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Can Christians Acknowledge Jews’ Chosenness without Resentment?

In his review of Jonathan Sacks’s Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, Phillip Cary pays special attention to the book’s treatment of the various sibling rivalries in Genesis, and of the metaphorical sibling rivalry among Jews (descendants of Jacob), Muslims (who consider themselves descendants of Ishmael), and Christians (who, in rabbinic literature, are seen as descendants of Esau). These biblical rivalries are complicated by God’s choosing of certain sons over their brothers, from Abel to Ephraim. Cary writes:

It seems God has favorites, yet he wants us sympathizing with the others, those who are not favored. Sacks shows us how the Bible enlists our feelings on their behalf, highlighting their emotions. For example, in contrast to the terse narrative of Abraham going off to sacrifice his son Isaac, which leaves all human emotion unspoken, there is the previous chapter in Genesis, which is clearly meant as its counterpart, where Hagar goes off with her son Ishmael into the desert, raising her voice and weeping because she cannot bear to watch her son die, and the child, too, crying aloud in his thirst.

Who would not hear such crying? God does, and sends an angel to address Hagar’s emotions with tender words he does not give to Abraham in the next chapter: “Fear not.”

Likewise, argues Sacks, Jews can continue to see themselves as chosen while tolerating, and even loving, Christians and Muslims, while devotees of the other two religions can do the equivalent. Cary explores what exactly this would mean for believing Christians:

To take up Sacks’s invitation . . . requires [Christians] to renounce a crucial element of their own sibling jealousy, which theologians have come to call “supersessionism”: the notion that Christians have now superseded and replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people—as if only Christians were the true Israel, the proper heirs of Jacob, because the Jews have sold their birthright like Esau. Renouncing supersessionism is something most Christian theologians since the Holocaust have been glad to do, supported now by the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate. . . .

[It] is [a] fundamental biblical teaching that Gentiles are blessed through the Jews, who are chosen and beloved by God for precisely this purpose. Genesis repeatedly tells us that in the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “all nations shall be blessed.” If we who are Gentile Christians really believed this, . . . we would rejoice that the Jews are God’s chosen people. This is a way of unlearning the murderous jealousy of Cain: to be glad that blessing for us comes from them. When Christian teaching makes this kind of rejoicing its own, then Jews will at last be safe from Christian anti-Semitism.

Read more at First Things

More about: Genesis, Jewish-Christian relations, Jonathan Sacks, Muslim-Jewish relations, Religion & Holidays, Tolerance

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic