“OK, Noah. Here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to go get drunk. I am going to put these animals back together. And we are never going to mention this again.”

…and, some time later, God instructed Noah very carefully to never, ever take the flesh from a living animal.

(This post is brought to you by Mark’s preparation for tomorrow morning’s chapel service. There is quite certainly a longer story in this, but that’s for another time.)

In fact, it has been over six months since I last posted anything. I might try to explain the absence a little more–though mention of moving and more has already been made–but that would require an entire post in itself, and is not the point here.

Instead, I want to wish everyone happy holidays. Today is the last day of Chanukah and the fourth day of Christmas.

(Here is one of our chanukiot after the latest sundown.)

I must say, I love the winter holiday season. I love Advent and Christmas, and always have, back as far as I can remember. As a child I spent Decembers reading about Christmas traditions around the world. (I think I felt a little sad about the fact that Canada hardly ever featured in any of these accounts; because Canadians did not seem to have any unique Christmas traditions, I constantly tried to invent some. They never stuck.) I also gravitated toward the religious stories of the Christian holiday. As much as I liked Santa Claus, I preferred a pop-up book of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the one of ‘The Night Before Christmas’. I used to try to get up early on Christmas morning before the stars had gone out, hoping to see THE star, the one that heralded Jesus’ birth. Whether sighting the star would mean a Christmas miracle–a momentary glimpse of the glories of heaven shining to give hope on a dark wintry night–or a sign of the second coming of Christ, I don’t think I was ever sure.

As I grew older, and when I learned some theology, I did not stop liking the Advent to Epiphany seasons. I never became one of those cultured Christian despisers of the holidays, thinking that they had become so commercialised that they need to be abandoned for some true Christian message, but I did wish that the spiritual side of Christmas would be more emphasised. To that end, I attended much more closely to Advent and its themes of waiting and preparation; the four Sundays before Christmas became a time of reflecting on Christ’s coming in the past, the present and the future. I became an enthusiast of keeping to the church calendar, even when it seemed counter-intuitive according to all that went on around me. When I was ordained, I carried this enthusiasm with me, trying as hard as I could to make worship services meaningful from Advent 1 to the Sunday after the sixth of January. It became my practice to hold an open house at the manse on Epiphany as a way of proclaiming that the story of the birth of Jesus did not end on the 25th of December (and of having good company).

Now, however, I am a bit more conflicted about Advent and Christmas (and probably Epiphany, too, but I have not stopped to think about that yet). I know. Last year he was in a funk, you’re thinking, and this year he’s ‘conflicted’! Is this going to be one of those holiday traditions?

Well, here is what is happening.

1. I really do find that this time of year lends to a heavy inclination towards traditions, with theological and liturgical traditions being no exceptions. For instance, growing up in The Presbyterian Church in Canada has meant that my experience of Advent is indelibly linked to the liturgies produced annually by Presbyterian World Service & Development for use with the lighting of the Advent candles. In an example of ecumenical liturgical convergence, these liturgies have always been tied to the same weekly themes each year: candles of hope, peace, joy, and love for the successive Sundays of Advent, followed by a Christ candle for Christmas Eve.

But we are back in Scotland, and all my experience here has taught me that the Church of Scotland observes Advent as a much more ad hoc affair. Candles are not tied to any particular meaning; special liturgies come from each individual congregation. The first congregation I attended in Scotland (admittedly one I was finding theologically incongruent from early on) impelled me to make the first Sunday of Advent my last appearance at worship there when they did not light Advent candles at all. It appears that I do have a theological line in the sand, after all.

This is not to say that the C of S has nothing going for it at Christmas time. I enjoy many of the ways of celebrating the holidays that are new to me. I find the custom of having Watchnight services on Christmas Eve which end after midnight, thus bringing in the festival with worship, and of having Christmas morning services particularly theologically thoughtful. (Few Canadian Presbyterian congregations have Christmas Day services unless the 25th falls on a Sunday.) It is just that the differences make me more wistful and nostalgic at this time of year than at other times. Apart from Advent candles, this feeling of being away from home is heightened by the increased number of Advent and Christmas hymns whose title is familiar from my church life in Canada, but which wrong-foot me when I open mouth to sing because they are sung to a different tune over here. All these things add up to make me much more sympathetic than ever before with those people who complain when aspects of worship services change: it can really feel wrenching. As an aside, I hope I remember that the next time I am in the position to do something differently than ‘the way it has always been done’–not that I should not change anything, but that I should be ever so sensitive to the consequences.

