Jesus, Jews and Mel Gibson

In the month of February, 2004, a hullabaloo of sorts started over Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ.” Many worried that the film, based on the Gospels of Mark, John Matthew and Luke, would or could incite anti-Semitism.

Critics have said that Gibson’s interpretation went beyond the text of the Gospels, at times putting his own spin on the Passion story with undue violence and shock value in the torture of Jesus during his last twelve hours and upon the Cross.

Defenders of the film said that the depiction is accurate and the display of intense violence is necessary to show how Jesus took on the task of suffering for the sins of man - this benefactor should be taken to mean men and women, one would suppose. Some people are still stuck in the older fashion way of ascribing the proper noun of the species to the male gender. The word “humankind” I imagine would garner greater respect.

Critics have also pointed out, also accurately, that writers of the Gospels, with the exception of John (and he wrote his version twenty years after Jesus’s death) were not witnesses to the events of the time in question since they did their writing years and years after Jesus’s death, and therefore their reportage nay have been based on word of mouth and their own subjectivity and, my guess, biases. It has to be noted that the span of time between these writings was something like fifty years, in all some seventy years after Jesus’s death, and that the facts and tone of the texts are quite disparate.

Indeed, the tone of the writing, with respect to the Jews, progressed, or shall I say devolved, from one Gospel to the next. Whereas John and Mark referred to the Jews as “we,” Matthew’s and Luke’s renditions referred to the Jews as “them” and leaned increasingly heavy on the blame factor.

Historically it has been established that the early attitude towards the Jews on the part of the growing Christian community had steadily become more hostile. Why and how did this happen?

After the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, some years after Jesus’s death the Jews were sent into exile (the Diaspora) to places and cities throughout the empire, around the Mediterranean. There the character of religious observance and ritual, no longer centered in the one Temple, in Jerusalem, became diverse, organized around the individual schuls (schools) and synagogues built in the different places.

This development happened, of course, before a Christian movement had gained much steam. Paul did the earliest proselytizing (his letter to the Thessalonians is a grand example of this) in Turkey and Greece, not to establish a different religion but rather to spread the teachings of Jesus The Christ and bring the Pagan peoples into converting and believing in Christ. This meant, of course, into converting and believing in Judaism, specifically in the Jesus as Messiah (Savior) sect of Judaism. Remember that John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, Peter and all the disciples were Jews. Jesus’s own preaching was based on the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible.

If one wanted to take time to read those scriptures as well as the texts of the Jewish Sages in the Talmudic age he or she would find the loftiest moral admonitions and codes extant, “Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, do onto others as you would have them do onto to you, bring the stranger into your home as a brother,”and not to forget the Ten Commandments, the sort of stuff that would, indeed, create a heaven on earth for humankind. The Sages like Hillel, Maimonides, Eleazar Ben Judah, Rabbi Akiba and a slate of others, extolled and expanded further on the wisdom of morality: “If thy enemy falls raise him up, feed and care for him; (to paraphrase) let not your heart rejoice at the weeping of your enemy’s widow, but take her and her children into your heart,” are examples of their philosophies.

The synagogues of the Diaspora were fascinating to the Pagan neighbors. Morality was taught. Monotheism (worship of one Almighty God) was taught. What a relief it must have been to individuals to not have to keep all those Pagan gods straight - who was who, who did what, who do I pray to this time for this or that? - but one all seeing, all loving Spirit. Most irresistible to the Pagans were the dietary and hygienic laws of the Hebrews. This made great sense for a longer, healthier life.

Pagans sought more and more to become part of this religion, to embrace Jesus and His Hebrew beliefs and customs. In the first many years of this development, in order to become a Christian, that is, to be enfolded into the flock, one had to convert to Judaism first and then be baptized into the Christian sect. Paul and Peter, the rabbis (teachers) of the synagogues and the other proselytizers all subscribed to this requirement. Each convert thus had also to undergo circumcision

Circumcision, the cutting away of the fleshy sheath in which the penis is encased (an early ritual and custom proscribed by hygienic considerations) hurt. A lot. We still do this in the world to newborns, but conditioned as we are to not consider the pain infants experience, or to believe that infants are not really conscious of the pain and that, at any rate, the pain lasts but a short moment (not true, the psychological aspects of early pain are registered in one’s psyche for life or until one undergoes significant therapy, of one sort or another, to undo the residual psycho/emotional effects of early trauma) we cheerfully proceed with the ritual, laughing, hand clapping, dancing and celebrating the entrance of a new member into the fold.

