actually claim to be a Pharisee. So what you have to say about it is of interest even if my first reaction is to disagree. Even though we know so little about you as an individual, we know more about you than virtually any other individual in the first century.
Further, you created a model of spiritual experience that, through your followers in future generations--Augustine, Luther--pervaded the Western world's understanding of what it means to be human and how the human intersects with the divine. As a Jew who is very much assimilated into a civilization shaped by Western Christianity, I too am shaped by what you believed.
What you had to say about my faith influenced how Judaism was treated in your tradition which had a lot to do with the fate of my people when we lived under Christian rule. Even today, your view of Judaism effects how Jews living in a Christian culture see their own faith.
Finally, you asked good questions. You struggled with some very important problems that I still struggle with today: what is the right relationship to Jewish law? How do Jews and gentiles fit in the divine economy? How do I understand suffering and death?
You always did have a grand vision, so you are probably not surprised that the Christian movement was so successful. Nor would you be surprised that the Jewish people--your own flesh and blood carries on, although they are now a tiny minority--less than 1/2 of 1 % of the world's population. If you came to Philadelphia today to my synagogue, you would hear some of the same prayers you chanted when you were growing up, you could read from the very same Torah that was read in the synagogues you visited, and circumcision which was such a huge issue for you and the early church is still practiced by virtually every Jewish family on the 8th day of a boy's life or at conversion of a male to Judaism. You believed all your life that your kinsmen of the flesh were God's eternal people. There is a troubling history between Jews and Christians which will shock and sadden you but I will save that for a future letter.
Before I close this first letter, I thought you might want to know a little bit about me. I am an American woman who was born at the very midpoint of the twentieth century, several hundred years after philosophers and social scientists declared the whole "God business" the product of the overheated imaginations of ancient ancestors like you. But two world wars and the threat of a third, the failure of science as the messiah, the ongoing difficulty of being a person--all of what Barth called the "questionableness of human life " led me--and I am hardly alone--back to religion, to the same Hebrew Bible you cherished and so often quoted, back to the search for God's presence in my life. Despite my relatively secular upbringing, I have become a rabbi. My denomination of Judaism reconstructionism asks many questions, just as you did, of inherited tradition. Our questions are sometimes like yours, but our answers rarely are. Nevertheless, I see us as fellow searchers and, along with the authors of all those books about Pauline anthropology Pauline eschatology, and Pauline Christology, I would like to get to know you better.
1 "The Acts of Paul and Thecla, The Writings of Saint Paul," ed. Wayne Meeks, New
York: 1972, p. 199.
2 Sydney Ahlstrom, Theology in America, Indianapolis: 1967, p.23
Letter Two
The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.
Romans 7:10
Dear Paul,
Most Jews know only one thing about you and your beliefs, and it may be false. If you stopped a Jew on the street today and introduced yourself, she would probably say, "Paul? You're the man who hated living under Jewish law and saw to it that Christianity was founded on faith, not works." I want to understand in what sense that popular belief is accurate. I also want to share with you how I see these matters. Your fame as the anti law thinker places you in opposition to the Hebrew Bible, to rabbinic Judaism and to your Torah observant lord, Jesus. In this letter I will examine the oldest and most widespread understanding of your view of the law, namely, that you found law a disastrous spiritual path, that Romans 7 describes your autobiography. In the next two letters I will look at two other theories that attempt to explain your abrogation of Torah as law.
This traditional view is the least appealing scenario for Jews, since it involves a serious putdown of our religion by someone who should have known better. Even those of us who are not orthodox accept law as a positive element, the sense of being commanded as part of what we embrace as Judaism. Certainly, we know the pitfalls. There is no Jew alive who would not agree, if he were honest, that the Jewish demand for works sometimes leads him to hypocrisy, other times to self righteous boasting, still other times to despair. Or at least he'd agree it sometimes leads other Jews in those directions. But the word sometimes is the key. For the most part, Jews feel positive about the life of commandments.