2. Increasingly, this time of year makes me homesick.

3. Perhaps the deeper thing is that I have had to re-evaluate my theological understanding of Advent and Christmas in the light of what I have learned from being part of an interfaith family. Yes, Alana and I celebrate together as much as we can. Yes, neither hinders the other from observing the religious traditions of our holy days. I do fear sometimes that decorating for Christmas might overwhelm Chanukah, but we are working on that. However, it would not be much of a partnership if we did not attend to one another’s stories, and attending to Alana’s story has taught me that my celebration of the season is not as innocent as I once thought. Christian interpretation of Hebrew scriptures–an important part of the season of Advent for interpreting the meaning of the coming of Christ–can smack of rather unfriendly appropriation. I learned this most keenly when the two of us were in Durham on a holiday that happened to fall on the first Sunday of Advent, and I convinced Alana to join me at the cathedral for the traditional service of lessons and carols, thinking that she would enjoy the music. There followed hours upon hours of theological conversation as she told me how it felt to have the interpretation of her tradition dictated to her in a way that never stopped to even think that there might be another way of looking at things. (See Alana’s latest post for more of her views on this subject.)

Such events have made me realise that my rather easy assumptions about the meaning of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany–though I may think them rather sophisticated by some Christian theological standards–do not sit easily with everything that I profess these days. In short, some of the things I thought I had figured out require more work. Even celebrating the season with a high inflection of social justice, as I had been wont to do, does not really answer the question of how to fit the celebration of the incarnation of God into a desire for fruitful collaboration with folk from other faiths. I am not saying that it is all or nothing, but that ignoring incongruities will not make them go away; I am also not suggesting that Christians should do away with the centrality of Jesus for the Christian faith. I just think that maybe it is time for more systematic reflection on what Jesus of Nazareth whom I call the Christ means for my interaction with the world.

And this makes me bow with weariness. It will not be easy work. It means asking more questions; it means not being able to rely on past understandings. Above all, it means that I cannot go through the Christmas holidays with an immovable theological anchor holding me in place when buffeted by the stresses of the season. But I used to say to people that Christian theology was all about asking questions, and probing God’s mysteries even when you were not sure where the exploration might lead you. Even when you were afraid and the light you held seemed dim. So perhaps all of this is God’s way of telling me to act on what I say and keep going with the hard work.

Besides, theological reflection has its own joys, joys and hopes which can be carried into celebration. A few timely interventions have reminded me of this, and I would like to share them here. First, there was Velveteen Rabbi’s ‘call for kindness during the month of Kislev‘, which reminded me that it was okay to enjoy holiday celebrations. Then there was Onehandclapping, wondering why Christians preach the Advent of liberation but do not always extend the work of liberation to allowing others the freedom to be different; this reminded me that hope calls for people to continue trying to inspire transformation for the better. Finally, Reb Jeff’s discussion of different understandings of Chanukah reminded me that traditions, if they are living, are constantly being reinterpreted, and our roles as theologians are to look to the possibilities for building upon what is joyously beautiful within the tradition. In all, some different faith traditions, but all holding up lights in the winter darkness, suggesting that a return to thinking through fundamental questions does not have to be unhappy.

So, from here to wherever you are, happy holidays, merry Christmas, chag sameach, and blessings for 2012.

One of the great pleasures of my job is the immediacy of conversation between theoretical and practical outputs–something which tends to surprise people not familiar with the field. But it’s there, and Scotland has both strong historic links between religion and public life and a healthy awareness of its own religious and ethnic pluralism, which makes it an ideal place for someone like me–a religious minority, with a strong research interest in how religious minorities fit into their wider society–to work. So in addition to the normal teaching and research outputs, there’s a certain amount of my time and energy that is spent being present–showing my face, lending my voice, and listening to what other people have to say, when there’s a conversation happening that requires input from multiple faith perspectives. I did two pieces of writing with that particular hat on this past term. One, of course, was my response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on Same-Sex Marriage (I’m all for it, and rather baffled by the arguments put forward by the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church that changing the law to permit religious bodies to draw their own conclusions on the issue and then act in accordance with those conclusions represents a restriction of religious liberty); the other was a reflection for our University’s Lessons & Carols service. The former needs a bit of cleaning up before it’s ready to post, since I ended up typing my responses directly into the web form. The latter, however, is reproduced here:

What on earth is a Jew supposed to say about Christmas?

These are hard conversations to have, still likely to end in tears and pain—though I dearly hope we have got past the bloodshed. But they are deeply necessary conversations: here, in the chapel of the University whose motto is Via, Veritas, Vita, where as a community we commit to seeking out truth for the betterment of all the world, we can only begin by telling the truth—telling each of our truths to one another, and hearing each other’s truths in turn. And so we begin, with this reading from the Book of Genesis, long before covenants or prophecy, with the deepest, most profound truth of all: in the beginning, God created all of humanity in God’s own image, and it was good. What happened afterwards is—and always was—ours to discover.

