Thread by @Delafina777

I also think the tendency to demonize Jews this way stems from dissonance within Christian thought about how to view Jesus’s teachings. They’re trying to have it both ways:

-Jesus’s teachings are simple and self-evidently true

-Jesus’s teachings are radical and hard to follow

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1483916346505109506

So on one hand, if Jesus’s teachings are simple teachings about compassion and they’re self-evident if you think about them and they all just boil down to the Golden Rule, you’d have to be either incredibly stupid or incredibly evil not to agree with them.

The problem with that, of course, is basic compassion and the golden rule are hardly unique to Jesus. So if you reduce it that much, he has nothing substantive to say.

So Christians also insist that what Jesus had to say was groundbreaking and radical and that it’s hard to accept and even harder to live by.

The problem with THAT is that if you accept that, you also have to accept that intelligent people acting in good faith might have disagreements with it, and there might be *substance* to those disagreements. They might be hard to refute. Those people might not be stupid or evil.

And of course this is related to but not quite the same as the theological problem the continued existence of Jews presents to Christianity.

So Jews become emblematic of those who disagree with Jesus. And we must be treated as either stupid, evil, or both for that disagreement.

The simplest and most straightforward solution to Christian antisemitism is probably the Nostra Aetate approach: Jews have their own covenant, which remains unbroken, so they don’t need to convert to Christianity.

That still, of course, creates an interpretive crux as far as the antisemitic passages in the NT, and it doesn’t resolve the easy/hard dissonance of how to understand Jesus’s teachings, but I’d still take it.

But I think there’s also an interpretive approach that doesn’t present those cruxes, and that’s to lean into Jesus’s teachings as authentically radical, and the *implementation* of them that he presented as specific to a time of crisis.

Like, Jesus was a Jew, and it is a very normal thing for Jews to say, ok, the principles in Torah are timeless—what do they look like put into *practice* here and now?

That’s our shtick. As the joke goes, Moshe comes down the mountain and says, “Ok, we’re not supposed to work on Saturdays,” and one Jew looks at another and says, “What counts as ‘work’?” and before you know it you’ve got two separate shuls.

But, joking aside, our tradition focuses on practice over belief, so any time someone proclaims a lofty moral principle, we’re not going to nod along—we’re going to ask what it looks like in practice.

Because as nice as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” sounds in the abstract, as soon as you try to put it into practice, you start running into the problem of substituting your own judgment for others’, projecting your own needs and desires onto them, etc.

So talking about how it’s put into practice is really crucial.

And most importantly, what that practice looks like may not be the same in 27 CE as it is in 2022 CE.

Which is why the rhetoric of “It’s simple, just do unto others,” has always been, at best, naive.

So here’s the thing. I think Jesus, if he existed as portrayed (which for me is a BIG if, given that the gospel writers both postdated him by a lot and were pretty agenda-driven), was preaching mostly straight Torah, in principle, with highly specific implementation.

He was operating in the context of a Jewish community suffering under a brutal occupation, and I think a lot of his teaching was focused on the community surviving those circumstances.

I also think he was anticipating imminent world-shattering change, and his teachings also reflect that.

Where I think he got it wrong was that he seemed to be anticipating a messianic age, and that's not what we got.

So his teachings, to me, seem to be about radical communal responsibility. We get through this only *together*, and you've gotta give up things for each other.

And there's sort of the implication that it won't matter because it's temporary. We just have to survive this occupation long enough for the messianic age, and then things will be okay.

So looking at the story of the man with the withered hand, I think he IS actually saying that people should be working on Shabbat, at least in terms of healing.

And yeah, that's bad news for people whose job it is to heal--that they should be willing to work weekends--

but I think the idea is *we just need to get through this for a presumably short period of time, and then we'll get to the kingdom of God on earth and it'll be okay.*

That's a boundary violation, yes--or rather, it's asking people to give up boundaries--

but I think the assumption is that it's going to be temporary.

And I think that's an attitude, in this pandemic, we're familiar with. He's asking for radical prosocial helping behavior. Do whatever it takes to get people through the crisis.

And let's be clear:

Radical dissolution of personal boundaries, radical collectivism, radical individual sacrifice--that IS radical.

That's hard to accept, hard to hear, hard to live by.

And people of goodwill and intelligence might very well disagree. They might point out that it's not fair. They might believe that it's not healthy.

They might not believe the promised relief is coming soon enough for it to be sustainable.

They might believe that there are other strategies that are better.

And none of that makes them stupid or evil.

Intelligent, caring people disagree ALL THE TIME about how to handle crisis situations.

And the thing is, everyone kind of ended up being wrong about what was going to happen next.. What Jews got eventually wasn't exactly *relief* from the Roman occupation, even though they did get world-altering change.

The Pharisees did eventually back a rebellion, and it was a disastrous one.

The world didn't end, the kingdom of God wasn't instituted on earth, Judah didn't through off the Roman yoke, God didn't rescue the people.

The actual world-shattering events were much drearier.

So I think if you're a modern-day Christian, what's really there to grapple with is the understanding is that some of what Jesus was saying was geared toward trying to get a suffering community to take radical action to *get each other through it.*

And that what he's suggesting people need to do *is* radical, and is HARD.

And some of the actual implementation of it might have been specific to that time and place.

You can draw some parallels between first-century Judah and the modern-day US, certainly, but they're not the same political situation at all. We're not being occupied. Christians aren't a tiny, oppressed people.

At the same time, I do think you can lean into those parallels.

The economic hardship is familiar. The sense of "how much longer is this going to go on?" is DEEPLY familiar.

And the question of "how responsible are we for getting each other through this? what is the responsibility of the individual to the community right now?" and even "who is my community right now?" is extremely timely.

As I read it, Jesus's answers to those questions were animated by a radical selflessness.

I don't agree with all of his answers, but then, I'm not a Christian.

But I think the real interpretive crux for Christians isn't "why didn't Jews accept Jesus's teachings?"

I think that's actually pretty self-evident, and it has nothing to do with being stupid, evil, or selfish.

I think the real interpretive crux, if you take the gospels seriously, is "what here is a timeless principle, and what is a time-specific implementation, and what does implementing the principles look like here and now?"

I think the answers suggested by the text *are* hard.

And again, this is me, a Jew who believes Jesus was a completely human first-century Pharisee with no more or less connection to the Eternal than anyone else, who cared deeply about his community and didn't want to see their suffering warp them into becoming like their oppressors

So I have the luxury of not needing the text--or Jesus--to be perfect.

But that's what I get reading the words on the page.

It would be a hard philosophy to follow, if I take it seriously. It's a *hard* implementation of familiar principles.