Tonight is Kol Nidre, the evening service which begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance. As I understand it, Yom Kippur didn't work for you. You describe your life as a Jew as one of living under the law. To you that meant that no matter how much righteousness you attained you were always in bondage to "the law of sin and death." (Romans 7:2) The impossibility of doing the law and being "justified" by it seems your most central concern.
I can relate to your experience that "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." (Romans 7: l9) It is for just that reason that every year I dread this night. I dread hearing the now familiar list of sins intoned and realizing my Bingo card is fuller than ever. That once again I have had more mismeeting than meeting, that I have loved inadequately, that I have failed to be the person I envisioned last Yom Kippur. It is tough facing what is deepest and truest inside myself and admitting I haven't always or even usually acted from that place, admitting my reckless treachery to my best self, my fierce loyalty to my worst impulses. Every year as I review my own misdeeds, I wish not only that I hadn't done them but that I were, in essence, the sort of person to whom it would never occur to do them. But I am not. And I don't expect I ever will be.
Perhaps you had similar experiences on the eve of the Day of Atonement. You came to believe, through your faith in the Risen Christ, that it was possible to die to that old self that came back year after year to Yom Kippur as sorry as ever and be reborn a new and better self, once and for all. You came to believe that in Christ you had been set free from the life in which "I can will what is right but cannot do it." I have not had that experience, nor do I feel a need for such a radical solution to my Yom Kippur eve dread. Let me tell you what gives me the courage to face my sins, even while still "under the law."
First, I comfort myself with tales of fellow sinners, knowing I am not alone. God knows I could never begin to muster the strength to face God on Yom Kippur if not for my fellow Jews doing it with me. Rabbi Soloveitchik recalls that in Europe the old men would weep during the silent confessional but the public / communal one was chanted in an upbeat confidant voice. We are not separate, alone, cut off, misunderstood each in our own small world, suffering with our pasts. We can reach out, and sometimes it is through our failings especially that we can touch another as a friend sharing with me a mismeeting in her life becomes in its retelling a vehicle that changes my life.
We sit in the synagogue together each a unique ray of God's light, of God's glory. Together we do cheat despair and face the challenge of the confession of sins. We don't become transformed forever, but we struggle together to get it closer to right next time. For traditional Judaism, and for me, one of the primary vehicles for experiencing holiness is through study, particularly study with a partner known as hevruta. Once every other week I call my friend Judy and we sit for two hours on the phone, each with the same Jewish text in front of us. We pick a text of ethical commandment and we study it, word by word and discuss its challenge for us. We share our failures and triumphs in attempting to live out the virtue described in our text. We do not experience the law as condemnation, but rather as freedom, and we feel empowered to succeed in living it.
But even if I agreed that a life of good works was totally undoable, as I sometimes feel on a bad day, I am still left with the faith that Yom Kippur gives me, but apparently didn't give you, that even all that is really all right. God accepts our honest efforts at repentance and forgives us, for in the view of our Yom Kippur liturgy, as I understand it, nothing we have done is unforgivable, nothing we have become is without possibility of renewal what matters most to God on this day is not tallying the good deeds against the bad but simply that we return to ourselves and to God. Just last week we read in the newspaper about the surrender of Katherine Power, the sixties activist who was wanted by the FBI for her part in the murder of a policeman. She had been underground for 23 years. Her parents--who hadn't seen or heard from her since the day they watched her on the evening news escaping from the shooting--were asked how they felt about their reunion with their child. They said simply, "We're her parents." What more was there to say?
We Jews chant Avinu Malkeinu in preparation for Yom Kippur, a prayer reminding us that God is our Father, that beyond any sins to be confessed there is the unconditional, unqualified, nonnegotiable love of a mother or father for a child. Jesus prayed to God as "abba" a familiar form of father and some people thought this meant some special relationship unknown to others. But Jews who read the New Testament are not surprised by the image of God as Daddy. It seems obvious to us.