I’m not really feeling settled into a habit, though–I’m struggling with timing. I usually think to say it as I’m brushing my teeth, but that doesn’t feel exactly appropriate–I can argue both ways on the praying-in-the-bathroom issue, but certainly mumbling around a mouth full of toothpaste is not an indicator of good kavanah; I try to delay until I get to my desk, but by the time I’ve made the walk in to work, my mind has leapt ahead to work stuff, and it’s usually not till my mid-morning tea break that I actually remember that I forgot something earlier.

So. There are two things going on here: 1) I need a better fixed time/place, and a post-it note reminder. I think perhaps as I’m stepping out the door to begin my walk to work is better than waiting till I’m in the building here. 2) Obviously, I have a strong instinct to pray while brushing my teeth, which is a bit weird, but why not go with it–while I’m working on building la’asok b’divrei Torah into a firmer habit, I’ll start thinking about what assortment of morning brachot can make sense in that context.

Trust me, nobody who’s ever watched me lose my place in the siddur halfway through the Amidah would ever mistake me for anything but a solidly desk-bound academic theologian. In my corner of the world, theology is primarily an intellectual exercise. I teach my students how to analyse text within, and with attention to, the context of one or more interpretative traditions; I don’t teach them how to be religious people (or not). I teach (and write) about Judaism, not how-to-be-Jewish. At the same time, I chose the rather unusual and less-than-easy road of Jewish academic theology because I had a personal need to work with a tradition that I actually feel connected to–like most of the other non-ordained Jewish theologians I know (there are a few of us around), I spent the early years of my academic training reading and writing about the Church Fathers and the Body of Christ. It’s a language that I can still deploy with a high level of fluency, but it’s not my native language, and the more I progressed, to the point that I was being expected to produce substantial original work, the more difficult it became to write using someone else’s words, and the more important it became for me to engage with my own tradition, my own native tongue.

Of course, any of my colleagues will tell you that a tradition is more than just text; it is also the interpretative community, and engaging with tradition also means stepping away from the desk every now and then. So, as we’re settling back into a comfortingly and disturbingly familiar existence in Glasgow (where I will be on a 12-month research contract), I’m trying to do what I try to do around the same time every year, and make those changes. In the past, I’ve avoided putting anything in writing, much less in public, for fear of having to publicly admit failure; this time, I’m hoping that putting it in writing might keep me honest.

In short: my prayer life needs a bit of work. I’m not a regular synagogue attendee, and nor, in all honesty, am I likely to become one as long as I have to choose between a 45 minute daily commute to work, or else a 45 minute journey to and from shul; I usually resolve to go once a month, but then find myself just too busy and tired by the end of the week. Last year was the first time in ages I actually made it to Yom Kippur services–for once, it was in my job description to take students to them, where for the past many years I’ve had un-reschedulable meetings and/or colloquia on the day. This year, I’ve written to the not-so-local synagogue to ask for the schedule, and I’m determined to mark myself as unavailable for work during services.

I usually resolve to pray at home, and spend a day or two trying to rush through the entire shacharit service, in Hebrew, while half-asleep, and then decide it’s just not practical. Which, yeah, it’s not. That’s kind of like resolving to take up jogging and starting with the Boston Marathon. The one bracha I say consistently is netilat yadayim, and that’s because I spent a long summer in a very frum community where everyone made a huge production over handwashing multiple times a day, and the habit was set by the time I left. (I also do candles, wine, and bread when we have a formal Friday night dinner, but anyone wanna guess how often that happens?) So, this year’s resolution: start small. One bracha at a time, consistently, for a week or two, until it becomes a habit. Short forms, English forms, whatever works to make it stick (which is to say: I spend some time thinking about the form of a prayer, I pick one I think will work, and then I stick with it). Post-it notes on the mirror, on the door, on my computer screen (surely, someone’s made an iPad app that reminds you to pray, right?) And if I find I’m forgetting them, dial it back until the previous habit is reinforced.

I’ll start simple, with one that I had mostly integrated into daily practice several years ago, before I got really busy and careless: la’asok b’divrei Torah, the bracha for Torah study. Every morning.

Keep me honest, people.

Comic by Lucy Knisley; original, with commentary, here.

I’ve spent the last week and a half pitching in to try to clean out my in-laws’ basement. It’s the accumulation of over 20 years of living in one place, with children who have grown up, moved out, moved back, moved out again, moved back… well, you get the picture. Right now, it’s still housing boxes and boxes of the life Mark left behind when he moved to Scotland, still waiting for him to come back and pick up again where he left off. So we’ve been trying to sort through that, being realistic (or, perhaps, a bit bloody-minded) about what we’re attached to enough to hang on to, what we’ll really, honestly look forward to unpacking at the end of this journey of uncertainty we’re currently on.

