The Psalms and Their Laments as a Resource for Social Healing in, through, and after Pandemic

It is a truism that as we seek social healing from here on in, we will not go back to the way we were, nor can we expect to enter the messianic age. So I suggest that one vital resource is the traditions of lament we know as Jews or Christians. Some – many – of these are shared. If we are ‘two people divided by a common Scripture’, then that common Scripture is evidently unafraid of lament. Of course, there is the nominatively obvious: the Book of Lamentations (Ekhah).[1] But there’s also the Bible’s other great (actually even greater, in terms of size) collection of laments: those within the Book of Psalms (Tehillim).

 

In attending to the Psalms, I am delighted I am in good company, here, within this virtual conference. We will have an “Invitation to Praise” with Psalm 100 in a workshop, later today, and we have the Concluding Plenary tomorrow: “Psalms in the Time of COVID: Prayer that Makes Us Human”. I suggest it is impossible to exhaust the wisdom of the Psalms, and so will continue.

 

The Jewish tradition of course makes great use of Psalms, including as set within the liturgies, and in wider customs. In Christian circles, it’s more complicated.

 

On the one hand, some (e.g. in monastic houses, but not only there) read/pray the psalms through, according to a perpetual cycle. The Rule of St Benedict (early 6^th century) envisages a weekly recital (though not in order). It notes that this is a concession, saying: the ancient Fathers recited the Book every day (Regula 18.22). The Anglican Book of Common Prayer (if you will allow me to focus on my own tradition for brevity’s sake) sets out a monthly (30-day) cycle, in strict order. The modern Church of England lectionary has a 7-week cycle. It is expected that ordained ministers will, other things being equal, stick to one of these cycles. Even this last still commits to reciting and hearing Psalms with remarkable dedication. The only parallel would be the Gospels.  

 

However, that sets up an ideal often observed in the breach. Most Anglicans come to Church on Sundays only. There, there is typically a Psalm, which picks up a theme of the First Reading from the Hebrew Bible. But anecdotal evidence suggests it is often treated as a musical interlude (sung by choir or cantor). I obviously claim that this de facto Christian neglect of the Psalms is regrettable. They are - as others at this conference along with me are also insisting - more honest about the human condition, and about the condition of the person of faith, than many a contemporary hymn/song book.

 

A note on a complication involved in the Christian use of the Psalms. For many Christians, it is emblematic that the psalmist is not only David (and others), but also Jesus. Jesus (on this reading) “recapitulates” the life of humankind, and the life of faith. So we pray the Psalms through Christ, or pray to or alongside Christ through the Psalms. Whether this is the best or even a legitimate way to read the Psalms, even on purely Christian terms, I leave for another place. It emphatically is not the only Christian way. No less a Christian than Calvin said that the Psalms described “the anatomy of the soul” – any soul.[2]

 

It is notoriously difficult to know quite how to categorise the Psalms (whether as lament, praise, royal, penitence, etc). There are no fixed, agreed criteria. Psalms often make radical swerves in theme and mood (and more).[3] But it’s not outrageous to suggest that more than a third of the corpus of the Psalms may be lament. Scholars Waktke, Houston and Moore make this claim,[4] and they go on to cite my old Hebrew teacher, Walter Moberly:

 

the predominance of laments at the very heart of Israel’s prayers means that the problems that give rise to lament are not something marginal or unusual but rather are central to the life of faith… Moreover they show that the experience of anguish and puzzlement... is not a sign of deficient faith, something to be outgrown or put behind one, but rather is intrinsic to the very nature of faith.

 

The scholar I want to move to is Walter Brueggermann, who in his 1984 book, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary,[5] speaks powerfully to our theme. He holds the Psalms in the highest regard:

 

The book of Psalms provides the most reliable theological, pastoral, and liturgical resource given us in the biblical tradition… a genuinely dialogical literature that expresses both sides of the conversation of faith. (15)

 

Crucially, he proposes a movement between three states:

 

1.     Orientation.
Human life consists in satisfied seasons of well-being that evoke gratitude for the constancy of blessing. (19)

2.     Disorientation.
Human life consists in anguished seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering, and death. These evoke rage, resentment, self-pity and hatred… This speech, the lament, has a recognizable shape that permits the extravagance, hyperbole, and abrasiveness needed for the experience. (19)

3.       New orientation.

Human life consists in turns of surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair. (19)

Each mode can be anything from deeply personal-and-intimate to societal and national.