In the end, Yom Kippur is not only about harsh judgment or charitable judgment, about blame or forgiveness. Yom Kippur is about what mattered most to Katherine Power's parents--the reunion itself, the connection, the homecoming. The Yom Kippur liturgy ends at sunset with the Gates of Forgiveness opened wide.
According to the traditional reading of your critique of the law. you never felt you could walk through those gates. For you, there was a different solution to the problem of being a flawed human being. You saw Jesus and his atoning death as conquering sin in a unique, dramatic way. You came to know God's love and forgiveness in a way that you had never known it before as an observant Jew. But I am here to tell you that the impossible happens, at least once a year. I believe we Jews see the battle in different terms than you did, but like you, we too have a glimpse of being forgiven and ultimately loved.
Letter Three
Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
Philippians 3:8
Dear Paul,
In the early twentieth century some Christian scholars began to look at rabbinic Judaism and to see some of the love and grace that I experience there and tried to share with you in my last letter. They began to doubt the classic interpretation of your view of law, that it was at root a critique of the Judaism you had known. George Foote Moore, a Christian, wrote a lengthy and highly sympathetic study of rabbinic Judaism and found little of the works righteousness you allegedly hated. More recently, a great scholar by the name of E.P. Sanders asked himself: Why wasn't Paul as smart as G.F. Moore? He concluded that you have been seriously misread: you did not in fact find Judaism deadening or Jewish law undoable before your experience of Christ on the Road to Damascus. Rather it was your experience of salvation that led you to view your real achievements and satisfactions under the law after the fact as, in your words, "refuse." (Philippians 3:8)
As Sanders put it, "This is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism, it is not Christianity."1 In words that would be too fancy for you, Sanders speaks about the "exclusiveness of your soteriology."2 Or, as you put it. "Neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation." (Gal 6:15) In plain terms, it isn't that Yom Kippur didn't work for you when you were a Jew. It's just that now that you have experienced the salvation of Jesus, you see that you have undergone a more radical shift than simply sin/forgiveness, you have experienced a "change of lordships."
What can I, a Jew, make of this? I can't say "no, I don't think the problem is that serious," because you will tell me you didn't think so either until you experienced the solution. In Philipians 3:6 you explain that when you were a Pharisee you were "blameless" when it came to "righteousness under the law." Only when you knew Christ, could you see clearly the lordship of death you had been living under.
For you there was a struggle in life between two forces and it was only after you knew, in faith. The victory of the force of life that you were able to state clearly the opposition.
As you put it:
For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other to prevent you from doing what you would. Now the works of the flesh are plain:
fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.
I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Galatians, 5: 17 24)
I don't expect to ever know what it is like to have crucified my flesh with its passions and desires nor to live so fully in love, joy, peace, etc. For you, freedom meant being able to be totally yourself because you had become exclusively the good urges, and so would reap the fruits of the Spirit. But in my experience. people are generally a complicated mix of both sets of urges all their lives and even a given experience is often an untidy mix, so it's not as clear to me as it was to you when we can judge something the fruit of the Spirit and when it is the fruit of the Flesh.
Perhaps it is a cheap shot to point out that even after your experience of Christ you had your moments of anger! Personally, I think anger can be a good moment in the moral reckoning. As I go over my deeds and misdeeds for the year, I find some very spiritual acts I would count failures, from a human relations view, and some very fleshly desires and urges whose fruits have been good--chief among them the processes by which I conceived, bore and nourished my babies.
So for me the two lordships doesn't work. For you, the Day of Judgment seems to have an either / or quality to it: either you will be among the saved or the damned, the saints or the sinners, those who remained in bondage to the flesh or those who walked according to the Spirit. It seems much messier to me. I like the Hasidic story that imagines the Day of Judgment as a kind of intimate chat between the individual and God. Some disciples came and asked their master: "What will the Day of Judgment be like?" He replied: "Only this! God will take you one by one by one and tell you exactly what your life was really all about. God will review with you the good that you did in this world, the ways in which you missed the mark. You will go over the story you wrote with your life remembering together each chapter and verse, the moments of failure, the moments of triumph."
