It’s a fact: Christians who express interest in Judaism most
often come to that place by Jesus. After all, Jesus was a Jew, shared in the
cultural traditions of Jews, and often quoted from the Jewish Bible. Most of us
experience Judaism on a very superficial level.
Until the Holocaust, not many of us came to understand Judaism through
tragedy.
When Nazi rhetoric ramped up in the
1930s, the biblical kinship with Jews felt by many Christians was broken through
for many living in Germany and beyond. Clever theologians such as Paul Althaus
(a leading scholar of Pauline theology in Germany) and Emanuel Hirsch found
ways around the Jews to get to Jesus in the theologies of their day. In the
immediate aftermath of the Nuremberg Laws, church officials were encouraged to
leave out overtly Jewish references in their services that linked Jesus to his
kin. Political propaganda helped to re-ignite hatred and suspicion and
caricatures of a rebellious people whose bloodlust knew no bounds were summoned
from the gospels. The Jews who killed Jesus were also responsible for killing
the collective German spirit, ravaging the economy, and introducing strange and
immoral behaviors into the social order of Germany.
While many Christians who experience
the Jesus of the Bible will only most likely ever experience Judaism the way a
playwright casts an antagonist to push the action forward in his play, every
year in some quiet corner of a university library, or in some integrated
reading assigned by an ambitious teacher, a minority of Christians experience a
“conversion to kinship” with their Jewish brethren care of the Holocaust. For those Christians fortunate enough, their
rite of passage will likely by through Elie Wiesel.
In 1999, I first read Night as a high school teacher doing a
one-year stint at a magnet school in the English department. I had the option
of picking through all sorts of books to read with my class, and along with
Archibald Macleish’s J.B. and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I found a book by Elie Wiesel called Night. Because I had to do my reading
prior to my students, I sat down with Night
figuring I would set my goal to a couple of chapters a day. I was done the
book that evening. Fighting back tears and hanging on every word, I read the
book as many fellow Christians had come to read it: as a form of penance for things I had not
done.
I felt guilt. Not as a Gentile, since
I wasn’t a Jew, and not as a German, though I had some German heritage, but as
a member of the human race who was desperately troubled by the realization that
something like this happened and it took me almost 24 years to read about it. I
wasn’t completely immune to the Holocaust. I had gathered information from
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But
remembering a childhood in which Spielberg created E.T. on the other end at best prejudiced me against the voice I
would eventually answer.
At best, I knew how to separate
Hollywood from my little world in the Towson suburb of Baltimore. The only
Jewish friends I had was a family my family grew up with and they never struck
me as a Jewish, as if the word was supposed to conjure occasions for
difference. As far as I was concerned
Jews were people living in the pages of my Bible.
My conversion to kinship (as I prefer to call it) with Judaism
came when in the final year of doing work at a Christian seminary I focused my
attention on Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was then that my
reading blossomed to other resistance figures in the anti-Nazi movement. Soon I
was reading Jewish writers, thinkers, theologians, and philosophers. And in the
summer of 2012, after spending time at two interfaith retreats, I entered a
Jewish Studies graduate program at Towson University where I am currently
working on a thesis in Jewish theology.
This conversion to kinship was a ground prepared by those seminal moments, encouraged by Wiesel who showed me the depths of human depravity, who showed me that my own
reservations about an all-loving God now seemed infinitesimally irrelevant
against the very real hardship on losing one’s entire family in the camps. And
the guilt I derived from this inadequacy moved me to study Judaism with Jews
who suffer and celebrate their Judaism.
In the course of my studies, I
learned that I was not alone. My path was similar to other paths. My Jewish Ethics
professor let me on to conversation he had while dining with Peter Schäfer, a scholar in early
Jewish-Christian studies, Jewish mysticism, and Rabbinics. I used Schäfer’s
work as reference materials for papers I wrote during that time, and was
interested to learn that Schäfer, a native German, told my professor that his
interested in early Judaism arose as a form of atonement for the sins of his
people. Using scholarship as a way of making atonement struck him as the right
thing to do with the kind of work he was pursuing. Through his continued
efforts, and numerous teaching assignments, he eventually became director at
the Jewish Museum of Berlin.
Arguably, one of the most famous books
on Jewish theology emerging after the Holocaust was Richard L. Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz, which offers a powerful
look into the theology of Judaism in a post-Holocaust world and challenges many
of the fundamental ideas that Rubenstein felt influenced the genocide.
Rubenstein dedicates his second edition of his book to two men, one of whom,
John K. Roth, was a Christian. Anyone who read After Auschwitz with open eyes confronted a problematic God, a
depraved world, and a Christianity that was invariably set on the destruction
of the Jews. Roth grew up a Presbyterian and had a burgeoning career as a
Christian scholar, even while his knowledge of Auschwitz was as incomplete as
any Midwesterner’s living in the shadow of the War. Roth recalls that he was
“too young to be much aware of World War II, barely hearing of Auschwitz
afterward, and knowing practically nothing about the Holocaust for a long time.
Yet I increasingly think of myself as a post-Holocaust American Christian.
Auschwitz stalks my soul, too.” It wasn’t until reading After Auschwitz that Roth found himself on a path of understanding
that would last much of his life.
It was through a brush with Wiesel’s
portrayal of Sarah in his early novel The
Accident that contrasted against the birth of Roth’s own child he named Sarah.
And then the words from Wiesel himself:
“Whoever listens to Sarah and doesn’t change, whoever enters Sarah’s world and
doesn’t invent new gods and new religions, deserves death and destruction.” The
reality of his daughter’s birth against the backdrop of a fictional character
living through a nonfictional event was deeply moving. Roth went on to create a
new god and a new religion that some would argue was always there and in time realized
that what is so important in our journey is the humanity that binds us, without
which, there could be no religion, no gods, no opportunity to make distinctions
like “Jew” or “Christian.” It was no longer enough that Jesus or Moses spoke
through the pages of ancient scripture. Roth reported that after reading about
Sarah that he often found himself on the verge of tears. “I began to understand
that my tears were partly a response to the Holocaust and to Wiesel in
particular, an awareness that has become all the more poignant with the passing
of time.” It was because of Wiesel, Roth admits, that he experience a
conversion of kinship, that his life took a “decisive Holocaust turn.”
Each year, I encounter new names and fresh
faces at various conferences or in journals as they bring forward their
research on Holocaust studies. A lot of those presentations come from outside
the Jewish community by those building careers, who found the Holocaust through
the insight of a teacher, a friend, a summer reading project, or a movie. Their
genuine attempts at understanding a detestable event reflect the complexity of a
world that does not provide easy answers. Wiesel himself will remain a prominent
figure even as many academics have moved on to other Holocaust voices. Unlike
Noam Chomsky, who beaconed the world with transformational grammar, only to
move far afield to political philosophy, Wiesel never moved away from his
original mission. And despite the controversy created around him in later
years, like Jesus, Wiesel’s reach into the hearts of people who were not his own
is a profound accomplishment.
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