My parents have occupied their home for almost, though not quite, as long, and I have my own boxes stored there. But my father is severely asthmatic, and housekeeping has always been focused on minimizing dust, which means minimizing the amount of stuff that accumulates in any one place, and making sure that anything that does pile up is easy to move and clean behind–including boxes. I hated that when I was a child, and rebelled against it when I moved out the first time, but it has marked me with a distinctly low tolerance for clutter.

And before they settled down in that house, my early childhood was spent moving all over the North American East Coast (and midwest), and my early adulthood has been similarly peripatetic; sure, I hoard books (and usually at least 50% of my luggage in any trip is taken up with them), and my undergraduate degree in studio art generated its own pile of difficult-to-ship material. But I haven’t had the luxury of developing an extensive file system, or sourdough starter, or keeping jars of screws and nails and paperclips, or back-issues of magazines the way you do when you live mostly in one place. I have one childhood stuffed animal that travels with me (it was a gift from my grandfather the day I was born), not a bag full of stuffed animals stashed in the basement. I have a box full of my great grandmother’s crystal coffee cups, but not a box of regular old drinking glasses; handmade pottery serving bowls, but no pots or pans or mixing bowls. I wouldn’t claim to be a light traveller, and I’m not likely to sign up for the 100-thing challenge anytime soon, but my metric for stuff is based on whether I love something enough to cart it to the other side of the globe and back; things that are useful but not sentimental, or mildly sentimental without being useful, are, in my mind, disposable.

So I’m simultaneously fascinated by and struggling against the extensive archive of my partner’s past. He has (well, had–see above comment about bloody-mindedness) almost all of his notes from high school maths, still intact in their binders. Relics from Cub Scouts. A rock collection. Boxes and boxes of back-issues of the Presbyterian Record. VHS tapes of TV shows that his mother made for him when he was first away at university. Orders of service from quite nearly every church service he’s been to or conducted since at least 1990 (as I mentioned on other social media platforms, we’re keeping most of these, at least for awhile). Sorting through all this gives me a picture of a life, of the sort of person he was long before I met him: the sort of person, it turns out, who once upon a time very long ago used the Reproaches from the Cross in a Good Friday service, and also the sort of person who conscientiously re-wrote every skit or story he used in youth ministry to ensure that it reflected the best theology he could marshal at the time. In fairness, he did also rewrite the Reproaches, in an attempt to make them more obviously about the penitence of the Church and less about castigating the Jews; it wasn’t a stunningly successful attempt, but I wouldn’t want to re-read the paper I wrote on trade unions when I was an undergraduate, either.

This insight into the family I’m now a part of, the completeness of the archive, is a tremendous gift, and I’m grateful for it. And I’m conscious–perhaps a bit sad–that it’s not a gift that I’m able to give in return. The past is a foreign country, and I have lost my guidebook.

All of this feeds into the intersection between my two big professional projects right now. On the one hand, I have some older writing under contract, and I need to get it dusted off, into proper shape, and delivered to the publisher by the end of the summer–and my ability to write is very intimately linked to my sense of space; my ability to think clearly is linked to my ability to control my space. There’s no good way to put a happy gloss on the fact that the basement cleanout has led to a physical encroachment on my professional ability to function, and that all the emotions connected to the past and the physical archive, the double-edged gift of being allowed limited access to a past that at the same time remains foreign and inaccessible to me, are being heightened by the outside pressure I’m feeling.

On the other hand, the research I’m currently developing is all about the religious resonances of objects. I’m focused mostly on the act of making (a combination of my art school background and reflections on certain inconsistencies within the Jewish tradition), but there is also a lot to be said, and a lot that’s been said and that I’ve been reading my way through, about our relations to objects as objects. (Anyone who’s interested in the larger discourse about objects and making should also go read my friend Anna’s work in a closely related area, since a lot of my project sprang from conversations we had while she was working on her article.)

In my in-laws’ basement, I’m reminded of the importance of artefacts and physical inheritance to a diasporic people–and every non-First Nations person in North America has at least a heritage of diaspora (as do a not insignificant portion of First Nations)–to our ability to maintain and reconstruct links to a past which may otherwise be lost. The piles of shoes and suitcases on display at several Holocaust museums around the world have more than a passing functional relationship to my box of crystal coffee cups; both testify to a continued connection with the long departed, lasting long past the time their names have been forgotten (this is in sharp contrast to the work I’ve done on war dead, where the names and, often, only the names remain as a trace in the world). I’m reminded that there’s a spirituality not only to making, but to keeping… and throwing away.