The disciples asked "And then...?"
The master explained: "That session with God, that reckoning of the good and bad in your life, that Last Judgment--for each of you that will be your heaven...and your hell."
For me, Yom Kippur is like a rehearsal for that judgment day, and for me it is always a mixture of heaven and hell. I will never be delivered from this body of sin, until I am finished on this earth. But I see the desires of the flesh and those of the Spirit as both God given. Your vision of a new lordship of Christ which makes the law irrelevant assumes a dualism I do not share.
But some scholars argue that this thesis, like the first, fails to really understand the "heart" of your gospel. They suggest that the end of the law, either because of its impossibility or irrelevance is not the central teaching of your life. Rather they argue that your great concern is not about law at all, but about the problem of Jews and Gentiles together in one community. We'll see about that in the next letter.
1 Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Philadelphia: 1977, p. 552
2 ibid. p.60
Letter Four
Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one.
Romans 4:29 30
Dear Paul,
You said some very critical things about law and works and for many centuries people understood your statements as brilliant, holy answers to a question with which they were struggling: How can I find a gracious God? "Not by works!" heard Augustine, Luther, Bultmann. Then, a wonderful New Testament scholar (himself a Lutheran) named Krister Stendahl came along and said: It's no use quoting holy answers if you're matching them to the wrong question. He argued that for centuries Christians had assumed that their question--How can I be saved?--the question of the introspective conscience of the West--was being addressed by you in your statements about law. Stendahl examined the context in which your critique of the law was actually carried out and concluded that such a question had never occurred to you; you were in fact addressing a different question altogether, that is: How can gentiles be included in the Jewish people?
Many scholars have followed Stendahl in arguing that the question of gentiles is at the heart of your gospel, that your concern is primarily to assure that these converts are full heirs to the promise of Israel. In its most radical form, this thesis argues that you never had a bad word to say about law for Jews and would have gladly endorsed Jews observing the law.1 A more moderate position is that we don't know what you would have said about Jewish legal observance--what we have is what you thought of Gentiles trying to become Jews in order to be in the young church.
As a Jew, I can only respond to all this scholarship with a giant "Whew! Now we're off the hook! You never said Judaism was wrong for Jews; you just want to make it possible for Gentiles to not have to become naturalized to the Jewish people in order to be Christians." This makes an enormous amount of sense, since in many ways --thanks in part to your teaching--Christianity is just that, a denationalized, universally accessible version of Judaism. The difficulty is that I am not convinced. I am convinced that your concern was Jews and Gentiles. But it seems to me your insight was deeper than simply not requiring law observance of gentiles. You had come to the realization that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek" and I suspect, reluctantly, that this meant for you that in Christ's community, the ethnically based Jewish legal practices could have no place for anyone. It is still worth recalling the virtue of this thesis. It reminds us that the law was not abandoned because it wasn't holy but because it was too saturated with Jewish peoplehood to find a place in a transnational community.
And here we come to a great irony. For you, law was revealed by God and problematic only in its keeping Jews and Gentiles separate. For many Jews today, the divine origins of law are questionable and one of the main reasons for continuing distinctive Jewish practices is precisely the separating of Jew and Gentile.
I must confess that there are some parts of Jewish law that I uphold just for that reason, such as my intent to circumcise my children on the eighth day had they been male (which they were not! )But that is not the whole story. I do not believe, as you did believe, that the law is from God. But I do find it can be to God.
A lot of the details of Jewish law drive me crazy and some of it I find unappealing, stifling, spiritually deadening. Some of it I simply can't get a handle on and, in fact, do not practice, for example, keeping two sets of dishes. But as I get older I increasingly find Jewish law that enriches and deepens my life. For example, every Friday night of my life at sundown I light candles, because I feel myself commanded to do so. With great joy I thank God for the privilege of not only telling a powerful myth of creation but getting to live it. Sometimes I wonder if you missed the way the law connects you to nature, the times and the seasons when you transcended its particularities in favor of your universal mission. One thing is for sure. The old Lutheran reading of you which Stendahl attacked has pretty much been put to rest along with the assumption that Judaism is about "works righteousness." Classical rabbinic Judaism never believed that people had to earn their salvation by observing the law. Rather, law was a response to the gracious gift of Torah which is given out of pure love. We don't observe the sabbath to win a blessing, the blessing is prior to the sabbath observance; we praise God for it at the very start of the sabbath. We observe sabbath as a sign that we know we are graced with the covenant.
