NEW JERSEY JEWISH NEWS
Judeo-Christian values, and other empty boasts
by Andrew Silow-Carroll
On a rare day off without the kids (we dumped, um, dropped them off with friends), my wife and I made a lightning tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Starting to the left of the Great Hall, we made a counter-clockwise loop that took us through the Greek and Roman galleries; past the arts of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas; into the 20th-century wing; down the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts corridors; and finally to the halls of medieval art.
It’s always this last stop that gives me pause — the graphic crucifixes, the waxy Madonnas, the scary saints and their afflictions. In this secular shrine to all that is glorious in human civilization, I can’t help but think of the centuries of fanaticism, serfdom, ignorance, and persecution that marked the Middle Ages in Christian Europe. The Met describes the “elegant articulation of the figures” in an 11th-century Byzantine processional cross; I think of the Crusades and the slaughter of Jews and Muslims.
Which is why I can’t quite account for commentators who celebrate the “Judeo-Christian heritage” and disparage modern-day Islam, as if the mullahs pioneered mediaevalism. The latest example comes from Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the group Toward Tradition, which has long advocated political partnerships between Jewish conservatives and Evangelical Christians. In a strange op-ed, he wonders why last month’s earthquake in Iran cost more than 20,000 lives, while a temblor of “almost identical” magnitude on the California cost a few days earlier killed only two people.
“Dispassionately examined,” writes Lapin, “the evidence suggests a spiritual rather than a seismic explanation for the disparity.” Lapin says he has studied the world’s “20 greatest natural disasters (measured by number of fatalities)” over the past 123 years. Of those, “only three have taken place in nations where Christianity has had a profound influence.”
Rabbi Lapin writes that he is not suggesting that “God dispatches natural disasters to punish those who have not embraced Christianity.” Rather, Western societies shaped by “Judeo-Christian values” are marked by faith in the future, while non-Christian societies languish in fatalism. Non-Christian countries “endure repeated earthquakes and repeated storms yet do little to reduce the successive impact while countries rooted in Christianity invest massively in seawalls, dykes, and other protective infrastructures and preventive measures.”
Lapin goes on to discuss why suicide bombers are less likely to come out of societies that affirm human life, and that Judaism and Christianity are “community-building religions rather than merely tribe-building religions.”
You get the picture, an appealing one in a post-9/11, post-Oslo world. But to tour the Met is to see the fallacy in this argument. As my friend Ami Eden (amieden.org) reminded me when I forwarded him Lapin’s column, “Death tolls in the West only decreased after all those countries in Europe shed their official religious doctrines. I’m sure that the amount of people killed by the plague had much to do with the religiously inspired backwardness of Europe.” In the same vein, I doubt that the Jews who were executed on trumped-up charges of poisoning non-Jewish wells during those plague years considered their Christian neighbors “community-building” and life-affirming.
This isn’t to argue that “all religions are the same.” Islam may not be to blame for deadly earthquakes, but it does seem in need of the kind of upheaval that dragged Christian Europe out of the Dark Ages. To read about Wahhabi Islam’s hold in Saudi Arabia, for example, is to travel back to the 11th century without changing time zones. Just as a Jewish triumphalist like Lapin demonstrates a woeful historical memory, those in the “sameness” camp ignore the current radicalism of many Islamic leaders, the inadequacy of their response to modernity, and the economic hardships — and susceptibility to radicalism — of their followers.
Meanwhile, Jewish triumphalists, including religious “thinkers” who write of the Jews’ inherent superiority to Christians, forget that the things that distinguish us a religion and a people — our scholarship, our commitment to family, our dedication to social justice — developed in contexts of relative powerlessness. We can gloat that Jews haven’t committed genocide or launched fleets in murderous foreign wars. But that was then. The true test of our superiority, if any, began in 1948, when we achieved our own state and powerful army.
So far we have passed that test — not perfectly, but far ahead of any similar state facing similar pressures. In a controversial interview in Ha’aretz, “revisionist” Israeli historian Benny Morris discusses his latest research and concludes that during the War of Independence, there were “far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought,” as well as “many cases of rape.” If true (and the Israeli debate over his research has been rowdy), the episodes are shameful. Still, Morris, perhaps too bluntly for some tastes, asks readers to consider the alternatives. “All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.”
And yet, it is obvious that the test is not over. To meet it, Israel and its supporters in the West will need more than cheerleaders declaring “Our side is better than their side.” We will need an honest accounting of the role religion plays or should play in the decisions of statecraft. We will have to decide by whose standards of behavior we would prefer to be judged and whether we are living up to those standards. Judaism is neither a smug nor a complacent religion. When the prophet Micah describes what God requires — “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” — he wasn’t fooling around.
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/12204/edcoljudeo.html
Judeo-Christian values, and other empty boasts
by Andrew Silow-Carroll
On a rare day off without the kids (we dumped, um, dropped them off with friends), my wife and I made a lightning tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Starting to the left of the Great Hall, we made a counter-clockwise loop that took us through the Greek and Roman galleries; past the arts of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas; into the 20th-century wing; down the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts corridors; and finally to the halls of medieval art.
