HIs Blood Be Upon Us - An Alternate Reading of Jewish Responsa

Recently as I worked on research relating to theological themes in the Holocaust, I came to an all-important verse used in the polemic literature against Jews. As I considered this question more broadly to the Jewish response to their own extermination, the reaction of the Jews clarified a bit and helped me think about the problem in a way that was more genuinely Jewish than Christian.

A typical Jewish response to Jesus that is exploited in the literature comes immediately prior to Jesus’ passion. As the Sanhedrin battled over the person of Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas is reported to have said: "You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” (John 11:50). And so through the lens of two thousand years of Christian exegesis, this verse has been interpreted as a way of punishing Jewish malevolence towards Christians. Most notoriously, it was impetus in charging the Jews with an admission of cowardice, as neglecting their own, and as a result setting the sword between Jews and Christians. Though ancients approximated this idea, it found violent new life beginning with Martin Luther, until it crested into an evil that was used as justification in the Holocaust for the extermination of 6 million Jews. An important reevaluation of this verse, however, is helpful in light of what I call a Jewish ethics of survival.

Unlike the theological interpretation that sees Jews as cowering in an antagonistic role, one possible alternate explanation was the Jews’ own keen awareness of their covenant with God, a point that had nothing to do with Jesus. In their own narrative framework, acts of disobedience had a way of punishing the entire people and putting everyone at risk. The placing of Jewish halakhic thinking above an ethics of survival may have been ideologically implausible given historical circumstances. When one considers that martyrdom among Jews for the sake of higher ideals was rare and was opposed by such figures as Maimonides during Almohad rule or by Buber who confronted Gandhi on non-violent resistance, dying for one’s ideals hardly ever became a single, solitary act by one pious Jew, but was an unwelcomed event often extended to all Jews in the form of massacres. The Jewish understanding that God is a god of history meant acting within history as a means of personal preservation that honored this covenant relationship.

Persisting in this covenant required living in this world. Life in the world to come is hardly emphasized in Jewish theology the way it has come to be understood in Christian theology and one might surmise this is a direct result of the Jews being a people constantly threatened by extinction so that life itself and the fight for life become
acts of faith.