Come to think of it as I write this, the loud celebration probably arose as a way of drowning out the wrenching cries of the infant - the adult’s way of repressing their own sense-memories of pain, which unavoidably would be triggered by the infant’s screaming were they to let in the full impact of the pain.

Which, of course, brings us to how the Pagans as adults felt when they underwent circumcision. in order to become Jewish, in order to be enfolded in the Jewish Jesus sect, in order to achieve salvation. It hurt. A lot. Complaints started to flow like a river into the inner circles of policy making headed by Paul and Peter.

Power and politics go hand in hand with any human organized effort including religion. Persuaded by the growing social outcry against the pain of circumcision by the potential and new converts, and tempted to hang on to the power that the increasing population of followers conferred to the movement, the policy makers decided to eliminate the requirement of circumcision. It was enough to pass the test of adopting to Jewish laws, custom and belief to qualify as a Jew within the Christian. sect of Judaism.

It’s not easy for a lot of adults to learn new things in depth and to change their ways of behaving, so for the same reasons described immediately above, in time, the qualification for converting to Judaism in order to become a Christian was dropped.

This was the final break in the link between the new Christian movement and the Jews. As this process of separation was forging ahead Matthew and Luke found in it license to stigmatize Jews as a whole. To further push them away, to estrange the Jews as “them.” Perhaps it was unresolved issues and personal pain in these men that were displaced upon the Jews. Perhaps it was a political act, conscious or unconscious, in order to obtain popularity and support from the masses.

Such acts of displacement and politicking are known as scapegoating. The mechanism of scapegoating is the blaming of others perceived as safe targets as an attempt to purge oneself of one’s own emotional pain, or as a way of galvanizing political support for one’s own cause. This is a common oppressive mechanism employed when one feels powerless to confront the real source of the problem, or politically to fan and coalesce latent emotional hostility in others to garner support for one’s agenda and goals.

Scapegoating exists at every level of human society: in families, groups, organizations and most definitely in religion and politics. In short the message always is “he or she or they, as the case may be, are bad. It’s all their fault.”

Something like scapegoating on a mass scale was the next phase in the growing and hostile separation between Christians and Jews.

Most of the Mediterranean areas at the time was ruled by Rome. It was in Rome that a significant Christian movement was taking place. The Romans knew the Jews and their philosophy of benign religiosity. The Jews were no threat to the Romans - their rebellion in Jerusalem had been quelled, their center of strength, the Temple, had been destroyed and the Jews were scattered in small pockets throughout the empire. Jewish strategy of survival to assimilate into the culture of their host territories was also favorable to the Romans.

The Romans therefore tolerated the Jews and, of course, as happened throughout history, availed themselves of the talents of commerce, science, philosophy, administration and art that the more privileged Jews had the opportunity to display.

It was quite a different case with the budding movement of Christianity within the Roman world. These Christians seemed to be zealots and branded as rabble rousers. They devoted their loyalty to a different King. As the movement grew the Romans perceived the Christians as a threat, a danger to the order of things and a hostile challenge to the authority of the Caesar, whichever one happened to be in power at the time - they seemed to come and go, with not a little help from the inside, with regularity. Some in power longer, others not so long.

So here was the situation: Jews on one hand were treated civilly, and on the other hand Christians were treated like criminals and persecuted. The dynamics of social relations that work in families are the same that work in wide society. There’s some one at the head, there are his or her followers, there are those who are favored on a sliding scale and there are those who are scapegoated.

Reminds you of a bit of “sibling rivalry,” does it? That’s exactly what it was, on a grand scale. You remember the definition of scapegaoting, the displacement of hostility, anger, blame, the whole gamut of resentment, on the one (or group) who seems least to be able to defend themselves against the attack. I cannot tell you how many families I have counseled and treated where the sibling rivalry was intense. Classically it followed the dame dynamic. One or more children were favored, another one or more were disfavored., sometimes the mother would be targeted, but seldom the father.

Do the disfavored children blame and attack the parents who, by their treatment of the children set up this hostile competition (sometimes the attack becomes murderous). No, of course not, while the disfavored child may show an attitude of resentment (equally often this child will show greater ingratiation towards the parents in order to win them over), his or her real ammunition is directed toward the favored child, because it is too risky and dangerous to aim the rage towards the big and powerful authorities, the parents.

Thus the resentment and hostility of the new (and persecuted) community of Christians, fanned by the exploitive propaganda promulgated by religious leaders and writers, increasingly targeted the Jews with blame, stigma, slander and as the decades progressed, with physical violence.