The past, and its physical traces, is an anchor: without it, we drift aimlessly, but if it becomes too large and heavy, it drags us down. That’s a problem that we see today in religious communities, both Jewish and Christian, which have become more concerned with maintaining identity markers because they were important once-upon-a-time than with generating a constructive current engagement with religious tradition. I think we’re all struggling, in different ways, to find the right balance between hanging on and letting go, between honoring the past and clearing out a space for ourselves.

But while I was travelling, there was a bit of a to-do in Scotland, and reading about it put me in mind of a piece I’d started writing back in December, right after the WCC meeting in Bethlehem. I shelved it because it was too much of an immediate reaction to the circumstances and discourse of that particular meeting; it felt more like a rant than a constructive contribution to dialogue, and there are entirely too many rants about Israel on the internet these days. But the current exchange of barbs between the University and College Union (UCU) and the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities has inspired me to dig it back out, refine it with specific examples, and finish it up.

Full disclosure: I have had tenuous, though cordial, professional relations with both bodies in the past, and would hope to resume the same should I return to Scotland in the future. I will state up-front that, while I share SCJC’s concern over the Union’s position on (and seeming preoccupation with) Israel issues in general and antisemitism in particular, I doubt that concern would be sufficient to prevent me paying Union dues, especially in the current climate of academic cuts.

The basic situation is this: the UCU passed the following motion at their annual meeting in May:

Congress notes with concern that the so-called ‘EUMC working definition of antisemitism’, while not adopted by the EU or the UK government and having no official status, is being used by bodies such as the NUS and local student unions in relation to activities on campus.

Congress believes that the EUMC definition confuses criticism of Israeli government policy and actions with genuine antisemitism, and is being used to silence debate about Israel and Palestine on campus.

Congress resolves:

1) that UCU will make no use of the EUMC definition (e.g. in educating members or dealing with internal complaints)
2) that UCU will dissociate itself from the EUMC definition in any public discussion on the matter in which UCU is involved
3) that UCU will campaign for open debate on campus concerning Israel’s past history and current policy, while continuing to combat all forms of racial or religious discrimination.

The “working definition” under discussion may be found as a .pdf here; the relevant portion is as follows:

Examples of the ways in which antisemitsm manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

-Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
-Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
-Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
-Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
-Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

It is not entirely clear to me precisely what in that definition UCU reasonably sees as confusing “criticism of Israeli government policy and actions with genuine antisemitism”, or having the potential to be “used to silence debate about Israel and Palestine on campus”; to the contrary, the EUMC definition specifically notes that criticism of Israeli government policy is not necessarily antisemitic.

The most charitable interpretation I can put on UCU’s position is that the majority of its voting members are operating in a post-national mindset, in which ethnically-based nationalism is always to be regarded with suspicion, as dangerously equivalent to racism, in which case the overt ethnocentrism of Israeli politics is treated with no more and no less disdain than that of the British National Party. This is a mindset with which I myself am more than passingly familiar, and considerably more than slightly sympathetic to, and it is certainly a mindset I can readily observe in many, though not all, of my UK colleagues. However, the voting members of UCU must be considered, on the whole, to have entirely too much education and experience between them to mistake their personal political views for the way the world actually works. My own discomfort with ethnocentric nationalism is heightened in regards to Israel because I am, as an ethnic Jew, implicated in the nationalist vision of a country that I am not, and have no desire to be, a citizen of. The majority of UCU’s members are not in that position, and therefore do not have similarly reasonable grounds for elevating their discomfort with Israeli nationalism above their discomfort with Serbian, Quebecois, Scottish, American, Greek, or any other nationalist politics–none of which are the subject of regular debate or condemnation in the same way that Israeli nationalism is.

Of course, one might protest (especially if one is a member of the Scottish Nationalist Party), other forms of nationalism do not create the same human rights issues that the Israeli occupation of Palestine has. This is true,¹ but it is also beside the point when the issue is antisemitism. Just as accusations of antisemitism should not be used to derail legitimate critique of human rights violations in Israel/Palestine, accusations of human rights violations in Israel/Palestine should not be used to derail legitimate critique of antisemitism–even when the targets of the alleged antisemitism are in Israel, and especially when they are not.

This is the crux of the issue: a separation must be made between critique of Israel and antisemitism. I believe the EUMC working definition provides an adequate basis for making such a separation–and I am deeply concerned about UCU’s refusal to refer to the definition in an educational context–but there are particular issues which arise in the context of interfaith dialogue or academic Theology and Religious Studies that merit a bit more attention. I offer my list here; additions and emendations are welcome.

