After that Jews and Christians cease their communal praying and move to separate locations. Gradually texts of a new kind appear among the Christians which are directed against Judaism and Jews. This is a huge area for research. Let us return to this issue when we come to the liturgy.
3. The liturgy. This is a particularly sensitive topic. There is a parallel between the Jewish Passover Seder and the Christian Mass. (A very interesting exercise is to compare the text of the Haggadah of Pesach and the Mass.) The Christian liturgy is linked very closely indeed to the Jewish Passover Seder. I am just touching here on various issues, reminding you of some basic matters, commonplaces, if you like. At the same time, however, I urge you to examine everything critically and creatively.
I urge you to test and question everything. Knowledge obtained without personal effort and concentration is dead knowledge. Only what has passed through your own consciousness will be of value to you.
And so, textological analysis of the Jewish Passover Seder and the contemporary liturgy of both the Western and Eastern Churches indicates a structural link between them, with the exploitation in both services of exactly the same prayers. Look closely at your notes on this topic. I am not going to repeat myself here.
A separate topic, which is constantly researched by both Jewish and Christian authors is the anti-Semitic character of certain Christian texts, particularly of those relating to Holy Week, that is, the days immediately preceding Easter.
The Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 repudiated most of these texts, and in particular those written by the Fathers of the Church, for example, St. John Chrysostomos.
The Eastern Churches view these excisions negatively, and in many Orthodox churches the texts are read to this day.
This is a sensitive topic which undermines several major authorities both of Christian and Jewish theology. In the works of Maimonides, known in Jewish sources as Moshe ben Maimon or Rambam, a Jewish teacher and commentator of the 12th century, we come across virulent attacks on Christians which are just as baseless as the anti-Jewish utterances of some of the Fathers of the Church. Thus was the gulf between the Jewish and Christian worlds deepened. It is immense but does not seem to me to be insuperable. Working with this material requires knowledge, honesty, openness, and boldness. As another Father of the Church, St. Gregory the Great, said, “If truth may cause a scandal, it is better to allow that scandal than to deny the truth.”
My dear students! The final thing I want to say to you today is that it is practically impossible to pass this course. In it religious history and the history of the human race are intertwined. Here is the tragedy of Jewry and the tragedy of Europe. In this place the heart of history beats. There will accordingly be no examination. There will be a discussion. With each of you we shall talk about what has seemed of most significance in my course. If you like, prepare notes for this in writing. That is particularly prudent for students who come from afar. You can carry out a comparative analysis of documents. Arad, as an Ethiopian Jew, might take the texts of the Ethiopian Christians—I have some which are very interesting—and compare them with Jewish texts of the same period. Now we shall say good-bye for a week, and then I will expect you in accordance with the timetable.
NOTE AT THE END: There is an anecdote to the effect that in one of these “discussions” Neuhaus asked a girl student how many canonical Gospels there were. She did not know and he did not ask any more questions. He let her pass. When asked why, he replied that there was only one question she couldn’t answer.
12. 1967, Haifa
L
ETTER FROM
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO
W
ŁADYSŁAW
K
LECH
Dear Brother W.,
As you see, I took a long time getting into harness, but then ran very well, and indeed so fast that I have broken my leg. It was set in plaster and I was immediately discharged from hospital, but now it seems it was wrongly set and I have had to have an operation. Accordingly, I am now in the hospital for several days and it has turned out to be the most perfect sanatorium. This frozen moment in the race is totally relaxing, and in addition, my leg hurts, so I have no guilty sense of neglecting my duties. At last I can write to you a thorough letter about my present mood. Immediately before I left Kraków for Israel, the abbot of our monastery told me Israel is an even thornier field of operations for a Catholic priest than postwar Poland, and that Christian missionary activity is impossible among the Jews in Israel. In fact, it is prohibited by law.
He was right. The Jews did not need me. Religious Jews were certain I had come here for the sole purpose of converting Jews to Christianity. The Catholics living here certainly did need me. I do not know how many Catholics there are from Poland. More than 1,000, I imagine, and there are numerous children from mixed marriages whose problems are even more intractable than those of Polish Catholic women. In fact it is not only Poles who are here. There is every living thing, two by two: Catholics from Czechoslovakia and Romania, from France, Lithuania, and Latvia. Almost half my parishioners know no Polish, but everyone who comes here studies Hebrew.
Thus it has come about that my idealistic dream has dovetailed with stern necessity, since Hebrew is the only common language among my parishioners. The paradox is that the Church which speaks the language of the Savior is a Church not of Jews but of displaced persons, outcasts, people the state judges to be of low value or significance. That is Christian linguistics for you: in earlier times a liturgy derived entirely from Judaism passed from Hebrew to Greek to Coptic, and later to Latin and the Slavonic languages. Today, Poles, Czechs, and the French come to me to pray in Hebrew.
Actually, the Jews are fewest of all in the community. In all the years I have been living here I have baptized just three. I baptized them wonderfully, in the River Jordan. They were the husbands of Catholic wives and I hoped they would stay in Israel, but they have all emigrated. They are not the only ones. I know other Jewish Christians who are leaving Israel, and several families of Arab Catholics have gone to live in France and America. I do not know how hospitably they will be received there, but I do understand why they have left.
The baptized Christians in far-off times left Israel and went out into the world, leaving behind only the unbaptized apostles. The Savior baptized nobody, and that is fairly intriguing. Indeed, the relationship between the two great figures of John the Baptist and Jesus is highly intriguing. Not counting the meeting of their pregnant mothers, when the babe leaped in the womb, the only time they met, at least the only meeting described, was at the River Jordan. All their lives they lived on the same scrap of land, a tiny country, but did not meet, and that despite the fact that they were related and without doubt there were shared family events, weddings, and funerals. Not to meet in these circumstances could only have been intentional. They did not want to meet! What secret is behind this? A remarkable person I talked to, a professor of Judaic Studies, David Neuhaus, gave me a glimpse into it. He studies Jewish religious trends of the Second Temple period. For him the two most important figures are “the historical John the Baptist” and “the historical Jesus.” Neuhaus uses sources little known to Christian researchers. I admit I am overcome with emotion when I come into contact with Jewish documents of those years. Here, sealed behind seven seals, lies the answer to what, for me, is the most important question of alclass="underline" what did our Master believe? Did he believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In the Trinity?
Neuhaus analyses the difference between the views of Jesus and John the Baptist, and that lies in their understanding of redemption. John was sure that the world would shortly end and lived in expectation of the Last Judgment, like the Qumran sages before him and St. John the Divine after him in the Book of Revelation. In Neuhaus’s opinion, this longing for speedy judgement and the desire to chastise the ungodly without delay were alien to Jesus. Jesus did not follow John the Baptist despite the high renown and authority of the latter. We may surmise that he was repelled by John the Baptist’s eschatological aspirations and passionate focus on the end of the world. The Master’s subsequent preaching is wholly devoted to life, its value and meaning. A living God for living people.