Ya Don't Have To Be Katholic To Be A Krazy

The Temple Mount also known as

The Noble Sanctuary

Kraziness of the “religious” variety is not limited to the Katholic wing-nuts as Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey recently demonstrated in his blog.  Rabbi Pruzansky, who heads the “Orthodox” Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in the northern New Jersey town that lies just across the Hudson River from New York City, wrote in his blog last week that “There is a war for the land of Israel that is being waged, and the Arabs who dwell in the land of Israel are the enemy in that war and must be vanquished. . .Arabs have no future in the land of Israel.” I put “Orthodox” in quotation marks as Pruzansky takes his opinions far beyond where most Rabbis would agree that Torah goes and indeed—and to their credit—the Orthodox Union—an association of Orthodox Congregations to which Pruzansky’s synagogue belongs—has condemned his views saying:

“We cannot countenance a response to terror that resorts to wholesale demonization, advocates for the collective punishment of Israeli Arabs, or calls for the destruction or dismantling of Muslim holy places. Such rhetoric is anathema to the Jewish religious tradition and has no place in civil society. Such rhetoric is wrong and must be repudiated, whether it is voiced by lay leaders, community leaders or rabbis.”

Rabbi Pruzansky pulled the offensive essay and issued a “clarification” in which he claimed that he never wrote that all Arabs or all Muslims fell underneath the epithet “savages” by which he castigated the terrorists who had brutally murdered four rabbis and a Druze policeman in Jerusalem the previous week.  That may be true—one can read the original sentence with several different interpretations—but exactly whom the Rabbi called “savages” isn’t the problem, only the symptom.  The problem is the blatant racism that underlies Rabbi Pruzansky’s entry.  While they may not be “savages,” Rabbi Pruzansky does not believe that Israeli Arabs or Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as are Jewish Israelis.   The Rabbi wrote

“Measures need to be implemented that encourage Arab emigration — the payment of stipends, compensation for property, etc. They must be made to feel that that they have no future in the land of Israel — no national future and no individual future.” And Rabbi Pruzansky went far beyond this suggestion that the native Palestinian Arab population who have lived in the land long before Joshua led the descendants of Jacob into “The Promised Land” be pushed to give up their family homes and their patrimonial orchards and emigrate.  He pushed the idea that any town or village from which terrorists came should be leveled and its entire population expelled.  Moreover, he advocated that severe restrictions be placed on the civil and human rights of non-Israelis who remained in Israel.  He further said that the Israeli police should use “live ammunition” against any demonstrating for Palestinian rights and that foreign reporters or cameramen have their notes and equipment confiscated so that they could not report on atrocities against the Palestinians.  What provokes the demonstrations against the Israeli authorities is the forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes—as is currently happening in East Jerusalem—so that those homes can be destroyed and new homes be built for Jewish Israelis.  Today’s Palestinian population are no johnnies-come-lately to Jerusalem and what is today the State of Israel but can be traced back to the Syro-Canaanite peoples who have inhabited the eastern end of the Mediterranean for over five thousand years.  How can the fortunate nieces and nephews of the unfortunate Polish and Russian and Czech and German Jews who were forced from their homes and lost their businesses before being herded into work camps and death camps because their existence was not convenient to a political ideology built on racial hatred advocate this sort of State-terrorism? 

Rabbi Pruzansky, like many others of a certain Jewish Orthodoxy, believe that the land of Israel belongs by Divine Right exclusively to the Jewish people and that all others, including those who have lived there for millennia, must vacate it.  The Rabbi went so far as to demand that the Muslim Holy Places on the Temple Mount be closed and that the shrines—the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque be “uplifted intact and reset in Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted.”  This opinion shows the Rabbi’s contempt for religions other than his own.  The “Noble Sanctuary” is sacred to Muslims as was the Temple to Jews and for both religions its sacred character is linked to the specific site of Mount Moriah and is not interchangeable with any other place on earth for its specific religious significance. 

This was not the Rabbi’s first racist rant.  He was beside himself with fury at the 2012 re-election of President Barack Obama and attributed the President’s victory to voters “primarily from the Third World” who “do not share the traditional American values…”  He went on to write “It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it.”

Christians, Jews, Muslims all must learn mutual respect and tolerance.  Christians, in their day, certainly have been guilty of bigotry and violence towards both Muslims and Jews, and no way occupy the moral high ground to lecture anyone else.  The Crusades and the pogroms and the Inquisition are all tired chestnuts hurled accusingly against the Catholic Church—but, tragically, they are all historically accurate examples of religion gone rotten.  Given our past, we Catholics are in no position to preach the necessity of respect for those of other religious persuasions, but by our example of tolerance and truth as mandated at the Second Vatican Council in Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate, and crowned by a proactive pursuit of charity and justice as indicated by Popes John Paul, Benedict, and Francis,  we Christians must get the message out that violence and hatred are no solid ground on which to build the future.  In the process of the sort of bigotry typified by Rabbi Pruzansky not only Judaism but all religion suffers a credibility gap.  Perhaps the following quote from the Dalai Lama puts things into perspective. 