 

These are not three stages, at least not in any simple way. There is not a linear movement, nor a simple cycle. Rather, they form a complex, organic network. The point is really the constant movement. There is no stasis; one is always moving either from orientation to disorientation, or from disorientation to new orientation.

 

Brueggermann on this basis commends the Psalms to all:

 

In a society that… grows numb by avoidance and denial, it is important to recover and use these Psalms that speak the truth about us – in terms of the governance of God…

 

The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organised to prevent the experience of both. (22, emphasis original)

 

We may think that this societal strategy has been threatened if not broken by the pandemic. But, even if so, that does not mean it will not rise again.

 

Arguably frustratingly, the Psalms give no content on how the new, wiser orientation concretely differs from the old, naive orientation. Brueggermann is clear that one psalm can be either or both, depending on what the reader brings (22). Again, they present no technique for living life in the healing of the new orientation. They tend to offer either lament, pure, or lament embedded in praise, including, as mentioned above, with the most sudden swerves from one to the other. These “swerving” psalms may be read as:

(a) containing an untold but implied story of problems solved, restoration granted, or

(b) of the psalmist’s decision to return to praise - anyway, nevertheless – “for the sheer heaven of it”, as it were.

We are not told which, and so we are not told which is the better approach.

  

I suggest we are simply (though not easily) invited to immerse ourselves in the streams (torrents?) of the movements mentioned above, moving from inauthentic orientation to authentic disorientation to authentic new orientation, all the time in intimate, familiar, familial, tensive dialogue with Gd, if only because (the praxis presupposes) we know that, when it comes to the big questions of justice and flourishing in this world, Gd is the ultimate interlocutor, with whom we just plain have to do.

 

Appendix

 

I had also been invited to speak more personally on the theme, but time prevented any serious autobiography. In the talk as given, I spoke of Psalm 137, saying that in my own way, I have made Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon”) my own Psalm of lament, in my prayers. This long predates the pandemic. I pray: “Gd, hear my lament, and cause me to make a good lament”, and then I recite. Ps 137 has its own challenges, supremely, its violent and vindictive ending. Tackling that would take a Workshop in its own right, and more. So I focused instead on the Psalm’s wistful-mournfulness: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither”. It happens that I have been at my happiest in Jerusalem (and I mean the physical place). So here is yet another way in which a psalm may resonate.

 

In the course of preparing the paper, I found myself drawn to Psalm 12, somewhat to my surprise. In this Psalm, it is manifestly clear that there is no resolution. The objective plight of the psalmist is exactly as bad in the last verse as in the first. Evil rules the roost. Words are twisted (surely a problem, for us as for them, before, during and after Covid). But Gd speaks into this. Not in abstract ways, but quite concretely. ‘I will rise up now’ says Gd, because Gd has heard the concrete cries of these concrete persons. Without any resolution, we are perhaps being invited to consider whether it makes any difference.

 

After the Hebrew, I offer a translation used liturgically in the Church of England (Common Worship)[6]. The reader/pray-er is encouraged to pause at the diamond.

 

Psalm 21, Massoretic Text, vv 2-9

 

 ² הוֹשִׁ֣יעָה יְ֭הוָה כִּי־גָמַ֣ר חָסִ֑יד כִּי־פַ֥סּוּ אֱ֜מוּנִ֗ים מִבְּנֵ֥י אָדָֽם׃

 ³ שָׁ֤וְא׀ יְֽדַבְּרוּ֮ אִ֤ישׁ אֶת־רֵ֫עֵ֥הוּ שְׂפַ֥ת חֲלָק֑וֹת בְּלֵ֖ב וָלֵ֣ב יְדַבֵּֽרוּ׃

 ⁴ יַכְרֵ֣ת יְ֭הוָה כָּל־שִׂפְתֵ֣י חֲלָק֑וֹת לָ֜שׁ֗וֹן מְדַבֶּ֥רֶת גְּדֹלֽוֹת׃

 ⁵ אֲשֶׁ֤ר אָֽמְר֙וּ׀ לִלְשֹׁנֵ֣נוּ נַ֭גְבִּיר שְׂפָתֵ֣ינוּ אִתָּ֑נוּ מִ֖י אָד֣וֹן לָֽנוּ׃