How to Talk About Israel Without Being Antisemitic

1. Don’t make antisemitic statements. This should be simple, and the EUMC working definition of antisemitism (the full version, not just the excerpt which deals specifically with Israel, quoted above) provides a nice, handy reference; print it out and keep it in your wallet if you often find yourself in the position of wondering whether something about to come out of your mouth (or keyboard) qualifies as antisemitic or not. It gets slightly more complicated when religion enters the picture, and the invented distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism is introduced.
   I have argued previously that such a distinction does more harm, in obscuring the underlying commonalities between theological and racial discrimination, than any good that might be accomplished by attending to the differences between the two modes of discrimination. The extreme instance of this is theologies which characterize Jews as suffering from corporate guilt for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth; a less extreme instance, of which many examples can still be found in contemporary preaching and exegesis, would be theologies which characterize Jews as suffering from both corporate and individual guilt for having failed, and continuing to fail, to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the messiah. This theological trope often manifests in references to the spiritual blindness of Jews, to Judaism’s inability to provide a complete picture of God and/or salvation, or to Judaism as a religion of harsh law, untempered by the grace and love which Christ and Christianity alone can provide. Statements about Israel which treat human rights abuses as the inevitable result of Jewish religious values, or suggest that a specifically Christian intervention is necessary, are anti-Jewish, and should be avoided.
2. Be especially cautious when making scriptural references. This goes for everyone, although since I’m focusing on antisemitism here, I’m not going to detail the problems with Jewish uses of scripture in Israel issues–maybe I’ll come back to that in another post. I know it’s difficult for professional religionists, who tend to find the best and most honest response to the world in the core texts of our traditions, to try to confront difficult issues without that grounding, but the longer I listen to people attempt to talk through the Israel/Palestine conflict as a point of inter-religious dialogue, the more convinced I become that we should all put down our Bibles and step slowly away.
   Christians wishing to use a Biblical frame to discuss contemporary Israel have the unenviable choice between referring to the New Testament, the very name of which carries implications of the new covenant over-writing the old, or to the jumble of Jewish texts that have been removed from their context, re-ordered, and re-interpreted to fit the Christian metanarrative (the Old Testament). The latter is problematic in its suggestion that Christians know Jewish scripture better than Jews do, and are better equipped to interpret it; it implies an indifference to the self-definition of any Jewish dialogue partner. The former has a better chance of being perceived as a sincere expression of the speaker’s own religious viewpoint, but it also risks coming across as a tone-deaf assumption of Christian universalism (if specific claims about the authority of Jesus of Nazareth are presented as basic points upon which everyone ought to be able to agree) or Christian superiority (if Christ is positioned as the sole source of grace and mercy, to the exclusion of other faiths). When grounding discussions of justice, mercy, inclusiveness, etc., in scripture, it is best to be very clear that the scriptural reference is language particular to one faith which describes a concept that is shared (albeit with some variation and nuance) among many faiths.
3. Differentiate between Zionism–Israeli nationalism, or, in historical context, Jewish ethnic nationalism–and Christian Zionism, which is a dangerous mix of bad theology, racism, and right-wing political ideology. The latter is deeply problematic, and open to critique from many angles, but it is also not the same thing as the former. If you want to argue against uncritical support of Israel within your own church, then make that clear. If you really want to argue against Jewish Zionism, then you should probably think long and hard about your attitude towards nationalism in general.
   Likewise, attempt to differentiate between various religious attitudes towards Israel within the Jewish community (ie, don’t perpetuate the myth of Jews as a monolithic collective). Some feel an attachment to the land described in scripture, but not the government; some feel a responsibility for the wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole, and to any one place with a significant population thereof; some see the existence of a Jewish nation-state as a certain sign of God’s continued presence in the world; some consider Israel to have no religious relevance at all. Avoid blaming “the Jewish lobby” for promoting policies which can be more accurately described as favoring Israel.
4. Finally, do not make the mistake of thinking yourself somehow freed from the burden of history. If a theological gambit has been used in the past to deny religious legitimacy to Judaism, then that argument retains, at the very least, an after-echo of antisemitism. Ignorance is not an excuse–but nor is it a condemnation; everyone has a stupid, foot-in-mouth moment now and again. The appropriate response to someone pointing out problematic language is “I’m sorry, let me rephrase that.” If you start to feel like you can’t say anything without someone suggesting you rethink your language, then it might be time to reflect on your underlying assumptions. Or find someone else to talk to.

1 Although if you think that other nationalisms are not grounded in racial identity, or that the nationalism of former colonial nations such as the USA, Canada, Australia, Britain, etc., is not built on the oppression of indigenous people, then you aren’t paying very much attention.

Here’s to many more years like the last two!