Finally I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.  

Many Catholics who share the religious arrogance of Rabbi Pruzansky would shrug their shoulders and condescendingly ask what the Dalai Lama or any other teacher outside their own faith tradition could possibly have to say to us who have received the teachings of Jesus.  I suspect many Orthdox Jews would also wonder why one would look beyond the rabbinical tradition when G-d has spoken his Torah.  Maybe we need to get over our prejudices and realize that Truth has never allowed any one source to hold the monopoly on it.      

True and False Religion

Model of the Second Temple, Israel Museum,

Jerusalem

I was struck reading Morning Prayer today by the words of Azariah in the Canticle from the Book of Daniel. 

For we are reduced, O Lord, beyond any other nation,
brought low everywhere in the world this day
because of our sins.

We have in our day no prince, prophet, or leader,
no holocaust, sacrifice, oblation, or incense,
no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you.

But with contrite heart and humble spirit
let us be received;
as though it were holocausts of rams and bullocks,
or thousands of fat lambs,
so let our sacrifice be in your presence today
as we follow you unreservedly;
for those who trust in you cannot be put to shame.

And now we follow you with our whole heart,
we fear you and we pray to you.

The context is, of course, the time of the Babylonian Exile.  In the all-but- abandoned City of Jerusalem, the Temple of the Lord sat in ruins.  There was no sacrifice, no evening offering of incense.  Indeed the Cult had come to a halt—how was God to be served when no sacrifices could be offered?  And the lament of Azariah over this tragedy led to the great breakthrough in our Jewish/Christian tradition.  “Let us be received with contrite heart and humbled spirit”—this is the true sacrifice.  What use does God have for bulls and goats—and should he want them, the hills are covered with them and they are his for the taking (cf psalm 50: 8-13). The time of the Exile was a “Dark Night of the Soul” for Israel where they were taught by God what he truly wants: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke.  (Isaiah 58:6) 
I bring this up because of an article I read yesterday about aggressive plans being made by certain factions tied to the Netanyahu Government to seize the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in order to build a “Third Temple. (The first was the Temple of Solomon; the Second Temple was the Temple that stood in Jesus’ day.)  There is a strong desire in certain factions of moderate Orthodox Judaism to rebuild the Temple and restore the Cult.  The Ultra-Orthodox say that the Temple cannot be rebuilt and the sacrifices reinstituted until the Messiah comes and sorts things out. The Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism do not seem to have much interest in restoring the sacrificial rituals.   But that is not what I am writing about—nor, for that matter, is the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoring of the Cult.  Though I do want to bring up the issue, before I move on to my main point, of how can people be anxious to restore Cultic Worship when, at the same time, they see themselves as having a right to seize farms and groves and houses from the Palestinian people who have lived on this land since the time before Joshua brought the Children of Israel into the Land of Canaan approximately thirteen centuries before Christ? Though, again this being a history blog, it would be more accurate to speak of a series of migrations from the fifteenth through the twelfth centuries Before the Common Era (1499-1100 BC) than a single “Exodus.”  What is the point of building a Temple or sacrificing bulls and goats if one does not honor the commandments of God?  That was the message of the prophets as distinguished from the priests who supported the Cult qua Cult.  Jesus, of course—at least from the Christian understanding—reinforced this prophetic tradition that what God wants is mercy, not sacrifice (cf Matthew 9:13). 
Now let’s bring this over to issues that face us as Catholics today.  We too have people for whom everything is the Cult and for whom the greater commands mean little or even nothing.  They worry about issues such as using glass chalices or home-made breads for the Eucharist but want illegal immigrants rounded up and “shipped home.”  They want to deny those whom they deem unworthy Holy Communion but they support economic policies that leave the poor without access to health care or a chance for higher education.  They want to bend the knee to receive Christ in Eucharist while kneeling but they don’t bend their hearts to Christ in the least of his brothers and sisters. The women veil their heads but their hearts remain hardened and stiff.  The men put pro-life bumper stickers defending the unborn alongside NRA stickers and don’t see the contradiction.  The children are shielded not only from sex-education but from meeting their peers who are Black or Hispanic or Asian.  They want Mass in a language few if any understand because, “God-forbid we understand the Word of the Lord: we may have to change our attitudes.”   It is all magical mystical mumbo-jumbo that gives them a sense of otherworldliness when what Christ calls us to is change—deep, personal, change-of-heart change—in this world and in this life.  One might belong to the True Church but still have false religion. 

