[Oe List ...] 3/17/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Irene Monroe: Confusion about the Holocaust confuses understanding antisemitism; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Mar 17 06:51:44 PDT 2022
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Confusion about the Holocaust confuses understanding antisemitism
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| Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe
March 17, 2022Conversations about race in America are our third rail. It trips us all up. Whoopi Goldberg proved that last month on the television talk show "The View" during a conversation about a Tennessee school district banning "Maus," a graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its curriculum. In her rebuke, Goldberg empathically stated the Holocaust was "not about race." She described the Holocaust as a form of sectarian violence when she said, "These are two white groups of people." Later that evening, in what was supposed to be Goldberg's public mea culpa moment, she further tripped herself up in the controversy by doubling down on her premise." As a Black person, I think of race as being something that I can see. So, I see you, and I know what race you are," Goldberg said during an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
Goldberg's faux pas - which itself occurred during a discussion about education - should have evolved into a prime teaching moment for America to have a robust conversation about the relationships between antisemitism, racism and whiteness.
Race is a social construct and not a biological fact. However, the deleterious effects of America's dominant black/white racial paradigm excludes other racial groups whose skin color and phenotype complicate the racist model. On "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," Goldberg further expounded that Jews are white and the Holocaust was "white on white" genocide. She illustrated a hypothetical situation in which white supremacists would be able to spot her visibly, but not a Jewish friend.
"If the Klan is coming down the street… I'm gonna run. But if my friend decides not to run, they'll get passed by most times, because you can't tell who's Jewish," Goldberg said. "It's not something that people say, 'Oh that person is Jewish.'"
While it is true that most Jews in America are Ashkenazi and predominantly white-skinned, how we view race today in America is very different than how it was viewed in Europe during the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, America's racial caste system informed Nazi Germany. Both white America and Nazi Germany wanted to maintain racial purity. America's system of Jim Crow laws on anti-miscegenation criminalizing sex and marriage between blacks and whites laid the legal groundwork for banning Jewish and Aryan marriages, which the Nazis called rassenschande, which translates to "race defilement." The Nuremberg Laws - the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor - were racist, antisemitic and separated Jews from society.
While it is also true that many European Jews have white skin like their oppressors, 92% of American Jews describe themselves as white, according to a recent May 2021 Pew Research Center Poll. From an American perspective on race, white as a racial category erases racial differences and the struggles of European immigrants like Hungarians, Italians, Irish, Greeks, etc. Noel Ignatiev's book How the Irish Became White illustrates how an oppressed group became part of a white racial class.
White privilege that America confers to white-skinned people obscures and complicates how some whites are harmed by an economic system that disempowers them and their support of public policies against the best interests of most people, including most whites. Also, white privilege complicated our understanding of antisemitism.
For International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27th, I joined the Congregation Beth Israel of Merrimack Valley to discuss the book People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn and explore the pervasiveness of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League's latest report on antisemitism in the United States reports more than 2,000 assaults, harassment and acts of vandalism in 2020, the third highest year on the organization's record. What is happening in America right now is not just a crisis for Jews. It is a crisis for this nation as a whole; it is an assault on the very thing that makes us all Americans. We don't often see antisemitism until something awful happens. For example, in August 2017, at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists threw Nazi salutes, waved swastika flags and shouted, "The Jews will not replace us!" And in January, a gunman held four hostages at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. It was a targeted act of terrorism, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray stated emphatically. Antisemitism should be tied to other hate crimes - racism, homophobia and Islamophobia, to name a few - but understood as having a distinct history and motivations. Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds us of that history.
During the Holocaust, six million Jews were killed. False equivalence and revisionism of that fact are not only hurtful to remaining Holocaust survivors, their families and friends, but also dismissive of the human carnage and crime against humanity. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump's public statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day intentionally omitted any mention of Judaism, antisemitism or the Nazis' systematic program exterminating European Jewry. While the president's generic statement on suffering might have been intended to be an all-inclusive acknowledgment of other groups killed - gays, Gypsies, political dissidents and non-Aryans, to name a few - by the Nazis, it did more harm than help.
