Reply #69: While I'm normally a fan of Rabbi Lerner's writings... [View All]

[regnaD kciN]

...he generally goes off-base when he writes about Christianity (not surprisingly, since it's a faith tradition he's approaching from the outside). In large part, this is no exception.

There are passages in the Gospels (not all of them, counter to what Rabbi Lerner implies) that appear at this time to be anti-Judaic. However, what both critics of the Gospels and fundies who take them literally miss is that most of the criticisms found in the Gospels were not, at the time they were written, an attempt by one organized religion (Christianity) to attack another organized religion (Judaism)...rather, they were examples of infighting between one form of Judaism (followers of Jesus) and other forms of Judaism (Pharisees, Sadducees, and so on). Some of the criticisms leveled in the Gospels are quite harsh...but no more so than what the Essenes, for example, were writing about their rival schools. It was, in short, "criticism from within." Christians make a serious mistake when they look at this criticism from the vantage point of two millenia and reduce it to a simple case of "the Christians" versus "the Jews," just as modern-day Jews make a mistake when they view said criticism as nothing other than generic "anti-Semitism."

Where I think Rabbi Lerner really misses the point, and thus weakens his argument, is when he sees Gibson's film as an "attempt to revive Christian enthusiasm around the part of the story that is focused on cruelty and pain" and relates it to the ways in which factions in his own Judaism have mistaken "the voice of pain" for "the voice of the Torah," thus giving divine sanction to, for example, the oppression of the Palestinians. Many of the texts cited by Israeli hard-liners has been the message of divinely-mandated war against non-Jewish peoples in the Holy Land, of conquest and cherem. The story of the Passion, in its ideal form, is the exact opposite of that -- it is the story of "cruelty and pain" as suffered oneself, not as being imposed on others in the name of God. And, to carry the message further, it is cruelty and pain which is overcome in the Resurrection, not by gaining vengeance on one's enemies, but on a non-violent, life-giving act of God.

So why worry about Gibson's film? Two reasons:

1) As I have mentioned before, it has been an unfortunately-common occurrence for the uncomfortable spiritual message of Passion stories, in which one is to see the role of one's own sin in driving Jesus to the Cross, to be evaded by resorting to a simplistic and quite un-Christian "us versus them" mentality, thus shifting any blame off of oneself and onto the scapegoat of "the Jews." It is not known yet whether or not The Passion allows for that mental evasion -- I could imagine a retelling of the Good Friday story that didn't. However, from what I know about Gibson, I fear that "us versus them" worldviews are a common thread both in his life (in particular, the ultra-traditionalist Catholicism he has become involved with) and work. This suspicion is not reduced by...

2) ...the whole way the film has been promoted based on the "us versus them" mentality -- possibly to the picture's benefit in terms of increased publicity and chance for financial profit. When the first news of this film came out, concerns were raised on behalf of both Jewish and official Roman Catholic organizations trying to ensure that the resulting motion picture did not fan the flames of anti-Semitism. Instead of dealing with these groups in a way that might assuage their fears, Gibson went on the offensive -- attacking both of them for "extremist" positions and painting himself as a martyr for religious truth at the hands of "liberals" and "political correctness." He then embarked on a heavy-duty marketing campaign aimed strongly at fundamentalists (the group that is least likely to be concerned about historical and scholarly examinations of the texts, in favor of "the unvarnished Gospel Truth"), practically turning a viewing of this film into a religious duty for many million devout religious traditionalists. (Indeed, there have been many accounts of "megachurches" renting out whole theaters on opening day to make sure their congregations attend.) Furthermore, this campaign was slowly (or not-so-slowly) skewed into an "us versus them" movement as well, with Mel joining with "true Christians" (and, presumably, the Vast Silent Majority of Middle America) to produce the sort of film that the Hollywood Liberal Elite, with their supposed devotion to amoral sex and violence, "doesn't want you to see." (Left unspoken here is the assumption, undoubtedly quite common in the target audience, to hear the term "Hollywood Elite" and think "Jewish.")

As I was saying, this marketing campaign might have been quite canny from a business perspective -- how else were you likely to fill the multiplexes for a foreign-language Biblical film, except by turning it into a religious obligation? Nonetheless, the tenor of this campaign, by itself, would seem to make it likely that The Passion's audience would come to the picture, and take away from it, an "us versus them" attitude, regardless of whether that message was found in the film itself. And, when you consider Gibson's own tendencies toward that combative, "good versus evil" attitude, it would be, at least for me, hard to believe that it wouldn't be found in the film itself as well. And that, as opposed to the very nature of a film based on Jesus's death, is what should have Lerner and others concerned, not the Gospels.

(For another critique of Gibson's film, this by Rev. Mark Stanger, see http://www.thewitness.org/agw/stanger021104.html.)