Oh, the contest from last week? Both Elizabeth and BlueRoses told us about lovely blogs that we already knew about, and so, after much discussion, we decided it was only fair that both of them win the handknit shawls I’ve already made (or am in the process of making) for them.

But all those hours of listening left me with one firm conviction about Jewish-Christian relations: Judaism is, and must be seen to be, more than just Israel.

That it is not seen to be such is clear, when the former Communications Secretary of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, who both presumably and demonstrably has considerable skill and experience in crafting his words to communicate effectively, can speak in support of boycott, divestment, and sanctions to “prick the conscience” and “for the sake of” the souls of, not the citizens or residents of Israel, but of “the Jews of Israel” (emphasis added). It is clearer when nobody on the floor of the Assembly rises to query the speaker, and clearer still when a highly respected think-tank reprints the speech without comment or correction. Because everyone knows that Israelis are Jews.

Never mind the 19% of Israeli citizens who are Christians, Muslims, or Druze of Arab descent. Never mind the less easy to establish number of Israeli citizens of Jewish descent who are practising Christians (I would include in this number messianic believers, such as the members of the two congregations that the Church of Scotland in Tiberias provides worship space for; others, especially the congregations themselves, may differ on this point). Israelis are clearly Jews… especially when one is talking about barriers to the Church’s mission.

This is clear when the Kairos Palestine Document is discussed at the General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada and speaker after speaker rises to protest the document’s “lies” and “one-sidedness”, its silence on the State of Israel’s “right to exist”. It is clearer when, at that same Assembly, a Statement on that Canadian church’s Relationship with the Jewish People comes to the floor with not a single acknowledgement of the existence of any Jewish people actually living in Canada (except for a paragraph commemorating the existence of early 20th century missions such as the “Christian Synagogue” in Toronto) and nobody rises to object to this erasure, but rise instead to ensure that it is amended to make clear that the mission of conversion to those invisible Canadian Jews remains ongoing. It is even more clear when a major portion of the discussion is spent on questions about Israel: is it just for the Church to attempt any relationship with the Jewish People in light of the Israel/Palestine conflict? Precisely what language should be used to make clear The PCC’s unwavering support of the State of Israel “as a place the Jewish people can call home”? (The attempt to amend this paragraph did not succeed.) And it is blisteringly clear when a motion to refer the statement to the consideration of the Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations Committee–the committee actually charged with attending to dialogue efforts with the very Canadian Jews whose existence the statement all but erases, the committee whose work is likely to be most immediately effected by the statement–is defeated. Because what could they possibly have to add to the conversation? Everyone knows that Jews are Israelis.

Never mind that the majority of Jews don’t live in Israel. Never mind that Canada itself has the highest number of Jews per 1000 people in the world (excluding the USA and Israel). Never mind that the communities that The PCC “sought to serve in the name of our Lord through specific missions in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg” are, in spite of rather than because of those missions, still there, still Jewish. Because everyone knows that Jews belong to, belong in, Israel… and nowhere else.

In a way, we have brought this on ourselves. Jewish organisations have placed an emphasis on politics in general, and defense of Israel in particular, often seeming to neglect religious (and inter-religious) issues; the exceptions to this tend to be smaller, either Orthodox or single-issue groups (and often both), campaigning against intermarriage or standing on the streetcorner teaching young men how to wrap tefillin. In a way, this is understandable: two Jews, as the saying goes, three opinions–it’s much easier for big-tent Jewish groups to focus on what unites us, rather than what divides us. That drive towards solidarity (alongside historical circumstances, such as the contemporaneity of Jewish emancipation and the rise of secular nationalism) has led to a tendency to emphasize Jewishness as a racial/ethnic identity which, in theory, we all share (even though in reality, Jews are as diverse in this respect as we are in any other), instead of a religious identity, the details of which none of us can agree upon. So less infighting about the limits of Rabbinic authority, and more solidarity against the creeping forces of anti-Semitism. And the State of Israel is a powerful symbol of that ethnic solidarity, enhanced by its resonance with our written record of religious memory, enhanced further by the far more recent memory of what can be done to a people who are denied the right to citizenship in the land where they reside, who lack a homeland. We are, understandably, loath to turn our backs on it.