At the ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995, Elie Wiesel stated it best: "It is true that not all the victims were Jews. But all the Jews were victims." In other words, eliminating Jews was the central organizing principle for the rise of the Third Reich. The president's statement acknowledging the Holocaust and not mentioning Jews and antisemitism is similar to making a public statement acknowledging American slavery and not mentioning Blacks and racism. At worst, the statement bolsters an already existing worldwide population of Holocaust deniers and revisionist historians because it erases the unique stories of survival, bravery and resistance.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to address the American Jewish Committee convention in 1958, he noted the significant similarities between Jews and African Americans, who both experienced hatred and prejudice."My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe," he said. "Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility." On Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol Insurrection, history was made in Georgia. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, a Black man and a Jewish man respectively, won their Senate seats in the Bible Belt. In the Deep South, Jews could be lynched as Black men were; it was the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915 that made many Jews conscious of the parallels.
However, antisemitism is so pervasive as to be invisible and normalized. One reason is that too often we de-historicize Jewish people from their suffering. For example, I know of Christians who love Jesus but hate Jewish people. I tell them it's similar to some white Christians revering MLK and former President Barack Obama, but they hate Black men. I remind these same people that Jesus was crucified because he was Jewish, and Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery were killed because they were Black.
Antisemitism has also been fueled by racist Jewish tropes that won't cease until we confront them head-on. I remember when the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign stopped in New York City. He referred to Jews as "Hymies" and the Big Apple as "Hymietown." During Trump's presidential campaign, he was condemned by Jewish leaders for what appeared on his anti-Hillary Clinton poster the Star of David layered over $100 bills. Trump barked back, telling his critics the star was a sheriff's badge.
In People Love Dead Jews, the premise is that there's too little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. To stop antisemitism in society, we must stop it in ourselves. However, we must understand Jewish people as a race with a long and ongoing history of discrimination.
~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Read online here
About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By David
When Jesus died on the cross, did God die?
A: By Rev. Fran Pratt
Dear David,I wish that I could hear more context from you on this question! I’m curious what prompts you to ask it? what are your thoughts on the nature of death in general? and so on. But, based on your words here, I’ll say: I don’t have an answer for you; but I do have a response. It’s somewhat paradoxical - a few truths coexisting here that might on the surface seem contradictory, but hang with me for a bit ok?
I don’t think God dies, but at the same time I think God is death just as God is life. I think God is found in all life, all matter, all energy; and since the nature of life is to be finite or cyclical, God is there is the cyclical nature of death and rebirth as well. Remember the Law of Conservation of Mass that states “Matter is neither created nor destroyed,” but it can get re-arranged in different configurations? I think God is like that.
And at the same time I think God is like the alchemy the ancients sought to harness. Remember how they wanted to transmute base metals into highly valuable ones, and find an elixir for immortality? I think God is like that too. God can show us the true value of what’s in our hands, and reveal to us the timelessness of our souls.
So much of the Christian story is a blend of these two stories: one - a story of birth, life, death, re-birth; a main theme of the whole story being that death is not an end but merely a transition to another form. Another - a story of the nature of things we thought were “base” - such as the body or the earth - being revealed as “gold” or spirit.
I love how quantum physics gives us some language for spiritual matters, like in wave-particle duality; a thing is a particle but it’s also a wave! It’s both at once, or either, depending on who’s observing it.
So my roundabout response to your question is: Yes! And No! Yes, in my view Jesus was an embodiment of God (as are you and I) and when his body died God experienced death. AND! Of course God can’t die because God is constantly rearranging Themself in patterns and configurations, particles and waves, “from glory to glory,” as the scriptures say. And it’s that ever-changing changelessness that makes God God.
Death and change are only failures from a very limited human ego perspective. A wider lens shows us the beauty of death as a transition to a new form, an alchemical progression on a journey. So, if God dies, no biggie! What’s next?
