Change Hearts, Not Laws.

Ronit Elkabetz in Gett: The Trial

of Viviane Amsalem

Yesterday I heard on the radio an interview with Israeli film directors Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz as they discussed their film, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.  The story is that of an Israeli woman, Viviane Amsalem, who wants a Gett—a rabbinical bill of divorce—from her husband Elisha.  Under Orthodox Jewish Law such a decree of divorce can only be issued if the husband ok’s it and Elisha won’t give Viviane her freedom from their loveless marriage.  What is even worse is that under this Orthodox Jewish system, the woman—Viviane—while practically speaking is the plaintiff seeking the divorce, actually becomes the one on trial in the procedure since the system is predicated on the exclusive right of the man to divorce the wife.  In Israel, despite it’s alleged separation of state and religion and despite the fact that the vast majority of its citizens, while Jews, are secularists, there is no provision for a divorce except that granted by a rabbinical court in accordance with strict Orthodox Jewish procedures.  Thus Viviane has no recourse.  The directors, who are brother and sister to one another, claim that there are currently about 45,000 Jewish women trapped in this situation where their husbands will not grant them their freedom. (While Israeli law has no provisions for secular divorce, Christians and Muslims can get their divorces from ecclesiastical (Christian) or Sharia (Islamic) tribunals as Jews get them from rabbinical courts. 

I am not a moviegoer.  I probably will not see Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.  I also did not see Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Timbuktu.  Timbuktu tells the story of the people of this ancient city in Mali during its occupation by the radical Islamic group, Ansar Dine, during the 2012 civil war in Mali. Ansar Dine imposed sharia law on the city demanding that women be veiled, stoning adulterers, amputating limbs for various crimes, outlawing sports and recreation activities, and imposing other harsh measures on the local population in the name of religion.

Religion too often is about power and in both the Christian (and post-Christian) West and in the Islamic Mid-East and now in Jewish Israel, religious power has become entangled with civil law.  The Civil Law gives power to religious principles and value.  More and more in a post-Christian society such as our own this residual of religious power over people causes a deep resentment. 

Toothpaste does not go easily back into tubes.  It is unlikely that Christianity will again be the foundation for Western Society.  We need to make peace with that.  Jesus never said that we were to have that kind of power over “the world.”  It is somewhat hard to take off one’s crown, climb down from one’s throne, and drive a taxi to support one’s self, but that is more or less what we, as Church, are called to do. And while it may not be as much fun as were the grand days of the Ancien Regime, it is not a bad strategy for the future.  Nothing will regain credibility for the Church like putting ourselves at the service of all in need.  For all his charismatic personality, Mother Theresa had much more influence over people outside the Church than did Pope John Paul, or even John XXIII in his day. And the mission that Jesus gave us was never to change laws—even laws to protect the unborn or to insure the moral character of marriage—but to change hearts.  The world will not be bettered by changed laws that impose values on people without their assent, but change hearts and you will change everything.  

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.      

When Religion Goes Rogue



Mosaic in the Church of the

Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem

Pope Francis goes to the Holy Land next week and the welcome is not universal.  Over the past several weeks a number of Christian churches have been vandalized by ultra-orthodox Jews in protest of the Pope’s visit.  While the majority of Israel’s Jews are highly secularized, there is a small minority that, due to the idiosyncrasies of Israel’s parliamentary constitution, wield disproportionate power over the Israeli government.  The plurality of political parties in Israel almost always ensures that no one party has sufficient support in Parliament to govern without bringing the small ultra-orthodox political factions into a coalition government in order to have the number of votes in the Knesset to insure its policies can pass.  By threatening to withdraw from such coalitions, the small orthodox groups can pressure the larger secular parties to take positions that impose Jewish theological perspectives on the larger and secularized society. 

One of the positions held by Orthodox—and some not-so-orthodox—Jews is that the land is theirs by the gift of God and that they have an absolute right to it.  This compromises the safety of non-Jews in Israel.  Orthodox Jews have gone with impunity onto lands held for centuries by Palestinian farmers and uprooted their olive groves, devastated their farms, and demolished their homes to build new settlements for Jewish settlers.  Since the land belongs by right to the Jews (to whom God allegedly gave it) Muslims and Christians have no right to it and it can be taken away from them at any time. 

In anticipation of the Pope’s visit some ultra-Orthodox have, not unlike cats pissing in corners to mark their territory, taken to spray-painting hostile messages and otherwise defacing Christian Churches including some of the most sacred shrines of the Christian faith. 

The historical facts of the matter are that the Palestinian people are the descendants of the ancient Syro-Phoenician Canaanite peoples who inhabited the land at the time of the Exodus and from whom much of the land was taken in the times of the Judges and of Kings Saul and David.  These people, along with the Greek settlers who came there about three centuries before Jesus converted to Christianity in the Byzantine period and a significant number of them converted to Islam between the seventh and the twelfth centuries.  As late as the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 about half of the Palestinians were still Christians.  As the majority of the Christian Palestinians were merchants and townspeople it was easier for those in Israel, and after 1967 those in the West Bank and Gaza, to sell their businesses and emigrate in order to escape the apartheid policies of Israel that discriminate against them, than it was for the Muslim Palestinians who were, by and large, tied to the land by their farms, orchards, and groves.  Nowadays, only about ten percent of the Palestinians who remain are Christians.  The plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza, Muslim or Christians, is desperate as more and more land is confiscated for Israeli “settlements.”  