 ⁶ מִשֹּׁ֥ד עֲנִיִּים֮ מֵאַנְקַ֪ת אֶבְי֫וֹנִ֥ים עַתָּ֣ה אָ֭קוּם יֹאמַ֣ר יְהוָ֑ה אָשִׁ֥ית בְּ֜יֵ֗שַׁע יָפִ֥יחַֽ לֽוֹ׃

 ⁷ אִֽמֲר֣וֹת יְהוָה֮ אֲמָר֪וֹת טְהֹ֫ר֥וֹת כֶּ֣סֶף צָ֭רוּף בַּעֲלִ֣יל לָאָ֑רֶץ מְ֜זֻקָּ֗ק שִׁבְעָתָֽיִם׃

 ⁸ אַתָּֽה־יְהוָ֥ה תִּשְׁמְרֵ֑ם תִּצְּרֶ֓נּוּ׀ מִן־הַדּ֖וֹר ז֣וּ לְעוֹלָֽם׃

9סָבִ֗יב רְשָׁעִ֥ים יִתְהַלָּכ֑וּן כְּרֻ֥ם זֻ֜לּ֗וּת לִבְנֵ֥י אָדָֽם׃

 

 

Psalm 12

1.       Help me, Lord, for no one godly is left;  ♦

the faithful have vanished from the whole human race.

2.      They all speak falsely with their neighbour;  ♦

they flatter with their lips, but speak from a double heart.

3.      O that the Lord would cut off all flattering lips  ♦

and the tongue that speaks proud boasts!

4.      Those who say, ‘With our tongue will we prevail;  ♦

our lips we will use; who is lord over us?’

5.      Because of the oppression of the needy,

and the groaning of the poor,  ♦

I will rise up now,’ says the Lord,

‘and set them in the safety that they long for.’

6.      The words of the Lord are pure words,  ♦

like silver refined in the furnace

and purified seven times in the fire.

7.      You, O Lord, will watch over us  ♦

and guard us from this generation for ever.

8.      The wicked strut on every side,  ♦

when what is vile is exalted by the whole human race.

 

The Rev’d Patrick Morrow

A version (with supplementary material) of a paper delivered within the Theology Committee Workshop of the Virtual Conference of The International Council of Christians and Jews, 22 June, 2021. 

---

[1] Liturgically minded Jews of course honour this, and chant it in majestic and mournful fulness, on Tisha B’Av, which marks the destruction of both Temples, and other catastrophes. In the Western Christian liturgical tradition (by which I mean principally Roman Catholic but also daring to add my own tradition, the Anglican) they are most used in Holy Week. In this, they can feed into the unhappy history of Holy Week vis-à-vis Jewish-Christian relations (by magnifying the strain of guilt in the Book as Jewish guilt). But, in any event, it does not have great prominence. I think most Church of England people will be most familiar with Lamentations through 3.22f: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness”, which, while good news, is scarcely a summary of the book as a whole. These words are popular at - and indeed set for - Church of England funerals.

 

[2] Cited by Brueggermann, Walter, 1984, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, Augsburg, Minneapolis, 17, as from Calvin’s Preface to his Commentary on the Book of Psalms. Brueggermann himself proposes maximal overlap for the Christian reader/prayer: all of “(a) focal movements of Christian faith (crucifixion and resurrection), (b) decisive inclinations of Jewish piety (suffering and hope), (c) psalmic expressions that are most recurrent (lament and praise), and (d) seasons in our own life of dying and being raised. “ 22.

[3] One parallel swerve which can make translation awkward is in grammatical person, moving from second to third person and back, or with the first person moving between Gd and the one praying.

It is my habit to write God “Gd”, since I have been convinced by R. Kendall Soulen that the Christian practice of writing nomina sacra in abbreviated form (DS for Deus, etc.) is not a practical matter but a form of reverence for the Divine which parallels Jewish practice. See Soulen, R. Kendall, 2011, The Divine Name(s) and Holy Trinity: Distinguishing the Voices, Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 31ff.

[4] Waltke, B. K., Houston J. M. & Moore, E.. 2014, The Psalms as Christian Lament: A Historical Commentary Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1.

[5] Op cit. Brueggermann owns his debt to Gunkel, Mowinkel, and Westermann, especially Westermann.