Reformation Today! 2



Model of the 2nd Temple--the temple in

the days of Jesus



I have been reading N.T. Wright’s Book Simply Jesus (Harper:2011).  I started it on my flight home from my retreat last week and have been reading it in bits and pieces over the past few days.  Almost done.  I find it a little disturbing as Wright comes out of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England and while he is an acknowledged scripture scholar, his methodologies leave him with some very different theological foundations than what my education has given me.  Ironically though, while we may begin from some different starting points—his what may be called neo-orthodoxy and mine, well, he would call them modernist simpliste probably but I would think of them as mainline Catholic (Rahnerian)—while we may begin from different premises I think we end up pretty much singing in the same choir.  Well, in the same choir, though perhaps he sings tenor to my baritone.  What I mean by that is I think the Church—in our case, the Catholic Church—needs a good shot of a sort of retro-viral evangelicalism to inoculate it against the disease of dominance-addiction that is becoming pandemic in religion today.  Ultra-orthodox Jewry wants to expel all non-Jews from Israel.  Right-wing Hindus attack churches and mosques on the Indian subcontinent.  Islamic extremism wants sharia law to be enforced over non-Muslim populations.  Religious crazies in our country want America to be declared a “Christian Nation.”  Atheists want religion relegated to the most private sectors of life and banned from view and hearing. And everybody wants their religious beliefs—or their rejection thereof—written into civil and criminal law regardless of the conscience rights of their neighbors to hold to different values and doctrines.

A point that Wright brings up several times in his book is that the Temple officials of Jesus’ day were heavy into power and the accumulation of personal wealth.  I was a bit surprised to read this—not that it is not completely true—but because modern fears of being labeled anti-Semite make it awkward to speak of the corruption in the Temple cult at the time of Jesus.  But corruption there was.  This isn’t anti-Semitic, or more properly, anti-Jewish, anymore than it is anti-Catholic to speak of the Borgia papacies or the pornocracy of the 10^th century.  Let’s just be honest.  Annas and Caiaphas and their buddies weren’t saints any more than Leo X or John XII were saints.  It’s history, no problemo. 

Yes, in the final decades of the Temple’s history, to hold the high-priesthood required one to work closely with the Roman authorities even at the cost of fidelity to Jewish principles and in return for this collaboration, the cozy arrangement of religion and power brought considerable financial compensation to those who held religious office. In fact, not only the High Priest but all those priests and levites involved in the Temple administration had access to power and the considerable revenues attached to the Temple.  The little guys from the countryside—like Zachariah, the Father of John the Baptist, came in for their two weeks a year of duty and did the routine tasks of the sacrifices and cult before returning to their villages, but the great leaders who composed the Sanhedrin or who were permanently attached to the Temple formed an elite club were men to be reckoned with.  There was a great chasm of wealth, social standing, and power between the “chief priests and leaders of the people” (Matt 26:3) and the average Jew.   The members of this small elite had no idea of the struggles and challenges of the lives of the mass of the people entrusted to their care—nor did they care.  The priesthood to them was simply a sinecure—a personal position that guaranteed them a comfortable life.  This was nothing new, Ezekiel in his day scored the priests for having been bad shepherds to the people (Ezekiel 34:1-10), abusing their position to exploit God’s faithful people.  

    I cannot but think that our Church might be very different if the Shepherds of the New Israel, the Church, had more experience of listening—listening—let me say it again—listening—to the people entrusted to their care.  I don’t think too many of the purpled mitered majesties have sat down with the father of four whose wife has anxiety attacks about becoming pregnant again and who  is wondering how he is going to put his kids through college.   I don’t know how many have sat down with the middle-aged woman whose husband has left her for an overbosomed twenty-something but who is afraid of falling in love again herself because the sacraments are too important to her.  I don’t know how many have sat down with gay couple who have had a stable and loving relationship for 25 years but are afraid that the local just-out-of-seminary jerk is going to deny them communion in front of the entire parish or refuse to baptize their adopted child.  I don’t know how many have talked with the couple who have unsuccessfully tried to become pregnant for eight years and won’t go in vitro out of fidelity to Church teaching.  You see we have all the answers—but do we really know the questions?  In speaking of prayer, Mother Theresa said:

Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.

But it is not only to God that we must listen—or rather, contemplative prayer is not the only place where we must listen to God.  We must have the lev shomea, the listening heart of Solomon and tune it to the experience of God’s people.  God speaks there too.  This is especially true of bishops and priests to whom has been entrusted the ministry of shepherding God’s people.  More important than their love for the rules and laws by which they teach and govern must be the love for those whom they have been called to lead.  The Law, after all, was made for us, not us for the Law.