gospels – Sim Lev

Have you ever heard someone say “who am I to judge?”

Not just casually. I’m talking about major situations, when something clearly is wrong. There are those who will shrug off great indecencies, and say they don’t feel qualified to provide a moral assessment.

There is a tendency, in the modern West, to avoid moral judgment, even when something quite clearly deserves condemnation. There are situations when people say “who am I to judge?” when they really ought to be judging.

This desire not to act as judge likely comes from certain interpretations of the Christian tradition. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches: “Judge not, lest ye be not judged” and in the Gospel of Luke, he instructs: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.”

There is a fundamentally Christian idea underpinning the notion that we shouldn’t judge. We are flawed flesh and blood, whereas God, who is perfect, is the only one who has the right to judge.

This is, I think, the direct opposite of the Jewish attitude towards judgment. Quite on the contrary, we are expected to be God’s hands in the world. We are expected to look at the world, analyse it, judge it, and find ways of making it better. We are supposed to be active participants in the world, working towards holiness and justice, by discerning right from wrong. God is not going to intervene for us: we have to intervene for God.

(I should be clear here that I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy between Christian and Jewish teachings. Some Christians say the verses I quoted from the Gospels are really about avoiding hypocrisy; and some Christians are in fact overly quick to judge others. I draw this distinction only to show that, in Judaism, judging is good. According to our Torah, our Prophets, our Mishnah, and our philosophy, judgment is the key to living righteously.)

In our parashah this week, Moses recalls the system of government he established with his father-in-law, Yitro. He reminds the Israelites that he appointed judges and told them: ‘You must hear the cases of your fellow Israelites and the foreigners living among you. Be perfectly fair in your decisions and impartial in your judgments. Hear the cases of those who are poor as well as those who are rich. Don’t be afraid of anyone’s anger, for the decision you make is God’s decision.’

For Moses, it’s not that God makes perfect judgments in Heaven and we make flawed ones on Earth. The process of judging is sacred. Finding a way to judge everyone fairly is doing God’s work.

We are supposed to judge. Fairly, honestly, without deference to the rich or patronising the poor, without fear or favour, human beings are supposed to judge each other.

In our haftarah, the Prophet Isaiah tells us exactly what happens when we stop judging. He chastises Israel: “Your leaders have become rebellious and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes and runs after payments; they do not advocate for the orphan, and the quarrel of the widow does not come to them.”

When you abrogate responsibility for judging, it is the most vulnerable people who suffer. Unless people are willing to say that something is wrong, the people with the least power are left without advocates or intercessors. In Isaiah’s time, he saw that this created “a sinful nation, a people heavy with iniquity.”

Not everyone will sit on the Sanhedrin, but all of us are supposed to be on the lookout for infractions against the moral order. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this became especially relevant.

Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers, escaped from the Nazi Gestapo in 1933. She was a stateless refugee in Paris throughout the war, during which she spent some years in an internment camp.

Afterwards, Arendt moved to New York, and became one of the only foreign journalists to report on Israel’s trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to refer to the Final Solution’s pen pusher. Anybody, said Arendt, could perform the most wicked acts in the most indifferent ways. She warned that, if the most disgusting crimes could be prosecuted, they could almost certainly be committed again.

When Arendt wrote her reports, and turned them into a book, she received considerable backlash from readers. Sometimes, she defended what she had said. Some of it caused her to revise her position. But only one criticism made her truly incensed. What got her truly angry were those who said she had no right to judge.

“Who are we to judge?” her critics asked. “How can we say that we would behave any differently to Eichmann under the circumstances? How easy it must have been to get swept up in the fog of committing genocide. Maybe anybody else would do such a thing.”

Arendt wrote a furious riposte to such critics, called Responsibility and Judgment. She said:

“Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning.”

This reluctance to judge Nazi war criminals who oversaw death camps was offensive to Arendt, as one who had survived that terrible era. But it was also, she felt, philosophically abhorrent.

If you can’t judge, says Arendt, nobody can ever take responsibility for anything. And if nobody can take responsibility, then history is just a bunch of forces acting on us all, that never requires us to take action.

On the contrary, judgment is the prerequisite for recognising when something is wrong in the world, and doing all we can to change it.

You can’t blame psychology or circumstances or material realities. Everyone must take moral responsibility.

That is by no means easy. The Christian rebuttal against judging warns that if you judge someone, you will be judged to the same standard.

Yet surely that is the point! Saying that something is morally wrong means making a commitment not to do it. Labeling another’s actions as monstrous means we commit ourselves never to be like them.

Arendt saw Eichmann, the mass murderer and war criminal, as an everyman. He was a mindless bureaucrat, who had never given any thought to whether what he was doing might be wrong. To adopt the familiar phrasing, Eichmann was “just following orders.”

One of the central goals of Shoah education must be moral instruction. Not only to teach about what happened to our people, but to show what any person is capable of doing. It must be to train people to look critically, with judging eyes, at all that happens in the political sphere, and never excuse it by blaming circumstances, history, psychology, or upbringing.

No, let us never say “who am I to judge?” Let us instead insist on appraising right from wrong and good from evil at every possible opportunity. Let us be willing to assess, without fear or favour, what we feel lives up to and defies God’s law.

May we fulfil the words of the Prophet, and live out Isaiah’s proclamation, that we shall be redeemed through justice and find repentance through righteousness.

Shabbat shalom.

A rabbi and a priest are comparing career trajectories.

The rabbi asks the priest: “so, you start here, what’s the next level up?”

“Well,” says the priest, “if I go further I become a bishop.”

“And how about after that?”

“The next level up is archbishop.”

“And then?”

“Well, then I could be a cardinal.”