But to many of us–50% is the figure I see cited most often, though I haven’t been able to find an actual, reliable source for that number–for whom Jewish descent is not the sole, or even the dominant, component of our heritage, talking about Judaism as an ethnicity, or a national belonging, makes little to no sense. I am not Jewish because one (or both, the family record is fuzzy on this point) of my mother’s grandparents came from the Pale of Settlement, spoke Litvak, and cooked a lot of cabbage, any more than I am Catholic because one of my mother’s other grandparents came from Italy, or, for that matter, Presbyterian because one set of my father’s grandparents came from Glasgow (and also cooked a lot of cabbage). To me, and to many other Jews, especially in the Diaspora, Jewishness is, if not so much a choice, then a conviction: I am Jewish because, as the Hasidim might say, my soul is Jewish: because out of all the ways of being in the world, being in relationship to the world, and understanding what there is beyond the world that are available to me, whether by ancestral inheritance or some other means, a Jewish way is the way that resonates with me, that gives me a firm foundation on which to stand and pushes me to reach out beyond myself, to seek God’s plan and work for God’s kingdom on earth. I am Jewish–completely Jewish–because that is my religion, just as I am Canadian–completely Canadian–because that is my nationality, where I was born and grew up and had a civil union (because those are legal there, yo) and where, no matter where else in the world I wander, I always come back to in the end. And my being Jewish makes me not one bit less Canadian than any other citizen of Canada, and not one bit more Israeli than anyone else in the world who, like me, does not hold (and does not intend to hold) Israeli citizenship.

When organisations such as The Canadian Jewish Congress are perceived as prioritizing support for Israel over respect for the legitimacy of Judaism as a religion, whether that is an accurate perception or not; when Jewish voters are asked to support candidates who blatantly do not share our values or our goals for our country, but whose foreign policy is perceived as pro-Israel, whether that is an accurate perception or not; when anti-Semitism is condemned as racism but theological anti-Judaism is ignored as unimportant or, worse, inevitable–then what happens is not actually a defense of the Jewish community, but a surrender to exactly the twisted thinking that turned European Jews into permanent, untrusted, outsiders in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sojourners in foreign lands, whose loyalties must always be presumed to lie elsewhere. The cohesiveness, and value, of national identity is diminished. The value of religion (and not just Judaism) is diminished. Humanity is diminished.

Judaism is far, far more than just Israel. And it’s well past time that everyone remembered that.

Therefore, I thought it would be good to gather as many statements of Christian groups related to The PCC and of neighbouring churches as I could. If I have missed any, please let me know. The web site ‘Jewish-Christian Relations’ has archived a larger collection of statements, but I wanted to focus on Canadian churches and Presbyterian/Reformed denominations, as well as on related ecumenical groups.

For comparison’s sake, The PCC’s statement can be found in the midst of the 2011 report of the Committee on Church Doctrine, though that was amended (the text of the amendment may be found on page 5 of these minutes given during the General Assembly). Note: these two links will probably disappear when the official Acts & Proceedings are published later this year.

In 2003, a large number of Canadian church leaders from different traditions, including the Moderator of that year’s PCC General Assembly, signed a letter against anti-Semitism. While this is not specifically a statement of relationship, it does illuminate what kind of theological and historical issues need to be considered.

Also from 2003, from the United Church of Canada, Bearing Faithful Witness. (A shorter version of the statement can be found here. Interestingly, while the statements made appear far more generous towards Judaism as a faith than the recent PCC documents, the UCC document also mostly neglects modern Judaism and its diversity, choosing to concentrate on responsible Biblical exegesis.

Back in 1987, the PC (USA) adopted Toward a Theological Understanding of the Relationship Between Christians and Jews. This takes the form of seven affirmations, each receiving short theological commentary. It should be noted that the PC (USA) has had an extremely rocky relationship with Jewish organisations over the last decade based on the denomination’s stand on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the rhetoric around that position. This came to a head in 2008 when the PC (USA) released a document “Calling for Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Bias” in May and then greatly revised the document in June. The revisions received a scathing review from a coalition of Jewish groups. Neither version appears to be available any longer on the denomination’s web site, and frankly I am uncertain about the status of the document at this moment. (If anyone knows, I would love to hear.) This certainly demonstrates the complexity of the issues involved.

The World Council of Churches has a couple of statements dating from the late 80s and early 90s: one from the Consultation on the Church and the Jewish People which met in Sigtuna, Sweden, in 1988, and another adopted in 1992 specifically to be a basis for dialogue. Both include the recognition of the living tradition of Judaism; the latter specifically points to the need to grapple with the relationship between dialogue and political activism.

The PCC also belongs to the World Communion of Reformed Churches; unfortunately, there is no web version of its book on Reformed Theology and the Jewish People.

Other Canadian Churches

Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada

The Anglican Church of Canada does not have a statement specifically on Judaism, but does have guidelines for interfaith dialogue.

European Churches (like the Church of Scotland):

Community of Protestant Churches in Europe

Not specifically Jewish-Christian:

From the World Council of Churches, on dialogue generally with people of other religions.

The Canadian Council of Churches has a very interesting document summarizing the position of 23 Canadian denominations on interfaith dialogue, as discovered by interviewing representatives of the churches.