Antisemitism

On this day in 1945 U.S. soldiers liberated the Dachau death camp.

Maybe the Episcopal Church should be careful about resolutions that in effect undermine the lives of the people of, and the existence of, the nation of Israel.  

In today’s New York Times, Michelle Goldberg reports, “The Anti-Defamation League this week released a report showing that, in 2021, there were more antisemitic incidents in America than in any year since the group started keeping track over 40 years ago. “We’ve never seen data like this before, ever,” Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the A.D.L., told me. The rapid growth of Jew hatred isn’t limited to the United States. According to a new report from the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, antisemitic incidents were up last year in countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Comparisons to 2020 might be misleading, because pandemic lockdowns likely reduced the numbers of antisemitic assaults and in-person harassment. But in several countries, including the United States, there were more antisemitic incidents in 2021 than in the prepandemic year 2019.”

And from Nellie Bowles writing about the ADL report in today’s edition of Common Sense. “Antisemitism in America continues to get worse: Last year, saw a 167% increase in antisemitic assaults in America from the year before. More than 2,700 incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault of Jews were reported.  A slice of news from this week alone: In New York state, a popular bill to make sure students are learning about the Holocaust has been mysteriously disappeared from the agenda. At Rutgers University, after a rally held by Students for Justice in Palestine, a group decided to protest the school’s Jewish fraternity, honking and waving Palestinian flags outside, as if the frat was an Israeli embassy. In Berlin this week, anti-Israel protestors crowded the street; some yelled ‘dirty Jews.’ Georgetown Law hosted the activist Mohammed El-Kurd, whose writing features “unvarnished, vicious antisemitism” like his belief that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred” Palestinians and eat them. One brave law student, Rachel Jessica Wolff, called attention to what was going on but otherwise it was all celebration for the speaker. 

When defenders of these events in elite media and academia say, “oh these guys outside your Jewish frat are just protesting Zionist policies,” or “that man is only symbolically talking about the blood libel,” those defenders are lying. It’s about hating Jews. They know that.”

The report notes that a good bit of the increase is due to the activities of far-left and far-right political groups. In that regard it’s important to note that some of the resolutions being advanced mirror the approach of the left wing groups. That in itself shouldn’t cause us to reject the proposals. But it may be prudent to pause and reflect a bit. What are the real life impacts of such resolutions? Are we being careless and lazy in how we are approaching this?

Goldberg points out, “Much of the threat to Jews in America seems to come less from a distinct, particular ideology than from the broader cultural breakdown that’s leading to an increase in all manner of antisocial behavior, including shootings, airplane altercations, reckless driving and fights in school.”

The church’s primary contribution to that part of the problem is the worship of God. Here’s a segment from the draft of An Energy Not Its Own by Michelle Heyne, OA and me (to be published later this year). I’ll leave it to your wisdom and imagination to make the connections to the particular issue of antisemitism. 

“The glory of God is a living human being; and the life of the human is the vison of God. Irenaeus 

Kenneth Kirk’s[i] translation in the early 20^th century was, “The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man is the vision of God.” John Behr’s[ii] translation is “For the glory of God is a living human being; and the life of the human consists in beholding God.”

We offer the whole quote in several forms as an affirmation of the radical orthodox position being asserted by Irenaeus. He is saying two things that can be lost in our times. First, the often used translation of “a human fully alive” is easily misunderstood as having to do with vigor and the pursuit of life’s enjoyments. So, the blind and lame are excluded along with those whose life is filled with struggle and limitation. Irenaeus includes all human beings. Second, the source of that life is God. The work of the Holy Spirit, an energy not of our making, is the renewal of human life from sin and death to authentic life. A new life because we are taken into the vision of God.

Two areas of parish development that can be helped by making use of Irenaeus’ quote and Kirk’s work are apostolic practice and social ethics.

The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum is the title of a 1931 book by Kirk. We’ll summarize it with two quotes from the preface.

Worship is the Christian’s first and paramount duty

The highest prerogative of the Christian, in this life as well as hereafter, is the activity of worship; and that nowhere except in this activity will he find the key to his ethical problems.