“Wow, what next?”

“Well, at the very top, I suppose, in theory, I could become Pope.”

“Great,” says the rabbi, “and what’s the level up from that?”

“Up from that?” splutters the priest. “You want me to go higher than the Pope? What do you want me to be? God?”

The rabbi says: “One of our boys made it.”

Yes, one of our boys did make it. 2020 years ago a little Jewish boy called Jesus was born, and his followers have spent this week celebrating by eating his favourite foods of Brussels sprouts and roast parsnips. For the last month, their homes have been lit up with garish bulbs and their front gardens have been filled with camp inflatable objects.

Personally, I love it. I felt a nostalgic loss at not having heard the Christmas jingles in shops this year, so played Whitney’s and Mariah’s classics to myself in the kitchen. I’m sure many of you did indeed mark the day yesterday. Not for nothing does demand for kosher turkeys sky-rocket at this time of year.

There is an apocryphal story that Lionel Blue, in his first year after becoming a rabbi, found himself with nothing to do on Christmas Day. He decided he ought to visit his congregants. He knocked on a door, then heard stony silence. Out of it, he heard one of them shout: “It’s the rabbi! Quick, hide the tree!”

As far as I’m concerned, you can love or hate the 25th of December in whatever way suits you best. The harder question for Jews is what we do with Jesus.

The most surprising thing for most Christians about Jewish theology is that we barely think about Jesus at all. It’s not just that he’s not our God and he’s not our Messiah. He’s also just not a topic of conversation for us.

But, given that it is Christmas, and the question might well be on your minds, this morning I will talk about how Progressive Jews have approached the question.

From the outset, one of the most interesting responses from Reform Jews has been to claim Jesus as one of our own. This might seem intuitively obvious, especially since today many Christians also emphasise Jesus’s Jewishness. But it wasn’t always so.

In the 19th Century, serious Protestant academics presented Jesus as a lone Aryan in the Middle East. They made clear that we should imagine him as a blonde-haired blue-eyed gentleman among the Semitic masses of Roman Palestine. Jesus, they claimed, was a superior, Western thinker who arrived to save the primitive, purity-obsessed Hebrews from their legalistic superstitions.

When Abraham Geiger, the first reform rabbi in Germany, sought to claim Jesus as a Jew, he was answering back to a Christian intellectual tradition that treated everything Jewish as underdeveloped, and Christianity as a perfected version of the blueprint. The great Jewish academic, Susanna Heschel, called Geiger’s thesis “a revolt of the colonised.” Geiger could reclaim Jesus from the Christians and remind them that he, like their Jewish contemporaries, was a Semite with a Jewish worldview.

This became the operative way for Progressive Jews to look at Jesus. In Victorian England, Claude Montefiore was the leading Jewish biblical scholar. He founded Liberal Judaism in Britain. He was born in the year of Jewish Emancipation and became the first Jew to get a phD in Divinity.

Montefiore’s teacher was the Anglican theologian Benjamin Jowett. Jowett was a liberal, in that he didn’t think Montefiore had to convert to Christianity in order to be saved. Nevertheless, he harboured many Christian prejudices about Judaism. He wrote to Montefiore:

It appears to me that there is good work to be done in Judaism; Christianity has gone forward; ought not Judaism to make a similar progress from the letter to the spirit, from the national to the historical and ideal?

As far as Jowett was concerned, Judaism was still stuck in the past. Montefiore responded by showing Jowett that Jesus was from exactly the same time period. At a lecture named for Jowett, Montefiore spoke to his Christian audience about who he, now an established historian of the Bible, thought Jesus was:

“He was a prophet.” Montefiore even quoted The Gospel of Mark that said so.

Montefiore went on to explain that Jesus “was the sort of man – under other circumstances and environment – such as seven and six hundred years before him had been Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.”

This analysis places Jesus firmly in the Jewish prophetic tradition, which ended with the destruction of the First Temple. Jesus was not the herald of a new religion, but the practitioner of an old one. He spoke in the same language and on behalf of the same God as the people whose testimonies we read in our haftarot. More than that, said Montefiore, Jesus wasn’t even particularly special:

I do not think that he was always consistent. He urged his disciples to love their enemies, but so far as we can judge he showed little love to those who opposed him. […] To the hardest excellence of all even Jesus could not attain. For it was far easier for him to care for the outcast than to care for his opponent, especially when the outcast was ready to acknowledge that he was sent by God, and the opponent took the liberty of denying it.

For Montefiore, claiming Jesus as a Jew meant also claiming him as a human being. He was a man like any other, full of imperfections, even angry and hypocritical. It is a remarkable testament to how far Montefiore had come that he could speak so openly, and even more so of his Christian peers that they tolerated this exegesis.

Even today, it would probably be hard to speak in such terms. One of the groups that would be most scandalised if Montefiore gave his lecture today would be other Jews. There is a tendency, at present, to try to draw increasingly thick lines between each religion, and to ghettoise Judaism. Certainly, many of my peers would roll their eyes at any attempt to claim Jesus as a Jew.

But I think doing so still has value. When we look at Jesus through the critical, historical lens of Progressive Judaism, we can see that he was just a man, doing his best to understand God’s will.

By association, we can recognise that our rabbis and prophets were no different. And we, too, might have a little less hubris. We might realise that all religions are just efforts to do right in the world and approach our own with some humility.

After all, none of us has all the answers. None of us can be God.

I gave this sermon on Saturday 26th December for Parashat Vayigash at Newcastle Reform Synagogue. The research here is from my MA dissertation, done at King’s College London under supervision by Dr. Andrea Schatz.

Tag: gospels

Can we claim Jesus as a Jew?