[6] © Archbishops’ Council, 2000. Note that as a liturgical text, this translation does not include the Psalms’ ‘superscriptions’. Hence the difference in verse numbers.

Sermon. Advent 3. Redeeming "Lo, He Comes"

Sermon. 15 December 2019. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Advent 3 (Gaudete), Year A

·       Matthew 11.2-11

Here’s a simple summary of where we are today:

·       We have lit a candle, which people often call “the pink candle for Our Lady”.

·       That said, that is wrong.

·       It is the rose candle for our joy, because a traditional service would begin with a call to rejoice (Gaudete!).

·       That said, we don’t do that.

·       That said, the theme linked to the candle is not Mary, nor joy, but John the Baptist.

·       That said, we were already introduced to John the Baptist last week.

·       That said, we might be invited to introduce Our Lady today, if we had chosen the canticle, the great Magnificat.

·       That said, she is not the theme and the candle is not hers!

Confused? Brothers and sisters, every Western Christian is surely confused by this great pile-up of themes. Worry not; take from it what speaks to you.

But, any way, there is something confusing about the hero of today’s candle, John the Baptist. He is difficult, and confusing. Consider what might sound like an easy question: Was John the Baptist a Christian? He was and is a saint, but was he ever a Christian? And this doesn’t mean: Was he a churchman who was baptised in the name of the Trinity and recited the creed? We know none of that applies; such things developed centuries after his death. But really the question is: Did he ever become a follower of Jesus? In today’s gospel it is clear that he is considering becoming a disciple. But we are not told whether he actually did. Did he welcome the answer to his question: “Are you the one who is to come?”, or did he find it evasive? We are not told.

So Saint John is often – and not wrongly – presented as one of the principal bridging characters. He bridges the Old and New Testaments. He bridges (for Christians) the Judaism of the Old Testament and the Second Temple and the emergent Christianity of the Jesus Community. This means, while it might be controversial, it’s not wrong to think of John the Baptist as a Jewish but not a Christian saint.  

The Jewish saint, John the Baptist… Yes! Yes, you are right in supposing I do want us to reflect on Christian approaches to Jews and Judaism. (No apologies for that.) But I am going to do so via what you may well think of diversion.

By a diversion, I mean I want us to think about… the hymn we will sing at the end of this service. That hymn is Lo, He Comes. It is a great hymn, in many ways one of my favourites. But I do have problems with it. They relate wholly to the second verse. Let me remind you:

            Every eye shall now behold him

            robed in dreadful majesty;

            those who set at naught and sold him,

            pierced and nailed him to the Tree,

            deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,

            shall the true Messiah see.

I can see that you will enjoy singing it. Many do. How often do we get to sing about wailing, in church, to a powerful, Wesleyan tune? Only really here. But! But I feel a need to say that the problem with this verse is this: the most natural subject in mind, for “those who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree” are… Jews, and even “the Jews”. And that is wrong, and that is bad, and even wicked. Wicked, because the underlying theme here is: at the second coming, most of humanity will rejoice, but the Jews will be found out and blamed for killing their Messiah; all they will get to do is wail for their sins.

“[T]hose who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree”. Yes, I know that a historian will say: that’s not the Jews; that must mean the Romans. Historically, the Roman overlords, in all their well-reported brutality, were responsible for the killing of Jesus. The trouble with that is that the Romans had no concept at all of a Messiah. To say to ancient Romans: “Here at last is your true Messiah! Wail!” would mean literally nothing to them.

“[T]hose who set at naught and sold him/pierced and nailed him to the Tree”. Yes, I know that a good preacher or theologian will say: that’s not the Jews; that is us, all of us. When we sin, we set in train the spiritual dis-ease which ultimately leads to the killing of Jesus. It’s good theology, but again, it doesn’t work here. It’s really the same point (though this is a harder claim to make). I am going to say that “Messiah” isn’t a Christian word. (Many, many apologies to Handel; it is certainly a Handelian word!) Messiah is an English version of the Hebrew word, Mashiach. But Christians (as their name suggests) overwhelmingly use “Christ”, the English version of the Greek word, Christos.