~ Rev. Fran Pratt
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Fran Pratt is a pastor, writer, musician, and mystic. Making meaningful and beautiful liturgy to be spoken, practiced, and sung, is at the heart of her creative drive. Fran authored a book of congregational litanies, and regularly creates and shares modern liturgy on her website and Patreon. Her prayers are prayed in churches of various sizes and traditions across the globe. She writes, speaks, and consults on melding ancient and new liturgical streams in faith and worship. Fran is Pastor of Worship and Liturgy at Peace of Christ Church in Round Rock, Texas. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part V:
The Traditional Religious Definition of Human Life
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
March 1, 2012In this series we have looked at the changing understanding of God throughout human history. We have tried to separate the God experience of transcendence, wonder and awe from the God explanation that has ranged from animism to fertility cults and mother worship to a God understood after the analogy of a tribal chief and currently to a kind of monotheistic oneness that has become all but universal, yet is still conceived in widely different ways across the great religious systems of the world. Despite all the claims made by religious people that they possess certainty in their formulation of who God is, the fact remains that no human mind and no human religion can finally capture in words or creeds the fullness of the mystery of God, primarily because all concepts of God are the products of the finite human mind. This means that the regular religious attempts to do so or to claim that this has actually been accomplished are little more than expressions of human idolatry. In spite of the regular refrain of ecclesiastical propaganda, there is and cannot be any such thing as “one true religion” or “one true church.” So, how can we think “different” about religion and how can we accept “uncertainty” in religion if we do not face this truth? The fact is we cannot. Imperialistic religion is always employed in the quest for power and it will always seek to impose itself upon the world. Why? Because it is the nature of human beings to build a mighty fortress behind which they can hide their rampant insecurity. If anyone is allowed to question official truth then its power to provide security disappears. That is why “religious talk” so often devolves into irrationality.
When God is defined as a supernatural power, who is both ready and willing to come to our aid, then without realizing it we have also defined human life in a negative way. To be human is now to be inadequate. We are creatures who must seek the favor of a theistic God. To illustrate this reality look at the image of God and the resulting definition of human life that dominates especially Western religious systems. In the language of our religious systems we portray ourselves either as children relating to a heavenly father or as convicted felons standing before a “hanging judge.” We are supplicants eager to please the authoritarian deity. That is why so often in our liturgical language we find ourselves saying: “Have mercy, have mercy!” Can anyone not understand how distorting that stance can be to our humanity? Is it possible for us to escape this self-definition without abandoning the traditional and popular concept of the external, supernatural God who is our parent and our judge? I do not think so.
That is why a religious reformation is required for the survival of Christianity that will enable us to “think different” and to “accept uncertainty.” If we are to find a way to escape the negativity that traditional religion pours upon the dignity of human life, we will inevitably have to move away from the idea of God as a supernatural, external being. The deeper question is: “Can we move away from the theistic definition of God without moving away from God? I believe we can, but traditional religious leaders will not make that distinction and because they will not they will almost inevitably distort totally what I am trying to say. Allow me to try to unravel this torrent of theological words.
Traditionally, those of us who are the recipients of and practitioners in the Judeo-Christian faith system that marks the Western World have in our definition of God attributed to God all of the things of which we human beings are lacking. God is infinite, we are finite. God is immortal, we are mortal. God is perfect, we are imperfect. God is all powerful, omnipotent, we are limited in power. God is everywhere, omnipresent; we are bound to one place at a time. God is all knowing, omniscient, we are limited in knowledge. God is timeless, we are bound by time. These ideas seem so obvious, but the sum of these definitions of God produces a picture of human life that is lacking in both talent and in ultimate worth. God is the heavenly extension of all of the things about which we feel inadequate. So, against this common definition of God, we human beings have been taught to judge ourselves to be inadequate creatures. This insufficiency of human life forms one of the major motifs of Christian worship. In our liturgies we human beings judge ourselves constantly as those lacking in worth. We sing of God’s “amazing grace,” but we soon learn that what makes God’s grace so amazing is that it saves “a wretch like me.” We sing to God the flattering words “How great thou art,” only to learn that God’s greatness lies in the divine ability to stoop to save a sinner like me. We refer to God in our hymns as the potter and to ourselves as the passive clay begging God to “mold me and make me.” We tell God in worship that “there is no health in us,” that “we can do nothing good” without divine help, that we are not even worthy to “gather up the crumbs” from the divine table. We portray this external deity as an inescapable judge from whose all-seeing gaze we can never hide. The plea for mercy that emanates from the lips of worshipers might be appropriate for a child standing before an abusive parent or for a convicted criminal standing before a sentencing judges, but is it ever appropriate for a human being standing before a God whose name is Love?
