Enduring Antisemitism
I’m taking the week off from “The Therapeutic” series, to go a bit more topical. There’s an ambiguity in this title Enduring Antisemitism. “Endure” as in patiently suffer through? Or “endure” as in continue for a long time? Let’s go with the latter, while noting these meanings always go together.
For months I’d planned a trip to Israel. Two days before departure, Hamas terrorists did what genocidal vectors of evil do. One day before, the airline canceled our flight.
We managed to pivot to another destination, but with some disappointment. I always pack a couple of books on these little junkets, and on this one had Salvation Is From the Jews, by Roy Schoeman (2003).
Schoeman argues the Messianic emphasis in the Old Testament in support of his thesis that the Jews have a significant part in Second Coming eschatology. That means post-resurrection Jewish history is very important to understanding the signs of the times. His point is to show the supernatural element of historical developments, taking the demonic seriously, as did Michael Heiser in The Unseen Realm (2015).
What Schoeman has to say seems extremely topical in light of what’s going on in Israel. Many radical progressives are outing themselves as full-on antisemites. I’ve always tried to understand why antisemitism even exists. I know some warped pseudo-Christians say Jews are “Christ killers” but that is far too fringe to explain anything, aside from being tone-deaf about what the Bible actually tells us. A review of Romans chapter 11 might be in order.
I think antisemites think Jews invented God, the authoritative Lawgiver who imposes interdicts concerning human relationships and especially sexual restraint. In this way, they think, Jews invented the conscience. That darn pesky inner voice killjoy. In The Nihilism of Anti-Semitism (Tablet Magazine 10-13-23) Amin Rosen writes:
It is precisely because the Jews advanced a moral system that doesn’t tolerate murder, theft, rape, or mistreatment of the weak, and demands we care for other human beings, that other peoples have tried to wipe them out. The spree of killing and rape by Hamas is, among other things, a cry for freedom from a Jewish moral system that forbids such things.
What of Christianity? Me talking now, not Rosen. Antisemites don’t bother to expand their hate beyond Jews because in their ignorance they think of Christianity as categorically distinct, but besides that, ostensible Christians exhibit so much flexibility in flavor-of-the-month metaphysics and fluidity in what counts as virtue, that they’re mostly harmless. Much of what flies under the banner of “Christianity” is emasculated.
Like many, I’ve been appalled not only at the news from Israel, but at the American response to all this. College students who have no idea what’s going on reflexively go out into the streets to protest not the murdering Hamas, but Israel! Not all college students are radical antisemitic thugs, but one is too many. And of course there are plenty of clueless older people who oppose Jews and secular Israel reflexively. Why? It’s so weird and so irrational, it can only be spiritual.
My theory. I think it’s a reaction to Moses. Or to Sinai, if you like. It’s a reaction to the law, delivered by God, of course, but delivered into the hands of the Jews. Scratch this putative God from your conception of reality and you’re left with the Jews as having introduced into history the system of moral interdicts that civilization is now built on, though it can become eroded or suddenly destroyed as it has at various times and places in history by inexorable leftist, pagan, revanchism.
The law is offensive if it is presented with no relief. You’re just doomed, you will always live under the oppression of these interdicts, with no opportunity for remission. Especially if, like religiously lukewarm Jews, you de-emphasize the Messianic parts of your scriptures because they sound too Christian-y. Or if you do not believe in God or believe in Him only as an interesting cultural artefact but are indifferent to Him as God. Constraint and no release. The oppression of sin awareness that you can do nothing about on your own. Consciousness of sin, but no remission.
Christ is the means of remission but we deny Him. And so we’re left to wallow in the oppression of unremitted sin. Might as well dive deeper, we’ll never break the surface. And who brought us to this pass? This moral weight? Antisemites blame the Jews for moral constructs understood to impose unattainable standards. Without Christ we remain under this oppression of moral weight.
We must stop blaming Jews for it, and blame ourselves for rejecting the One who suffered holocaust, kherem, for remission. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on Him.” John 3:36 (ESV, emphasis added). Antisemitism results from feeling the weighty burden of God without the burden being lifted in Christ.
One more stab, if I may, at what I’m trying to express. The pattern of interdict/remission is also the pattern of crucifixion and resurrection. There is no resurrection without first crucifixion. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24 (ESV). Sinai was a form of holocaust, the imposition of unattainable interdicts, by which we’re shown our inescapable depravity. It crucifies us. Some will be resurrected. Many won’t. The ongoing persecution of those law-deliverers, the Jews, results from the unrelieved torment of Sinai, felt by those who can’t shake terror of God because they know in their hearts He’s real. But they reject Christ and so are with no hope of remission and release.
It’s all the fault of the Jews, they think. Always someone else’s fault. “The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless,” wrote Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands (2010) p. 399), concerning human predilection not just in the context of Nazi aggression against Jews, but all movements of organized hatred and violence.