They both mean the same thing. They mean “anointed”, “the Anointed One”. But still the Christian preference for “Christ” over “Messiah is clear. It is clear in the New Testament, where the word Messias occurs how many times? Only twice [Jn 1.42, 4.25]. (The “Messiah” in today’s gospel is the translator’s interpretation of the Greek “Christos”.) It is clear in all our hymn books. It is clear in this hymn book [Common Praise]. You look for mentions of “Messiah”; you will find few. So, again, we are given a real nudge to think not of ourselves, but of the Jews, others, over there.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that when you sing, you consciously think: “the Jews killed Christ and this is about how they’ll get their comeuppance”. This is not a conscious thing. But we do have to have some historical awareness.

We do have to face clearly that from very early days, Christians have been saying “the Jews killed Christ”. And (even worse) not just a particular group of Jews, in Jerusalem around 33 AD. No. All Jews, everywhere, throughout time and space.[1] The Jewish people as a people have this guilt.

It was around – it was preached in sermon and sung in liturgy – already towards the end of the second century. Great saints like John Chrysostom (349-407) in the East and Augustine (354-430) in the West proclaimed it proudly. Martin Luther (1483-1546) also became increasingly insistent that it is so. It’s hard for us to hear this. But the historians are clear. They even speak of a “teaching of contempt”.[2] It’s not wrong to say that it has been as-natural-as-breathing for even great Christians to teach contempt for Jewish people.

It follows that we do need to go out of our way – we really need to go out of our way – to make sure we are not teaching or even hinting at that contempt now. And - in that context - to sing: “those who set at naught, and nailed him to the Tree, deeply wailing, shall the true Messiah see” must surely leave something of a bitter taste. You cannot not know that you are being given that nudge – whether directly or subliminally – to think that “the Jews killed Christ”.  

Fortunately, we do not have to abandon this otherwise lovely hymn. Nor does it need rewriting in any complicated fashion. What we can do is simply change one word, one syllable.

We can sing instead: “We who set at naught and sold him…”. That brings us back to the good, healthy theology I mentioned before. It is our sins which ultimately lead to the death of Christ. We should wail – deeply wail – that sorry state of affairs, always safe in the knowledge that we will be forgiven and restored. What is not to like?

So, brothers and sisters, I am going to encourage and, yes, urge you to do that, and not to please me (nor even to shut me up), but because it is a change that tells the gospel, that “speaks Christian” better than what is actually written in the hymn-book: “We [not “those over there” but “we over here”] who set at naught and sold him…”.

You may object on any number of grounds.

·       You may say you don’t understand what I’ve said. Please tell us this. Your preachers need to know if and how and when they are being understood, and this is a natural time for a review of our preaching.

·       You may say I have made claims but not brought much evidence. That is true. It has been (I know) a long sermon without “putting the quotes” in. But I can provide the quotations and statistics, if we seek some more teaching.

·       You may say that I’ve just preached on my hobby, my hobby-horse, Judaism. To that I want to say gently but clearly: No. To be a Christian is to engage in Jewish-Christian relations, even if we never meet a Jew. Our Scriptures, are all (or almost all) written by Jews, and are drenched in Jewish themes, like Israel, election, Hebrew heroes of faith, the hope of the prophets, and more.

·       You may say (most likely option, I’d say) that I’m a pedant! You don’t think about what you sing anything like as carefully as I’ve presupposed, and I should get over myself. To that I also say gently but clearly: No. It is precisely what we find ourselves saying or singing, without any need to reflect on it, that tells us what we truly believe. What we need to reflect on, we are still in some ways weighing up. What just launch forth into with gusto, that is what we have uncomplicatedly signed up to. That is worthy of our attention, from time to time.

Here I do finish. Please notice that I am not at all saying: We need to water down what we believe and sing, for fear of giving offence to Jews or others. I am a million miles from saying that. I am saying that here that, given how Christian history has unfolded, we have a chance and a need to improve what we sing, so that we can become better, more truthful, more authentic, and, yes, more orthodox Christians.

“We who set at naught and sold him,

            pierced and nailed him to the Tree,

            deeply wailing,

            shall the true Messiah see”

            and He will love us, forgive us, heal us,

            and give us what we need

to love and heal ourselves, heal others,

and bring and be reconciliation throughout the world.

Amen. 

---

[1] Perhaps starting with Melito of Sardis, d 180.