During the period of the Dark Ages, a time of great ignorance, superstition and terror of the power and evil intent of Satan, implanted in the public psyche by the leaders in and out of the church, the stigma and violence against the Jews grew in grotesque and brutal degree.. Accusations ranged from “Christ killers” to “sucking the blood of children,” physical assault ranged from pogroms (villages and communities attacked, sacked and peopled killed), to exile and Inquisition (exiles, burning and hangings).

Finally the violence and hatred, conditionally installed in the minds of each new generation for hundreds of years (by now a patterned, automatic habit in society) culminated in the Nazi insanity called “the final solution,” the wholesale extermination of six million Jews (plus another six million innocents, progressives, intellectuals, unionists, socialists, physically challenged, among other groups, seldom mentioned) called the Holocaust.

I read the record of the Holocaust. What struck me as one of the most salient realities in the life of the extermination, human experimentation and slave labor camps was that a great many of the Capos, the guards and torturers who carried out the day to day torment.(at the threat of being punished themselves), had to stay drunk most of time in order to repress their own conscience and horror.

I admit that I cried often over this as I read through the narrative. This reality says to me that human beings are inherently good and that it takes terrible circumstances, threat to their survival or the senselessness of habitual hate conditioning to turn people into agents of oppression, brutality and murder.

Blessedly, in this past century the Vatican Council ordained the innocence of the Jews as a people of the torment and death of Jesus Christ. It is my hope that this proclamation of truth trickles down into the consciousness of succeeding generations. Thus to heal this strain of mental/spiritual disease from the human condition, as we struggle to do so with the other strains of oppression that sets humans against humans, in the forms of racial, sexual, class, age and other conflicts and prejudice.

Actually Jews have a great opportunity to help heal the rift between themselves and non-Jews. By taking strength from the Talmudic Sages Jews can rise up (as many do) out of the role of victim, and in their moral and human power, understand that the disease of anti-Semitism (and any other anti human group) is as damaging to the soul, the quality of life and mental health, of the purveyor as it is to Jews (and the rest of society).

Jews can be the agents of healing by taking the, admittedly, long yet steady road towards peaceful enlightenment by reminding the afflicted, in all ways, that they are inherently too good, too smart, too human to continue to harbor their conditioned hate. To remind them that no newborn human, especially them, comes into the world with hate in his or her heart, that the cancer of hate is learned very early; that each one, underneath the pile of hate and fear, is possessed of the inherent gifts of worth, of loveableness, of intelligence (with few exceptions due to damage every human has at least a 100 billion smart neurons in their brain waiting to be freed from the restrictions of distress to do its best work), of compassion and joy, and valuable uniqueness - these are just for starters as to what inherent human elegance is all about. Remind yourself, go study very young children (who are safe and well fed) to see what amazing delights they are).

Jews as individuals can respond neighbor to neighbor, as a group to other groups, as a nation to other nations, by asking what can we do to help make your life better, It this not a better alternative than to perpetuate rage , violence and conflict? The great Sage Hillel in the second century said “If I am not for myself, who will be, If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”

“When thy enemy falls, lift him up, feed and care for him; let not your heart rejoice when the widow of thy enemy weeps, but take her and her children into your heart.”

I did not mean to ignore Mr. Gibson so thoroughly in this article, but it seems I did. Really, this is not about him or his film, it is about that particular aberration of human behavior, anti-Semitism (and actually anti any human group), and how it festered within our human family.

As for Mr. Gibson’s film inflaming more anti-Semitism, I don’t think that is a serious issue. Many non Jews inside and outside the church have criticized the film on different levels. The point is that for those who suffer that mental affliction of blind blame and hatred, this film will not add to the weight of their distress (it may spur some to flare out their patterned hate in spiteful action for a week or two - bad enough, of course). For those whose minds and perspectives are more or less clear of such painful ideation, they will respond to the film in other, more rational ways.

Mr. Gibson is a talented artist, and he himself has issues, as do we all. He also has the disadvantage of a parental figure whose psycho/social/emotional perspective, according to implications of Mel’s own and other public discussions, leaves one with little doubt about the probable influence of bias that father had over son. I am here for Mssrs. Gibson too.

Readers of this article will react in different ways, agreement, disagreement, disdain perhaps even anger (you have my support to curse and cuss me out, beat up a pillow and whatever other way that does no harm, to vent those feelings in order to get to clearer thinking). I do hope that you will think about this matter critically and look into your own deepest core of human value. It is my belief and confidence that what you may find is a greater love for your life, for those close to you and for the preciousness of life of all humanity.

I wish you the fulfillment of your uniqueness and all your dreams.

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