Evening honoring Amos Oz and his new book

I am neither a writer nor a literary critic. It is rather embarrassing to stand before you and speak but I will take this opportunity to thank Amos Oz for his new book. I enjoyed every moment I spent reading it. I speak from the margins – an Israeli, Catholic priest – and I spent a lot of time reflecting on which theme among the many that arose during the reading of the book I should relate to this evening. I decided that because of the importance of the relations between Jews and Christians as opposed to the relations between Israelis and Palestinians, I will focus on this.

Gershom Wald, a central character in the book, speaks over and over again about the relations between Jews and Christians. Let us listen to his words in one of his early conversations with Shmuel Asch. “After all, not everyone can just get up in the morning, brush his teeth, drink a cup of coffee and kill God! In order to kill God, the killer has to be even stronger than the god and must be so very malicious and evil, almost without limits. Jesus the Nazarene, a warm divinity who radiates love, whoever murdered him needs to be stronger than him as well as cunning and despicable. Those accursed killers of God are talented to be killers of god only on condition that they are endowed with monstrous powers of strength and evil. The Jews are just like that in the basement of the imagination of the Jew hater. We are all Judas Iscariot.” (p. 46) Towards the end of the book, Wald continues in the same tone and explains to Shmuel, “the conflict between us and the Muslim Arabs is nothing but a fleeting episode in history, a short and passing moment… In another fifty, hundred or two hundred years no one will even remember it. But what is between us and the Christians is a deep and dark matter and will likely endure for another hundred generations. As long as they teach their infants with their mothers’ milk that there are still God killing creatures walking about, or the descendants of the murderers of God, we will have no rest”. (pp. 257-258).

A grim and painful history! However, today, I can cry out together with the last six Popes that it is indeed grim and tragic. I can read the lines Oz has written without trying to defend myself and my Church. Rather I can come with all humility and ask forgiveness for the betrayal… to admit the terrible betrayal by Christians of the gospel of love preached by a Jew from Nazareth. How could we have forgotten the debt of gratitude towards the people who gave us Jesus, for the Sacred Scriptures that have become our common heritage. This year, we celebrate the jubilee year, fifty years since the publication of a document that changed the face of the Church. The year of Oz’s narrative is 1959. Nowhere is it mentioned in the book that this was the second year of the pontificate of Pope John XXIII, known as “John the Good” by his many admirers, including many Jews. During the dark years of the years of the Shoah, he saved thousands of Jews. In 1962, he convened a world gathering of all the heads of the Church and it continued for three years. Before this Council, he met with the renown French Jewish historian, Jules Isaac and asked him what a Jew like him, a survivor of the Shoah, would expect from a world Council of the Catholic Church. Isaac presented the Pope with his research on anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism that were rife before the Second World War. The Pope took upon himself the task of changing the way the Church speaks about Jews. One of the most significant documents that was published in 1965, at the end of the Council, was Nostra Aeatate (our times) which determined that it was impermissible to blame the Jews everywhere and in every generation for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth but rather that it is an obligation to remember the Jewish identity of Jesus, his disciples and the early Church. Likewise, it is an obligation not forget the shared heritage of the Church and the Jewish people in the sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament. Furthermore, in the expectation of the coming of the Messiah (a first coming or a second one?), Christians and Jews can and should work together to repair the broken world. There is a magnificent prayer, attributed to Pope John XXIII that I would like to read in order to illustrate the dramatic change in discourse:

O God, we are conscious

that many centuries of blindness

have blinded our eyes

so that we no longer see the beauty

of your Chosen People.

Across the centuries

our Jewish brothers and sisters

have lain in the blood which we drew

or caused to be shed

by forgetting your love.

Forgive us for the curse

we falsely attached

to their name as Jews.

Forgive us

for crucifying you a second time

in their flesh.

For we knew not what we did. Amen

I cannot but meditate on what might be the connection between the enormous revolution in the discourse and attitude of the Church with regard to the Jews that took place in the second half of the 20th century and the relations between Israelis and Palestinians, also very present in Oz’s novel and in his thinking. The connection between these two systems of relations is vital for our future here. Can we, as Israelis, listen a little more closely to the voice of Shealtiel Abarbanel, which rises from the grave throughout the book. I quote here Atalia, who raises the memory of her father: “His many conversations with his Arab friends brought him to the realization that there is, in fact, enough space for two communities and it would be best that they exist side by side or one within the other without the structure of a state. To exist as a mixed community or the integration of two communities that does not threaten the future of either one of them. However, maybe you are right. Maybe, all of you are right. Perhaps, he really was a naïve person. Perhaps it was best that what happened is what you did here, tens of thousands went to the slaughter and hundreds of thousands went into exile… two peoples consumed by hate and poison and both emerge from the war filled with revenge and self-righteousness. Entire rivers of revenge and self-righteousness. And because of an excess of righteousness, the country is covered with graveyards and sown with the ruins of hundreds of poor villages that once were, were erased and are no more.” (p. 193) Can we listen, internalize and change our discourse through understanding the pain… Betrayal is not only of the Arabs who lost their homeland but also of the history of a long suffering people that endangers itself with the temptation of power and control.

As a cleric and a believer, I meditate on betrayal in order to repent and renew my trust and my faith. Perhaps, I too am naïve like Shealtiel Abarbanel and Oz’s “Judas”. The way of faith – I believe – is not naiveté but rather the endurance and patience to wait for the third day and to experience the resurrection, the act of a God, faithful to His promises. Thank you Amos Oz for this book that challenges me, my faith and obliges me to contemplate my betrayals.