[2] Coined by Jules Isaac (1877-1963)

How to Fail at Jewish-Christian Relations

HOW TO FAIL AT JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

TALK TO THE WOODROFFE SOCIETY 

OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD,

6 NOVEMBER 2017

For reasons which will become only too obvious, I’d like to speak on how to Fail at Jewish-Christian Relations (JCR), this from the Christian side of things. 

I begin with an anecdote that doesn’t involve me, but which is true. Rabbi Julia Neuberger tells of giving a talk at a Christian seminary. At the end, a seminarian said: “I myself have no problem with woman rabbis.” Rabbi Neuberger smiled, and thought: “That’s nice, but what’s it to you?” “But,” the young man continued: “What about the sacrifices? Are you physically strong enough to perform the sacrifices.” The good rabbi confided: “I came very close to saying: ‘It’s alright unless they struggle’”. But instead she explained to the Christian at necessary length how rabbinic Judaism is different from the religion of the Old Testament, that home and synagogue (or shul) had well and truly replaced the Temple, and prayer and learning had replaced sacrifice. 

That seminarian has done us all a favour. For we will all fail at JCR if we allow ourselves to think that Judaism is the religion of the Old Testament. One powerful introduction which both your chaplain and I once heard, from an Orthodox rabbi, [Rabbi Norman Solomon) began with the Mishnah, the first rabbinic document, compiled around 200 CE, consisting largely of legal details absent from the Scriptures themselves. And increasingly one is encouraged to think of Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions. After all, after the Mishnah (200 CE) there were a good three centuries before the Talmud (in two versions, Babylonian and Palestinian) was itself completed, and it is on the Talmud that much later Judaism rests. In other words, the rabbis (or, within the family, Chazal, chachamim zikhronam livrekhah - our Sages, may their memory be blessed) were giving definitive shape to Judaism as we know it - in precisely those days when the Church Fathers were giving shape to Christianity, through councils and creeds. In Roman Catholic circles, it is now commonplace to speak of the Jewish People as “our elder brother”. Precisely how much older is not the point. That is more a nod to the understanding that Judaism has a more direct link at least to aspects of the Hebrew tradition which is our common ancestor. [It is not a term without its own difficulties. Jews, knowing the biblical stories, know that the elder brother often loses out to the younger.]

In saying that Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament, I have brought us into another way to fail at this relationship. I was once speaking to a Jewish audience about modern Catholic approaches to Judaism. (Does Pope Francis think that Jews are “Anonymous Christians”? was the title, with more than a nod to Karl Rahner.) As I was outlining some of the recent texts, I mentioned, with heavy, heavy scare-marks “the Old Testament”, as that is the language both used and defended in the Catholic documents. Still, in questions, someone - an extremely gentle, gentleman who I consider a friend - gently insisted that that language was offensive. This because for Jews it is the only Testament, and is in no sense old, in the sense of needing modernising, replacing, or fading away. 

There are ironies here. What I have just been saying about Judaism and Christianity as sibling religions can be reframed thus: neither faith treats the Hebrew Scriptures as complete in themselves. For Christians, they are completed by the New Testament. For Jews, they are complemented by the later Mishnah and Talmud and stories in the form of midrash. This latter set is called “the Oral Law” or “the Oral Torah” (Torah she-be-al-peh) alongside the Written Torah (Torah bikhtav). Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner speaks of rabbinic religion as being the Judaism of the Dual Torah, on this basis. Another point: one thing orthodox Christians certainly do not mean by calling the First Testament “Old” is that it is worn out or passing away. In orthodoxy it is axiomatic that it remains Revelation. And that one Gd is revealed from Genesis to Revelation. That the “God of the Old Testament” is war-like and judgemental is one of the earliest Christian heresies (Marcionism) even though it is a popular trope in wider culture. I sometimes make the point this way: it would be better if we spoke of “the Original Testament”, that would convey more about the interaction between the two Testaments.

But we must turn from these lighter matters to more weighty ones. I have to say you will fail at JCR if you think you can say anything wholly right about Jewish belief. There is a book, author Menachem Kellner, entitled Must a Jew Believe Anything? The majority report is No. A Jew is one who identifies as belonging to the Jewish People and typically does, or tries to do, Jewish things, around circumcision, diet, the day of rest, and of course ethics and compassion. If you go to shul (synagogue) and try to speak of Gd, it is not at all unlikely that you will meet someone who says, “But I don’t believe in Gd”. Again, if you were to try to convert, it is likely you will be asked all kinds of questions about your kitchen, and how you spend your Saturdays. But it is unlikely you will be asked about your belief in Gd. 

