Q: Dear Rabbi Gellman, bravo, bravo and thank you for your cogent lessons on the relationship between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter. I spent my high school years in the seminary studying for the Catholic priesthood (in the ’60s, so I am old). We were taught, and I have never forgotten, that our Jewish brethren are literally our older brothers in faith and that without Judaism, there clearly would be no Christianity. I just would like to expand, if I may, on your wonderful and very important observations.
While the English word “Easter” is derived most likely from the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre, the romance languages call it Pâques and Pasqua, French and Italian, respectively, all deriving from the Latin Pascha, which clearly is derived from the Hebrew Pesach, or Passover.
Our Jewish brothers commemorate the deliverance of the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt with the Passover meal and marked their doorposts with the blood of a lamb to spare them the last of the plagues, death to the firstborn of every household not protected by the blood of a lamb. Moses then led the Israelites through the waters of the Red Sea from their bondage and slavery in Egypt to their new lives in the Promised Land. We were taught that Christ was the new Moses, the Lamb of God who saves Christians from the death of sin and who, through the waters of Baptism, leads the Christian from the bondage and slavery of sin to eternal life.
There are so many more parallels — the 40 years/days wandering in the wilderness, Moses receiving the Law on Mount Sinai and Christ with his Sermon on the Mount. As a young student, I was amazed at these parallels and could have nothing but awe and respect for the Jewish faith because it gave birth to the Christian faith. So how can we tolerate the evils of antisemitism without casting aspersions on the Christian faith? Our citing of St. Paul and Corinthians put it best: There are different gifts, but the same Spirit. How beautiful and faith-affirming. We need to be reminded of these similarities much more frequently because this sad world in which we are living still propagates hatred and antisemitism.
It is quite clear that no one who considers himself a Christian should be harboring such pernicious sentiments. Thank you so much for your wisdom, a much-needed quality in a world that seems to lack it so terribly. Chag Pesach Sameach! With gratitude. — From F
Thanks, dear F, for your very kind words. Your observations about the theological foolishness of Christians hating Jews was particularly apt in this time of rising antisemitism.
People forget that although Christianity bears some obvious guilt for supporting antisemitism through its teaching that Jews supported or demanded the killing of Jesus, by far the largest and most virulent antisemitism came from non-religious sources. Hitler was not a religious man. Stalin was not a religious man. Mao was not a religious man. The reason for the virulence of secular antisemitism, as compared to Christian antisemitism, is that Christianity did not want Jews killed. Christianity wanted Jews to convert. Secular antisemites had no use for Jews, and so their only mission was to kill them. Today, secular communists and fascists are a much greater danger to Jews than religious Christians.
Antisemitism in Islam is a complicated case. On the one hand, Islam was close to Judaism and protective of Judaism in the Islamic empire of the Middle Ages while Jewish life in Europe was filled with brutal antisemitic pogroms, which were attacks on Jewish communities. On the other hand, at the same time the life of the Jews in Muslim Spain in the 10th through the 12th centuries was so kind that it is called “The Golden Age of Medieval Jewry.” For example, the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides was the court physician to Saladin.
In 1964, things changed in the location of antisemitism. After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, and encouraged by Soviet antisemitism, the Muslim world turned largely antisemitic while Christianity, particularly Catholicism, adopted a more supportive view of Judaism. The Catholic encyclical Nostra Aetate specifically rejected the antisemitic view that Jews are under a curse for killing Jesus. Catholic textbooks were also cleansed of antisemitic elements.
Today, the rise of radical Islamism, which is not Islam but which uses selected anti-Jewish texts from the Quran, has risen in power, and with it, attacks on Jews have become more violent and more frequent.
My view is that the solution to antisemitism is found in the mission statement of The God Squad, “We know enough about how we are different and not enough about how we are all the same.”
May this season of springtime and freedom and salvation help us to find each other.