This definition of human life is also the primary background theme in the way we Christians traditionally tell the Christ story. Jesus comes, we say, as the savior of the sinner, the redeemer of the fallen and the rescuer of the lost. We are portrayed as helpless victims begging for the intervening God to come to our aid. We are pictured as standing in the lostness of our own weakness and guilt, waiting for the punishment we deserve. When raised to our awareness it is a strange portrait of human life, but it is so pervasive that we have been dulled to its debilitating presence and are thus surprised when it is lifted into our conscious minds.
How does this God then come to our aid? We say God sent Jesus to save us from our sins. How did Jesus affect this salvation? “He died for our sins,” we reply. That is, the unforgiving Father had to punish someone and since we were not able to bear the divine wrath, God punished Jesus in our place. Is that a healthy way to view God, Jesus or ourselves? One can, however, hardly go to a Christian church without hearing this aspect of the salvation story being proclaimed. Protestants have made a mantra out of the phrase, “He died for my sins,” repeating it unquestioningly week after week. Roman Catholics refer to their primary act of worship as the reenactment of the crucifixion. They call it “the sacrifice of the Mass,” because it makes timeless the moment when Jesus suffered and died for my sins. All Christians have made a fetish out of the cleansing blood of Jesus. Protestants want to bathe in it so that their “sins might be washed away.” Evangelical hymn books are filled with such titles as: “Washed in the Blood,” “Saved by the Blood” and “There’s a Fountain filled with Blood!” One Lenten hymn in my Episcopal hymnal exhorts God to “bleed on me.” Catholics on the other hand speak of being cleansed inwardly by “drinking the blood of Jesus” in the Eucharist.
When these aspects of this “blood ritual” are raised to our consciousness, we experience a sense of repulsion. Yet we Christians wallow in this mentality Sunday after Sunday, year after year. Lots of people appear to drop out of the church because they find worship vaguely uncomfortable. Perhaps one of the reasons is that this theology of human depravity and degradation unconsciously pushes us down into the depression of feeling worthless.
When we analyze this theological understanding we find that it misrepresents God, distorts Jesus and destroys our human dignity. It is wrong in every detail! First, it turns God into an unforgiving monster who must have a victim for the wrath of the offended deity. This is a concept of God apart from love, forgiveness and compassion. Unable to extract the payment due from us sinners, God kills the son to accomplish divine justice. This makes god the ultimate child abuser. What a dreadful deity this is.
Second, this theology turns Jesus into a chronic victim. His love is seen as a willingness to accept divine abuse on our behalf. Perhaps that is why we have kept him hanging on his cross in the symbol of the crucifix. This allows us to crucify him daily through our ongoing sinfulness.
Third, this theology dumps enormous amounts of guilt, unbearable guilt, onto us when we are worshipers. That is why we are taught to beat our breasts and to plead for mercy. We are, this theology proclaims, responsible for the death of Jesus. Our sins resulted in his crucifixion. We are all “Christ killers.” Guilt has become the coin of the realm in church life. It is “the gift that keeps on giving!” Has the imposition of guilt ever produced life and wholeness in anyone? Is guilt not rather one of the most distorting emotions with which human beings have to deal? Have you ever known anyone to be made whole by being told what a wretched and miserable sinner he or she is? How does this square with the promise attributed to Jesus by the Fourth Gospel that his purpose was to bring abundant life to all?
The final thing that is wrong with this theology is that it is simply not true. It is based on bad anthropology and a bad understanding of what it means to be human. One cannot build good theology on bad anthropology. When this series continues, I will begin the process of dismantling this debilitating theology by looking at our human origins through a different lens. We are not “fallen” creatures who were born in sin. “Original sin” is a concept that has to go. With it goes the portrait of Jesus as the rescuer of the fallen and the image of God as the external and displeased deity. It will be good riddance! To go here, however, will require that we “think different” and “accept uncertainty.” Not to go there is to face the death of the Christian faith. So stay tuned.~ John Shelby Spong |
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Announcements
Race, Class, Gender and the Story of
Christianity’s Forgotten First Creed
Session #1, Friday April 22nd 7:00 – 9:00 pm
The First Creed: Discovering a Hidden Faith in Humanity
Session #2, Saturday April 23rd 9:00 – 11:30 am
Dismantling the Ancient Caste System: The Creed Then
Session #3, Saturday April 23rd 1:00 – 2:30 pm
Faith and the American Caste System: The Creed Now
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