Your plan to turn Judaism, a people based religion with universal aspirations, into a creedal community established on a nonethnic basis was not a bad one. It was the church's claim to have replaced the original Israel that got it into trouble morally and my people into trouble physically. That all happened after your death, as you'll hear in the next letter.
1 See, for example, the work of Lloyd Gaston.
Letter Five
For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race. They are Israelites...
Romans 9:3 4
Dear Paul,
In this letter, I will share with you something that will surprise you. I know you are not surprised that the Jewish people survived, even as a tiny persecuted minority or that the Christian Church flourished and became large and powerful. What you will find hard to believe is that it became part of Christian teaching to denigrate and even despise the Jewish religion in which you were raised and the Jewish people of which you considered yourself a life long member. Your own flesh and blood saw a lot of blood spilled and flesh crucified by the followers of your Lord.
How did that happen? you ask, devastated. I will tell you.
The first part of the story was already becoming clear in your lifetime. Despite reasonable expectations to the contrary, the Jewish messiah was largely--although not entirely--rejected by Jews. That was a surprise. And, he was very widely accepted by gentiles--also a surprise. But this upset the way things were meant to be and you, in Romans 9-11 are trying to explain how this strange turn of events may actually be part of God's economy of salvation. If Jesus had returned only decades after his death, he would have been amazed by the ethnic makeup of his followers. If Jews had joined the Church they would have been the Brahmins of Christianity.
The problem then was how the new community of faith which was a sect of Judaism without many Jews would view the other Jews. Like any sect it saw itself as having the true version of what the other folks saw only dimly or wrongly. But in this case the new folks and the old folks are increasingly two different peoples, both claiming to be heirs to the covenant, true interpreters of the Bible, correct readers of the history of Israel. By the second century, the Christian group began to call itself the "new Israel" thereby claiming to replace the Jewish people--a phrase that would have been anathema to you.
After you died, stories of the life of Jesus were written called Gospels--and even though that word means "good news" in Greek, those books were hardly good news for Jews. They told the story of the teaching and death of Jesus in a way that allowed them to be used to fan hatred of Jews. Jesus's debates with his own fellow Jews read by non Jews became attacks on Jews. In the Middle Ages the deicide charge elaborated in art and folklore became the focus of Jew hatred and persecution.
Your own writings, though they never denigrate Jews per se (I believe, as many scholars do that the one place you degrade the Jewish people--1 Thes 2:14 16--is a later interpolation) began to be used after the Reformation to give ammunition to those whose target was Judaism. Your own heartfelt struggles with your faith were used as proof texts to show that Judaism was a wrongheaded path to God. From this it wasn't hard to make the step to Jews as wrongheaded people.
Do you feel awful? I expect you do, since I believe you tried to prevent just such a misuse when you urged the Romans to understand that they were grafted onto the tree and the Jewish people were the original trunk.(Romans 9-11) You already saw the possibility that the gentiles might grow complacent and even feel superior to Jews. You tried to prevent the worst abuses. You did not succeed.
And you haven't heard the worst of it. I don't know how to break this to you this gently so I'll just say it crudely. Fifty years ago, a third of the Jewish people alive in the world at that time were brutally, systematically murdered in the heart of Western Christendom by people who had been baptized into the church you helped found. Do you understand what I am saying? In this century, in towns across Europe, year after year, people with crosses around their necks and Bibles with your letters in them on their mantles lead your people to trains taking them to gas chambers. Sometimes they merely knew and said nothing. Other times they assisted the Nazi invaders by organizing local killings on the spot. Let me hasten to assure you that there were Christians at the time who spoke up and said, this is not what God intends. But when two of them, Catholic bishops, went to Adolph Hitler, the chief murderer, and not, I would add, anyone's idea of a good Christian, and protested what was happening, Hitler expressed surprise and said, "But I am finishing off what the Church began."l And none of the scholars today who study this history would argue that there was no truth in Hitler's remark.