There are different layers here. For some, in synagogue as in college, only the Dawkins’ definition of Gd counts. That is: Gd as an item within the universe, who, if he existed, could be examined and analysed like any other item in the universe, so that the statement “that there exists at least one supernatural being” is the one to be tested. Well, that is as far from the orthodox Christian understanding of what “belief in God” is as it is the traditional Jewish one. For others, it is quite specifically the Holocaust, or the Shoah which destroyed faith in Gd, Gd as benign. Before the Shoah, the mainstream idea was that Gd would indeed allow the Jewish people to suffer and even endure persecution for the sake of Gd, but would never abandon them or let them be destroyed. That kind of “covenant” seemed to burn in the ovens of Auschwitz, to many. But, over and above these points, it is the case that faith or belief play a different role in Judaism than in most forms of Christianity. 

In Christianity, the creed is recited solemnly in the middle of the eucharist and at other times. In Orthodoxy, according to the letter of the text, catechumens are sent out before it is recited, such is its mystery and power. We may insist that to say “We believe in Gd the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit,” the “believing” in question is more about trust, or even giving your heart to Gd-so-named, than it is about accepting a quasi-scientific proposition, but this only emphasises the importance of the creed. In Judaism, there is no creed as such. There are the 13 Principles of the Rambam (Maidonides) which have much of the feel of a creed. They refer to Gd as creator, as one, as eternal, as incorporeal, and to Moses as unequalled Prophet and Torah as revelation. But these are recited right at the end of the service, really as a jolly little tune. Certainly, one can be a very devout and observant Jew and take issue with many or most of the Principles. 

That said, it has happened time and again to me that I have heard a Jew say “we Jews don’t really do theology; that feels like abstraction and surmise to us” after they have actually just offered some truly beautiful theology, or interpretation of a Bible story. The joke is that to be Jewish you don't have to believe in Gd, you just have to obey Gd. But there is no doubt that that obedience involves worship, praising Gd, thanking Gd, asking for good things from Gd. And (a different point) the distinction between “Orthodox” and “Progressive” Judaism is theoretically at least a matter of doctrine, whether all of the Written Torah is direct revelation from heaven. So I would say that Judaism has to do with Gd as much as Christianity does, and so by extension with belief. But the framework for any reflecting on Gd is that one is not in a school of faith, but a school of interpretation, where all questions can constantly be asked.

If it is hard to know whether or how to speak of Gd in JCR, it is at least as hard to speak of Israel. A former director of the Council of Christians and Jews tells of giving a talk about the eucharist, and its resonances with Jewish practice. The first question was indeed on the bread and the wine. But the second was on the State of Israel and its actions. And this happened again and again. She ended up “biting the bullet” and setting up the Forum for the Discussion on Israel-Palestine, with Jews, Christians and Muslims integral to the task. The scope for misunderstanding is great. In the first place, it is always worth checking whether a Jewish person is speaking of the person, Jacob-Israel, the People Israel (Am Yisrael) or the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) or the State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael). 

When it comes to the State and its policies, there is no one position that is the Jewish one. Debate on all aspects is fierce and complex. It happens that a clear majority of Jews in this country do support “the two state solution” and are typically against the settlements. But the bigger picture and the smaller details are all disputed. 

By no means do all Jews identify as Zionist. Some indeed do say that they are anti-Zionist on religious grounds; they believe Jews cannot have full power in the land before Messiah comes. For others, the grounds would be that they are against all nationalisms. Others would be non-Zionist, simply believing that the heart of their Judaism lies elsewhere. 

However, the vast majority would want to insist that Zionism is not a dirty word; Zionism is an honourable position, even for Jews who do not share it. Zionism is simply the view that the Jews are a people like all all peoples, and that as such the Jewish people are as entitled to self-determination as any other people, and that, at least since 1948 this has meant self-determination in the form of the nation state of Israel. This is felt, as much as it is thought about. Amos Oz writes movingly about his father talking to him on the day independence was declared. His father says he should rejoice. They now lived in a country where no one (no fellow-citizen) would humiliate or attack them simply for being a Jew. They were, in the ordinary sense of the word, safe.  

