Against Those Who Hate Jewish Flesh

For most Jews, life since October 7, 2023, has been a flood of emotions: fear, anger, depression, fatigue. For those of us who are Jewish disciples of Yeshua (Jesus), there has also been heartbreak over how some segments of the Church have responded to the Hamas attack of October 7, as well as the can of anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions that it opened. After the devastation of the Holocaust, many Christian denominations created statements explicitly condemning anti-Judaism and supersessionism, and yet in a contradictory fashion much of the anti-Jewish racism spilling out of the Hamas attack is from Christians, from those very same denominations, the Episcopal Church included. I must wonder if such post-Holocaust statements are empty words, similar to false promises made to other ethnic minorities. As a Jew in the Episcopal Church, I have a special ability to feel the arrows of anti-Jewish racism in an obvious way that Gentile Christians cannot. So, when such arrows are shot in my vicinity, I feel compelled to speak up.

Yet because anger, particularly from ethnic minorities, is often seen as a vice, something unwarranted, I feel compelled to give a brief apologia so as not to be dismissed. Anger as virtue has a rich history within the Christian tradition. Origen, for instance, believed that just anger can actually serve as an instrument for justice. The Jewish Maccabees during the Greek colonial occupation of Israel used their righteous anger, a response toward the violent ideological and land colonization of the Greeks, to oust them, reaffirm their allegiance to the God of Israel, and regain sovereignty in their land. Yeshua expressed anger at injustice in the temple toward the moneychangers, and Paul writes, “Get angry, but do not sin.” James Cone once noted, “Your anger is how theology begins. It starts with anger about a great contradiction that can’t be ignored.” So yes, I’m angry, and if you use that as an excuse to write me off, that says more about you than it does me, and let’s be honest: it probably speaks to your white privilege. With that, let’s briefly touch on this great contradiction.

First of all, Gentile Episcopalians should not deceive themselves into the delusion that supersessionism and anti-Jewish racism is somehow a thing of the past. This is a particularly hard reality to swallow for Episcopalians (and other traditions from Northern Europe, i.e., liberal Protestantism) who are mostly white and have continued to carry the mantle of the white man’s burden, in which they serve as the culmination and height of moral and ethical development and who thus serve as the arbitrators and exemplars of ethical righteousness. White Episcopalians can’t imagine themselves as racist toward any group, because they perceive themselves as having reached the pinnacle of ethical development. It is their white burden to teach how other people (but never they themselves) are racist.

A shining example of this after October 7 came from an Episcopal bishop sending out a video that not only failed to condemn Hamas (which is known for teaching children that killing a Jew is their life’s goal), but downplayed Hamas’s actions and blamed any future deaths on the Jews. The Jews are always to blame, as the old anti-Jewish scapegoating tactic holds. Let’s be clear: supporting Hamas, an Iranian-backed terrorist government whose mission is explicitly to wage genocide against Jews, is not a sentiment rooted in compassion for brown Palestinians versus white Israelis (most Jewish Israelis are brown anyway, and two million of Israelis are Arab citizens), but one rooted in centuries of racist hatred of Jews.

Before October 7, I was invited to preach at our parish shortly after anti-Jewish racist coloring books had been distributed in our town, namely in the wealthy part of town where many of our parishioners lived (although the invitation was unrelated to this event). After preaching against anti-Jewish racism rooted in solid orthodox theology and the kingdom of God, I was berated by the priest, accused of not preaching the gospel, which really meant I didn’t preach to make parishioners feel good; instead, I made them uncomfortable. In tears I asked my once-trusted priest if Jews being murdered was less important than maintaining the comfort of the congregation. This was a relevant question even before October 7, given the synagogue shootings and various other kinds of anti-Jewish murders that have been happening in the last few years, which nobody seems to know or talk about. He was silent, which spoke volumes.

The encounter is a good example of how explicit anti-Jewish racism is still rooted in our broader culture and in the Episcopal Church. The scenario wasn’t a hostage situation, in which hypothetical perpetrators held a group of Jews and a group of white Episcopalians hostage and had agreed to kill only one group and let the other go free. In that hypothetical situation, a white priest giving up the Jews would be bad, in that they would be seen as more valuable, but in real life the stakes weren’t so high for the white group. It was merely their comfort at stake. The experience taught me that the mere comfort of a group of white, wealthy Episcopalians is worth more than the lives of Jews. Not the lives of the white Episcopalians, but only their mere comfort. Jewish lives are worth so little that they aren’t even worth the sacrifice of comfort for this group.

Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of the rampant anti-Jewish racist culture that still is very much alive and well in the world, and let’s not pretend such racism is not the lens through which many see the current conflict. For any Christian tradition that claims to serve and worship the God of Israel, who permanently took on Jewish flesh, such racism is completely antithetical to worship. Anti-Judaism is anti-theism.

It’s time for the Episcopal Church to either stop calling itself Christian or to move past cheap, meaningless slogans that supposedly come out of a desire to not be racist toward Jews or other marginalized peoples. The reality is the Episcopal Church remains a racist church that hasn’t really moved beyond its colonial past. Even the attempts to do so are usually just colonialism disguised. Serious structural theological work needs to be done. But that would require giving up the liberal Protestant Northern European modernist colonial matrix that is the foundation and heart of so much of today’s Episcopal Church. While our tradition was certainly guilty of colonialism and supersessionism before its adoption of liberal German Protestantism, such was mitigated by an attachment to the traditional premodern brown Jewish doctrinal purview that has among large swaths of the Church since been openly discarded. I speak of course of Jewish doctrines such as the bodily resurrection, the Jewish sexual ethic, the Jewish life ethic (vis-à-vis abortion), and a spiritual-allegorical reading of Scripture, among other items.

To the extent the Church rids itself of the tradition that was rooted in first-century Judea in exchange for doctrines and practices rooted in 18th through 21st-century Northern Europe, the continued assault on Christianity as an essentially Southwest Asian Jewish religion continues unabated. The same worldview in which liberal Episcopalians is rooted in is the same soil in which the Nazis grew up: the Northern European “Endarkenment.” It is no wonder priests can imply that Jews are violent, bloodthirsty barbarians who are too stupid to understand what God actually desires (another experience I had), or that Jewish lives can be considered worth less than the comfort of white, upper middle-class Episcopalians, or that a bishop can fail to condemn the actions of a terrorist group that explicitly has genocide of the Jews as its goal and somehow can spin Hamas’s genocidal actions around so that they’re the victims!

The reason many Jews and other ethnic minorities continue not to trust Gentile Christians is that you have given us very little reason to trust you. Either step up and honor the flesh and blood God decided to take as his own and give to the world for its life, the flesh through which you must pass in order to obtain salvation (John, 4:22, 14:6), or go back to paganism to worship the non-Jewish gods. But do not continue to pretend you worship the God of Israel who took on Jewish flesh, while continuing to demonize his flesh, delegitimize our right to be worth more than your mere comfort, and delegitimize our right to sovereignty in our own land where God first became one of us. Salvation comes from the Jews not from Gentiles. You are the branch and we are the roots.