After Hitler was defeated, one of his chief henchmen was found and brought to the Jewish State to stand trial where he was ultimately convicted of mass murder and executed. But before Eichmann was prosecuted by Israeli lawyers, a Jewish thinker wrote provocatively that Israel should actually provide Eichmann with a defense lawyer. He should construct a case for the defendant saying he alone was not guilty--the Christian Church, for spreading contempt for centuries, should own this tragedy.
Let me hasten to assure you that in the last forty years many Christians have owned it, tried to repent of their history of teaching of hatred. They have even used your texts, such as Romans 9-11 to argue for a positive, indeed privileged place for Jews in the Christian story. That your text was an effort to minimize the damage done to Jews by the Christian community seems clear. Even the Jews themselves knew this and used your text in their own defense in a critical work prepared in the late 13th-early 14th century, The Nizzahon Vetus. It may have been too little too late. My teacher, Paul van Buren, has devoted the last decades of his life to rewriting Christian theology in light of the Jewish-Christian reality.
My own experience as a Jew has been one of philo-semitism from Christians rather than anti-semitism. Indeed, I am reading these letters to you aloud to a group of mostly Christian people at a University whose minister invited me to share what I, a Jew, had to say on these issues. This is a fairly remarkable reversal of almost 2000 years in which Christians told Jews what they thought and not vice versa. So there has been radical renewal and even forgiveness, but the events I have just described will color relations between Jews and Christians for many years. I have often thought that if I am granted long life I may stay on this earth long enough to be here when the last survivor--Jew or Nazi--of that era has died. Yet I am certain we will still be telling the story without them.
On some deep level, your universalism was prescient. The astronauts who photographed the globe from outer space--gave us a new vision with which to see the world and your were right. None of these divisions ultimately matter.
But now let me tell you something about your message and the history I have just shared with you. If I had lived in your day, I might have followed you. Your universal community would have been enormously appealing to me. But living as I do today, with all that has happened, I could not leave the Jewish people--not for Christianity nor for Ethical Culture nor for good old fashioned pagan Americanism. I believe that something precious was preserved by my people, despite the odds, carrying on these 2,000 years and I would not be ready to abandon that family of mine for any idea, ideal, or whatever.
You tell a moving parable in Galatians, one to whose message I dissent with every fiber of my being. You tell about the tragic story of Hagar and her son who are cast out because the covenant is with Isaac. You interpret this biblical story in a way that surprises me--somehow finding that my people are Ishmael and yours are Isaac. But my quibble with you is not over which of our faith communities are the children of God who indeed have the blessing. My argument with you is your accepting the terms of this story--Abraham has only enough love for one son, there is only enough blessing for Isaac, not Ishmael .
It seems to me that way of thinking works very poorly in a family, it has worked terribly in world politics and it is utterly out of place in religion where we believe that God has infinite power, presumably included in which is the power to love more than one son, bless more than one faith, even heal the wounds between siblings. I am writing this letter just weeks after watching the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael sign a peace treaty. I am still filled with the euphoria of that moment of promise. It may be a long road, but on the basis of that beginning I have been renewed in my faith that there may be enough land for two peoples, that one need not be "cast out" as the text says. We can be different communities, both Jew and Greek and still believe that there is enough blessing to go around for both of us. And while there may be enough land and I believe there is enough blessing I am absolutely certain that God has enough love to go around.
I am left still interested in the question which haunted you: What does God have in mind for the gentiles and how are Jews to be a blessing to the nations? Perhaps through the church your communities helped begin, perhaps through our own carrying on as a model, perhaps through working for peace and justice, but surely not by disappearing as a people. I think if you were alive now you would agree with that.