Notice that in giving this account of Zionism I had no recourse to talk of Gd. Indeed, before the Second World War Zionism was secular in the main, and often expressly socialist. Think of the kibbutzim. But after the war, for obvious reasons, religious Jews were also as drawn to Zionism. So indeed often reference is made to the centrality of the Land in the Bible, and of the longing for Zion expressed time and again in the Jewish liturgy. Beyond that, some even think about the refounding of the nation in the Land as miracle, as the dawn of redemption, as messianic at least in embryo. But this is by no means the only way to be a religious Zionist.

I do believe it is true that in discussions with Jews one can indeed criticise any aspect of Israeli politics. Just be aware that Zionism to your partner does not mean “what Netanyahu and those to the right of him do” but an honourable and broad network of ideas. And also be aware that Christianity has a long and ignoble history of valorising Jewish powerlessness. Think of the wandering Jew of St Augustine’s thinking, destined to wander the earth without power or dignity, for killing Christ and rejecting Gd. This has played no small part in the ongoing relationship. So Jews will be suspicious if they pick up a sense that Jews or Israelis are being held to a standard no other people must keep, as if Jews are uniquely to be distrusted with power, always on probation as it were. But over and above all of that, just don’t approach any Jew (who is not already a friend), and expect them either to defend Israeli policies in the light of your objections, or for that matter to disassociate themselves from them, for your convenience. 

Speaking about Jesus Christ is a good way to fail at JCR. I am not thinking so much of the question: “why did you Jews not accept Jesus as the Messiah?” I assume we can all see how, within the Jewish framing of things, Jesus does not figure. Jews did not “reject” Jesus any more than Christians have “rejected” Muhammad, or Baha’ullah, or Joseph Smith. I am thinking of what really prompted my title today. In the (otherwise) excellent book edited by Rabbi Tony Bayfield, Deep Calls to Deep, I have a chapter seeking to set out the orthodox creedal position on Jesus Christ - the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity - in ways that made sense to Jews. I drew heavily on John Zizioulas’ work, Being as Communion. I said that rather than think of the classical creeds as the Hellenisation of Christianity, they can be thought of as the biblicisation of Hellenism, i.e. bringing Hebraic ideas right into the heart of Hellenistic religion. The core conviction being: whereas in Hellenism, Gd, or the Most Real, is always distant from us, and our point of contact can only be indirect, via emanation after emanation, the Biblical understanding, shared by Jews and Christians, is that when one meets with Gd, it really is Gd one meets, Gd as Gd is Gd. Gd is not distant, but with us as-it-were as Agent. Christians and Jews, then, disagree about where one meets with Gd most centrally (at Sinai or at Calvary), but still share more in common than is usually thought. I drew secondarily on the work of Daniel Boyarin, who insisted that in some strands of Second Temple Judaism, a heavenly messiah was already thinkable, as found in some interpretations of the Son of Man in Daniel. I did not win any of my Jewish readers round, at all. Maybe it was because of the difficulty of comparing Christian belief with Jewish “belief” at all. Maybe it was the Boyarin reference, where I was giving two much credibility to fringe or heretical Jewish texts. I don’t know. 

Much more could be said. For rabbinic Jews, the Pharisees are the forerunners of the rabbis, and are heroes, and liberal reformers. To criticise any view as “Pharisaical” will win you no friends. Jews also tend to reject any teaching of “original sin” and of “salvation”, if “salvation” is taken to mean rescue from damnation. But, over and above all such details, Jews are very much aware of the power-imbalance in the relationship. There are well over a billion Christians in the world, under 20 million Jews. About half this nation identifies as Christian, about 0.5% as Jewish. And Christians have, let me put this delicately, played to their numerical strength, in persecuting Jews, and not least in setting up false “disputations” where the Jew was always bound to lose to the Christian. 

But I leave you not on that note, but on this one. My sense is that JCR are bound to fail, if by success we imagine a state of being where each fully understands the other. I can describe my involvement only as an oscillation, where I move from thinking “we are at heart the same”, to “no, we are very different”, and back again. Cardinal Kasper has called Judaism “as a sacrament of every otherness”. [Address on the 37th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate, 2002] As such, it is a mystery we can never wholly understand. I say, with my best Hebrew, Amen.