Concern about turning on fellow countrymen was a fact of Jewish life. After all, as a continually conquered and subjugated people, making nice with the oppressor could easily become a way of life. Conversely, to ignore such realities could cost you your life. Jews throughout time have proven to be good at both, at least under compulsion rather than as a force of habit. Their rebellions and subjugations are well known in the historical annals of planet Earth. From the Assyrians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Christians to the Muslims and beyond, Jews have continually been in a position that is a negotiation between these two poles.
The problem of conspiring with the enemy was often so deep that a word was given against committing such criminal behavior in the Talmud. Mesirah, as it was known, was the act of turning on a fellow Jew, by handing him over to Gentiles. These crimes could be against fellow Jews or against Gentiles, but either way , by those who applied this view, the sinner was looked upon as one who denied identifying features that strengthened the community bond.
A recent article by Joshua Hammerman illustrates the way
in which Mesirah in contemporary
times has been avoided and by doing so protected pedophiles within the Jewish
community who have been given safe harbor at the cost of handing them over to
the local authorities. The Times of
Israel reported on a case of such coercion in January 2013. Hammerman lays out
the rabbinic origins of the practice, and in one place shows how Rashi applied
the principle to Moses after he murdered the Egyptian.
Perhaps the most notorious use of the principle comes
from none other than the Jewish ethicist and philosopher Maimonides, who
bluntly encouraged the murder of any Jew who would go against his people,
regardless of whether a moral transgression had taken place.
Yet there is another reason to give pause as we look at
the life of Jesus, the Misith and friend
of the Romans. In the gospels, Jesus clearly advocates a non-violent approach
to the Roman occupation of his land. And while this alone may have made good
strategic sense, for it spared waves of zealous men from death in full-on
rebellion, there are other passages where Jesus goes beyond a mere acceptance
of the reality of Roman occupation. In Luke 7, Jesus not only interacts kindly
and thoughtfully with a Roman soldier but sings his praise as one who has greater
faith than his own people!
The Sermon on the Mount offers the best glimpse of a
possible response to Mesirah. Jesus
warns that a fellow Jew might drag off another to the Gentile courts for
immoral behavior (Matthew 5:26). But rather than rebuke the practice as
something that would have clearly been a kind of Mesirah, Jesus’ comments are directed at the victim of Mesirah instead of the perpetrator! If we see these comments in light of the
larger reality of revolution and oppression then the matter-of-fact way in
which Jesus is said to deliver this warning begs the question of his
revolutionary intent. And it seems that he is almost accepting of the practice
as a way of life. In another instance (Matthew 18:15-17), Jesus seems to
establish the terms for avoiding Mesirah
though there is no condemnation of the practice itself. Unfortunately, this is
a difficult verse to establish since it anachronistically speaks of a church
that didn’t yet exist and establishes an ecclesiastical order that was most
likely written back into the gospels after Jesus. For someone like Paul,
however, Mesirah was clearly a
transgression and act of treason.
When one of
you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the
unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will
judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent
to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much
more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do
you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to
your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a
dispute between the brothers? (1 Corinthians 6:1-2)
In an even stronger condemnation, Paul states Christians are to suffer evil and moral transgressions when it deals with those in the community – a principle obviously derived from a rejection of Mesirah within his own Jewish context, but applied here to the church, Paul’s spiritual Israel.
But brother
goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at
all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong?
Why not rather be defrauded? (1 Corinthians 6:6-7)
One wonders how Paul might have treated the issue if a member in the church had sexually abused another’s child or murdered one of their own, but let’s move on.
Clearly the reality of Mesirah accomplished what it set out to do: it challenged communal life by creating
internal dissension. Postcolonial theory scholars like Moshe Rosman and Homi
Bhadba have recognized this with regard to a methodological-historical approach
to Jewish life at all intersections despite the charge of anachronism. Yet
Rosman and Bhadba wrestled this insight from its colonial context and showed
that while it evolves there this kind of master-servant dynamic is broader
bound. To put the community at internal odds with itself is to manage a
dangerous game yet at the same time increase the power structure and influence
of the oppressor. Jesus’ acceptance of the practice could be seen as an unfortunate
nod to its reality. But I want to argue that it could also be that in accepting
its reality, there remained a way of working through it, and in doing so, the cohesion that remained in the community
was no longer reliant on numbers but on
ideology and identity. If Jesus
believed in his Messianic role then sheer numbers were not as important as
God’s self-identifying truth that he saw working through his life. After all, it would be God who redeemed, and
wayward Jews would not escape this reality regardless of where their loyalties.
Perhaps this is what Paul also saw in his writing of Romans when he talks of
Israel’s ultimate salvation.
Much of what Jesus says however gets lost when we read
the Beatitudes as universal principles of conduct rather than responses to the political
and social environment in which Jesus remained. The Roman principle of
impressment, for example, crops up here as well as the ancient custom of how to
receive and accept an insult. But these make no difference if we only read our
own situation into Jesus’ world without first understanding the world in which
he lived.
I think that Jesus’ bringing up of Jews hauling other
Jews off to court was a contentious issue during Jesus’ time, and probably more
pertinent to the context of his day than his promulgation of a universal morality
being founded upon the ground of ancient Palestine where we imagine Jesus only
as an ancient teacher of wisdom detached from his own world. The fact that a
possible link to Mesirah is brought
up in several places along with Jesus’ rather unique and matter-of-fact
response could explain why such instances evoke against Jesus the charge of
blasphemy even as it is believed to have been applied to his direct threat to
destroy the Temple. The latter charge, in my opinion, has to be contextualized
since many Jews had already abandoned the Temple’s centrality (consider Rabbi
Zakkai, for example). This means that
the Temple narrative, by and large, depends upon Mesirah, and the state of affairs in which every day Jews
interacted. I do believe Jesus saw himself as a messianic figure, but I don’t
believe that the Temple is necessarily key to this claim. Jesus may have been
radically misunderstood in his take on Mesirah, and this stirred the charges of
blasphemy. But, it is in his unique response to Mesirah that Jesus can most clearly be identified as messianic,
through which the Temple narrative and other responses spring out, especially
if one considers that the “temple of his body” was not a physical structure,
nor was it dependent upon physical entities, but upon an ideal of Israel, of
the temple, and of himself.
While it might be said that such an interpretation
requires a radically re-interpretation of the meaning of physical resurrection,
I would only remark that I do not believe that we are confined to only one
layer of meaning here. We must remember too, the “temple of his body” quote is
a gloss by the gospel’s editor and not part of the narrative flow.
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