D. Stephen Long picked up on Kirk’s approach when he wrote Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. In the middle of the book, he offers a few paragraphs on the various ethical stances found in the church—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, and so on. In “Anglican Ethics” he draws on Kenneth Kirk’s work.

Kirk “suggested that Christian ethics best proceeds by avoiding both formalism and rigorism. Formalism seeks to bring all of life under kind of a codification, the setting out of codes and laws that proscribe what is not to be done in advance, but actually demands very little; for all it asks is that we avoid violating some formal code. … Rigorism reacts against this formalism and demands a higher standard.” Kirk  sees both as lacking because they miss that the true purpose of life is the vision of God.  Kirk uses the whole of Irenaeus’ quote,

The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man is the vision of God 

Long goes on to explain Kirk’s notion that worship is the key to humanity’s ethical problems. The way of worship is the alternative to a moralism “that becomes so preoccupied with one’s own virtue or morality that it turns into a self-preoccupation; a ‘vision of self’ supplants the ‘vision of God’. Worship re-directs us from self to God.” A useful orientation in an age of virtue signaling and performance everything

We’ll highlight one additional point Kirk makes. In a section on “Worship and service.” He writes, “The end of all our praying and worship is contemplation or the prayer of union. He’s not writing about a set of contemplative practices as we think of today but a state of being. He seems to be saying much what Martin Thornton means by habitual recollection. In Thornton’s words it’s a state of “constant recollection of Christ’s presence” or “a continuous, even subconscious, awareness of the divine presence everywhere.”

For Kirk, worship is not about our enjoyment or what pleasure we may gain. It isn’t selfish.  “To look towards God, and from that ‘look’ to acquire insight both into the follies of one’s own heart and the needs of one’s neighbors, with power to correct the one no less then to serve the other—this is something very remote from any quest for ‘religious experience’ for its own sake. Yet this, and nothing else, is what the vision of God has meant in the fully developed thought of historic Christianity. … The Christian tradition of the vision of God seems, even so, to have a message for the restless energizers of the modern world, with their problem,  programs and calls to discipleship. The concept of service embraces two very different ideas. Only one of these is Christian – indeed, only one of them realizes the ideal of service at all; for service of the other kind is self-destructive and nugatory. For the purposes of the present discussion, they may be called the service of humility, and the service of patronage. It should not be difficult to see that only the former of these two has real worth. Once this is recognized, it becomes not unreasonable to suggest that worship alone guarantees to service that quality of humility without which it is no service at all.”

It accords with George Herbert’s

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see,

And what I do in any thing,

To do it as for thee

Sound parish development requires grounding the community in the teaching of Irenaeus, Kirk, Thornton, and Herbert.”  

There are a number of diocesan resolutions going to General Convention. They may include a sentence or two noting how we are against antisemitism and we are for the right of Israel to exist. They are our attempts to wash our hands while enabling hate and murder. There is a need to look at the likely and actual consequences of what we say as a church.

In the meantime. Two things to do. First, continue our efforts to assist the apostolic members of the parish to deepen their life of worship. Second, I’m going to read the complete ADL report today. I hope you’ll do the same

rag+

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[i] The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum is the title of a 1931 book by K.E. Kirk.

[ii] Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity, John Behr; Dean and Professor of Patristics, St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, New York. Behr makes the case that the ‘heretics’ were intolerant, they would abandon a church community to be part of a different church community that agreed with them. "The early Church was ‘catholic’ not because it was monolithically uniform, but because it embraced a variety of voices all willing to work together within shared parameters — a New Testament, rule of truth, apostolic tradition, and succession — that became clearer through debate. The theological vision elaborated by Irenaeus is important both as a historical phenomenon and also for our own contemporary situation: it answers questions we have today about Scripture, interpretation of Scripture, Adam and Christ, and what it means to be human in a tremendously positive fashion. Never again does someone say, with such clarity and force, that ‘the glory of God is a living human being’; yet that he is speaking of a martyr simultaneously challenges us in a unique manner today."