It’s always this last stop that gives me pause — the graphic crucifixes, the waxy Madonnas, the scary saints and their afflictions. In this secular shrine to all that is glorious in human civilization, I can’t help but think of the centuries of fanaticism, serfdom, ignorance, and persecution that marked the Middle Ages in Christian Europe. The Met describes the “elegant articulation of the figures” in an 11th-century Byzantine processional cross; I think of the Crusades and the slaughter of Jews and Muslims.
Which is why I can’t quite account for commentators who celebrate the “Judeo-Christian heritage” and disparage modern-day Islam, as if the mullahs pioneered mediaevalism. The latest example comes from Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the group Toward Tradition, which has long advocated political partnerships between Jewish conservatives and Evangelical Christians. In a strange op-ed, he wonders why last month’s earthquake in Iran cost more than 20,000 lives, while a temblor of “almost identical” magnitude on the California cost a few days earlier killed only two people.
“Dispassionately examined,” writes Lapin, “the evidence suggests a spiritual rather than a seismic explanation for the disparity.” Lapin says he has studied the world’s “20 greatest natural disasters (measured by number of fatalities)” over the past 123 years. Of those, “only three have taken place in nations where Christianity has had a profound influence.”
Rabbi Lapin writes that he is not suggesting that “God dispatches natural disasters to punish those who have not embraced Christianity.” Rather, Western societies shaped by “Judeo-Christian values” are marked by faith in the future, while non-Christian societies languish in fatalism. Non-Christian countries “endure repeated earthquakes and repeated storms yet do little to reduce the successive impact while countries rooted in Christianity invest massively in seawalls, dykes, and other protective infrastructures and preventive measures.”
Lapin goes on to discuss why suicide bombers are less likely to come out of societies that affirm human life, and that Judaism and Christianity are “community-building religions rather than merely tribe-building religions.”
You get the picture, an appealing one in a post-9/11, post-Oslo world. But to tour the Met is to see the fallacy in this argument. As my friend Ami Eden (amieden.org) reminded me when I forwarded him Lapin’s column, “Death tolls in the West only decreased after all those countries in Europe shed their official religious doctrines. I’m sure that the amount of people killed by the plague had much to do with the religiously inspired backwardness of Europe.” In the same vein, I doubt that the Jews who were executed on trumped-up charges of poisoning non-Jewish wells during those plague years considered their Christian neighbors “community-building” and life-affirming.
This isn’t to argue that “all religions are the same.” Islam may not be to blame for deadly earthquakes, but it does seem in need of the kind of upheaval that dragged Christian Europe out of the Dark Ages. To read about Wahhabi Islam’s hold in Saudi Arabia, for example, is to travel back to the 11th century without changing time zones. Just as a Jewish triumphalist like Lapin demonstrates a woeful historical memory, those in the “sameness” camp ignore the current radicalism of many Islamic leaders, the inadequacy of their response to modernity, and the economic hardships — and susceptibility to radicalism — of their followers.
Meanwhile, Jewish triumphalists, including religious “thinkers” who write of the Jews’ inherent superiority to Christians, forget that the things that distinguish us a religion and a people — our scholarship, our commitment to family, our dedication to social justice — developed in contexts of relative powerlessness. We can gloat that Jews haven’t committed genocide or launched fleets in murderous foreign wars. But that was then. The true test of our superiority, if any, began in 1948, when we achieved our own state and powerful army.
So far we have passed that test — not perfectly, but far ahead of any similar state facing similar pressures. In a controversial interview in Ha’aretz, “revisionist” Israeli historian Benny Morris discusses his latest research and concludes that during the War of Independence, there were “far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought,” as well as “many cases of rape.” If true (and the Israeli debate over his research has been rowdy), the episodes are shameful. Still, Morris, perhaps too bluntly for some tastes, asks readers to consider the alternatives. “All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.”
And yet, it is obvious that the test is not over. To meet it, Israel and its supporters in the West will need more than cheerleaders declaring “Our side is better than their side.” We will need an honest accounting of the role religion plays or should play in the decisions of statecraft. We will have to decide by whose standards of behavior we would prefer to be judged and whether we are living up to those standards. Judaism is neither a smug nor a complacent religion. When the prophet Micah describes what God requires — “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” — he wasn’t fooling around.
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/12204/edcoljudeo.html
Vastaukset 2
Vanhimmat
what you believe is in your heart. Of course that what we are tought to think has a very big influence, but still as Jesus said "who hears my words..." is in your heart. So no matter which which is your religion, if yo have yeyes and ears, if you feel in your heart that something is right even it is not told to be right, for example tha tall people are equal and is a purpose of life to learn to love everybody you are a bit christian also. Have a good time.
Puhutko suomea,
or shall we discuss in English?
Thinking all people are equal and loving everyone can be a Christian thing, and like all religious teaching, it is thus a human thing, and that which ever is humane in being human, I welcome and celebrate. But it is not truthful for Christianity to claim to itself all that is good and fair, when such things existed and do continue to exist also without it and sometimes due to lack of it. Thus you are a bit humanist also.
Heikki