1 Hitler's Table Talk quoted in Rosmary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, New York: 1979, p.223 24
Letter Six
Lo! I tell you a mystery...we shall all be changed, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable.
I Corinthians 15:51-52
Dear Paul,
You may have been surprised by much of what I have said, particularly in the last letter, but I suspect nothing has amazed you as much as getting these letters from the future altogether. You and your generation of followers of Jesus believed that the end was imminent, that you yourselves would hear that last trumpet blast. I have sobering news for you. None of it has happened. Over nineteen hundred years later, we human beings are still at the business of living in much the same way you were: babies are born from mothers, nurse at their breasts, grow up and fall in love, have children, die and are not heard from again. We still have wars and dream of peace, and none of us have seen a living being that is imperishable. As we approach the year 2000 there are those in both my religion and yours who are talking about an imminent end to the drama of history. What will happen in that year I cannot say. All I can tell you is, 1900 years later than you would have thought, we are still here.
Your vision of the future redemption is problematic for me, not only because it hasn't happened yet. The very notion of what you anticipate occurring in that twinkling of an eye is foreign to me, although there are elements that I can easily recognize from various versions of Judaism. To begin with, the Hebrew Bible, while anticipating a redemption, a glorious denouement of human history does not posit a "new creation" in the radical terms you do. As I understand the Hebrew Bible, the world will be morally transformed in the future but it will still be the same world. There will be a Kingdom of God--peace and justice--on earth. When Jesus spoke of the immanent approach of that Kingdom with its reversal of the social order (the Jewish nation would triumph over its powerful enemies, the poor would triumph over the rich) he was describing a dream held by many Jews, ever more intensely as their actual situation grew worse.
It was precisely because this redemption was to be earthly and physical that the Pharisees insisted on the doctrine of bodily resurrection at the end of time. People would need their bodies back to enjoy the Kingdom for it would be a this worldly event that only bodies could partake of. So, even though the Hebrew Bible has virtually no trace of an afterlife of any kind, the rabbis came to believe quite emphatically in the possibility of each person being reunited with their body in the time of the Messiah.
Although there were Jewish apocalyptic groups before you who elaborated upon the original vision of a transformed world, your approach is a radical departure. You appear to say that the coming kingdom will be "in the air" (1 Thes 4:16), "in the heavens" (Phil 3:20). You have utterly depoliticized the vision (it no longer has Israel as the lynch pin) and totally spiritualized it. Moreover, it no longer involves resurrection of the body. In your view, the new creation will be enjoyed by body-less souls, non-perishable beings. In hundreds of places you talk about death as an evil intruder into a good creation and in your vision of the return of Christ you have death finally and utterly defeated, for people won't be in bodies anymore.
This may sound like a strange question, but I've wanted to ask you it for a long time. What is so terrible about death? Why do you experience it as a punishment for sin rather than the richly deserved rest at the end of a life of work? Why do you cry out, "Who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?" (Romans 7:24) Why does the Messiah have to conquer death?
In the Hebrew Bible death is the assumed end of life "for dust we are and to dust we return." That part is a given; Adam and Eve's punishment is the struggle involved in living. Premature death, painful death, these are affronts. But to sleep with your fathers at the end of a good and long life seems to be taken for granted, and while Moses may question the timing of his death, no one questions the fact that he, like all life, must die. I know you lived in a time of syncretism, with an unbearable number of options, the flooding of possibilities. Dying in Diaspora, away from the soil of the homeland may have made it harder. Seeing yourself as more of an individual and less as a cell of the Jewish people may have made death more of an affront. For whatever reason, it is important to you to conquer death fully, to be redeemed without a body so you never will have to die.