The visit of a Pope to the Holy Land always shines a bit of a spotlight on the plight of the Palestinians—especially the Christians—and this makes the Israeli government very uncomfortable as their racist policies are exposed for the world to see.  But for the ultra-Orthodox the visit of such a prominent Christian leader is not so much an embarrassment as it is a sacrilege that a gentile is allowed not only to tread the land given to them by God, but to offer worship where God should be honored only by his own people and according to the rites he established for them in the sacred books.  But such fanatical views are not restricted to ultra-Orthodox Jews.

I noticed in one of the Katholic Krazy blogs a few days ago a complaint about Buddhist and Shinto worship being allowed in the Cathedral of Saint James in Compostella and how this “desecrated” the shrine.  Christian worship being offered in Jerusalem would have just the same stigma in the minds of the more extreme Orthodox Jews.  I think this highlights the danger of religious extremism whether by Muslims or Jews or Christians.  Religion, for too many people, has become an end it itself—and the supreme end of life.  They confuse their love for religion—with its ceremonies and dogmas and regulations—with the Love for God.  They take the created reality of religion and it becomes their god.  Jesus in his day had issues with both the Temple cult and the Pharisaic interpretation of the Law over this very thing. In this idolatry religion becomes more important than the believer; the cult more important than the person.  At least in Christianity this can never be allowed to be.  The Sabbath is made of us, not us for the Sabbath.  The Dalai Lama—who I admit does not share in the magisterial office of the Church (but who is a much more authentic teacher than many who do)—admonishes us that “the aim and purpose of religion is cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind.”  He later expands this idea: “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.”  While this teaching come from a most eminent Buddhist teacher, it is totally consistent with the Gospel which Jesus entrusted to his Church. 

The greatest possession of the Church is not itself, it is the Gospel which Christ entrusted to it.  I think we too often forget that.  Too often he Gospel is something we have encased between golden covers to carry high overhead and then to sonorously proclaim as we surround it with candles and swing a censer rather than be the living message that transforms our lives.  If there is one thing that this blog is dedicated to making manifest is that the Church is most authentically the Church of Jesus Christ not when it is absorbed in its own religiosity but  when its members are focused on putting the Gospel of Christ into practice in our lives.  And if there is one thing I hope to expose is that obsession with its own power and majesty that is the greatest threat to the fidelity of the Church to its Lord.

When Religion Goes Bad

I was very disappointed that Malala Yousafzai didn’t wind the Nobel Peace Prize.  I can’t think of anyone better to symbolize the victory of Peace over Violence in our contemporary world.  But last week when I saw Diane Sawyer interviewing a group of Muslim women and heard them say that Malala should “return to Islam” and express their opinions that non-Muslim women like Ms. Sawyer are “oppressed” because they don’t live “under God’s will” but as “beholden to the slavery of their own desires” I saw not only the danger of radical Islam but the danger of radical religion of any stripe. 

Several days ago The New York Times carried a story of two Rabbis who—for a hefty fee—would arrange for men to be kidnapped and tortured until they gave their wives a get (a religious bill of divorce, required by Orthodox interpretation of the Mosaic Law for a woman to be released from marriage).  And again, like listening to those Muslim women, I cannot but wonder about what religion   devolves into among those who consider themselves “orthodox.”  Kidnapping and torture are a legitimate means to carry out compliance with the Mosaic Law?  And I read a story on the internet a few days ago how Orthodox Jewish settlers had not only stolen the land from Arab families in the West Bank but adding insult to injury, defaced their mosque.  And this is done because Jewish extremists make the claim that “God has given this land” to them.  The Name of God is blasphemed when it is used to justify such atrocities just as it was blasphemed when Christians used horror stories of child kidnappings and murders to instigate pogroms against the Jews of Europe. 

Extremist Hindus murder Muslims and Christians in India in the name of religious teachings that would demand religious conformity to all ethnic Indians.  And Buddhists—despite the clear teachings of the Buddha—massacre Muslims in Myanmar.  No wonder so many in our modern world just walk away in bewilderment and even disgust from religion all together. 

And sadly there is a Catholic Taliban too that would impose on all in our country, of whatever religion or of no religion, the dictates of the Church when it comes to matters of marriage or reproduction.  There are those who would bind not only the consciences but the freedom of others to rules of conduct whose only basis for authority are religious teachings. 

I am not saying that there are not moral standards and that Christianity’s moral law is in any way arbitrary.  I am only saying that any religion that compels adherence of unbelievers to its creeds or to its specific moral precepts is essentially a false way of life.  As Christians we have a mission to convert hearts, not to impose laws.  Winning hearts is a far more challenging mission than imposing laws, but it is the mission Christ gave to his Church and the only one we do with his blessing.