I have always loved the parable of R. Levi who tells of two vessels sailing the Mediterranean Sea, one entering the harbor and one leaving it. "When a vessel leaves the harbor, all should not rejoice, because they do not know what its lot will be--what seas it will encounter, what storm it will face. But when a vessel enters the harbor all should rejoice over it, for they then know that it has come back safely from the sea and has safely entered the harbor." (Exodus Rabbah 48:1)
Abraham Joshua Heschel has written, "dust returns to dust, while the image, the divine stake in man, is restored to the bundle of life... Our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to return... When life is the answer, death is a homecoming...this act of giving away is reciprocity on a man's part for God's gift of life. For the pious man it is a privilege to die."1
So, you may ask, how do you understand the Messiah? I see the Messiah through the lens of Jewish tradition which has been hopeful, but cautious, often caught up in secular messianism such as socialism and just as often wary of premature messianism. I like the story in the Talmud tells of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi meeting Elijah the Prophet. He asked him: When will the Messiah come?
Go ask him yourself, said Elijah.
What? He is here on earth? Where is he?
He is sitting at the gates of the city with the other homeless beggars.
But there are so many poor who sit at those gates. How will I know which one is the Messiah?
He is sitting with those who are afflicted with illness. They all spend the day binding and unbinding the bandages on their sores. You will know which is the Messiah. The others unbind all their bandages and then bind them up again. The Messiah unbinds one bandage at a time. When it is bound again he unbinds the next. This way, if the moment should come for him to reveal himself, he will be ready.
The Messiah already alive on earth, suffering from the first century equivalent of AIDS, and indistinguishable in appearance from the other street people! I like the modern midrash that urges us to imagine that each person we meet is the Messiah looking for some human kindness. Whether or not the Messiah comes, in our lifetime, does not matter.
1 "Reflection on Death," Conservative Judaism, Fall, 1973, pgs. 6, 9
Letter Seven
Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?... For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
I Corinthians 1:20, 22-25
Dear Paul,
This is my closing letter to you. I want to thank you for what you've taught me. For all that I have taken issue with you and argued with your thoughts, I still value the challenge, further, some of your teaching I simply accept as a gift of your spirit.
Take the passage I quoted above. Although it seems to stereotype Jews, I still love it because I hear in it a much needed put down of myself. I am the Jew and the Greek. always wanting things to go my way, the signs to be as I expect them. But as I get older I keep learning more and more how little I am really wise, especially when I think I am. The image of an unlikely Messiah who the Jews reject because it isn't how the messiah was meant to be and the Greeks reject because it is irrational is very compelling to me. This paradoxical thinking, seems crazy and yet true to my experience. In my own life, moments of power and powerlessness seem reversed, and I have never been in quite as much trouble as when I thought I had it all figured out.
Perhaps that is really what your criticism of law was all about, a criticism of all earthly projects and presumptions. The greatest Christians through the centuries have read your critique of Judaism as a prototype for launching a scathing critique of Christianity itself. Karl Barth read Romans as a warning against religion in general, and his wariness seems warranted. One of my favorite phrases anywhere is your reminder, "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show us that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us." (2 Cor 4:7)
A meditation on the limits of wisdom seems an auspicious place to end my letters to you, since despite your having written and my having loved this passage both you and I have spilled a lot of ink--or printer cartridges--trying to convince others that we are wise. So perhaps we can end, or at least take a hiatus, from our debate and rest in the wisdom that all these quarrels will be sorted out some day. You, in your wisdom never finally made clear how God was going to save everyone at the end of time. Would the Jews have to convert to Christianity first? You don't exactly say. Would the sinners be saved along with the righteous? You don't exactly say. You simply assert, in Romans 11:32 that God will have mercy upon all and then, as if to indicate that you are leaving the rest of these mysteries in His hands you quote Isaiah "For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?" Certainly not you, Rabbi Paul or I, Rabbi Nancy. So we can agree that our disputes are, as Jewish tradition would says L'shaym Shamayim--for the sake of heaven and leave the unanswered questions--of which there are many--to be resolved when the Messiah comes--or returns. And, as you taught, only God knows when and how that will happen "for from God and through God and to God are all things." (Romans 12:36) Amen. |
