Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (19 page)

But is it possible? No less a figure than Karl Rahner, widely acknowledged to have been the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, declared, "Let no one say that nothing more is really possible in this field [Christology] any longer. Something is possible, because something
must
be possible, if it is a matter of the inexhaustible riches of God's presence with us."
¹³
And Rosemary Radford Ruether helps. She too believes that change at the level of faith, even a once fratricidal faith, is possible. The key is Jewishness, the Jewishness of Jesus, but not only his. "The Christian anti-Judaic myth," she writes, "can never be held in check, much less overcome, until Christianity submits itself to that therapy of Jewish consciousness that allows the 'return of the repressed.' This means establishing a new education for a new consciousness."
¹⁴
Or, as Paul van Buren, a pioneer of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, put it, "Israel's story is the primary context that makes the Church's language about Christ intelligible." Jesus, van Buren said, must be "set within Israel's story, and Israel's story is still unfolding ... By the way in which it speaks of Jesus Christ, the Church is always defining itself before God."
¹⁵
Which is why the Church must learn to speak of Jesus Christ in a way that honors his Jewishness not only as something past but as something permanent.

In the course of writing this book, I went twice to Jerusalem. I returned there with a revised sense, shaped by personal as well as political history, of what religion is. I stood on the ramp above the Western Wall that leads to the Temple Mount, looking down. From that spot, or one near it, Josephus had looked down. "For while the depth of the ravine was great," he wrote, "and no one who bent over to look into it from above could bear to look down to the bottom, the height of the portico standing over it was so very great that anyone looking down ... would become dizzy and his vision would be unable to reach to the end of so measureless a depth."
¹⁶
For me, to paraphrase Nietzsche, the depth stared back. I saw the difference between now and 1973. As a mature man, I looked down at the Jewish worshipers below me, the black-hatted figures in the ravine before the wall. Instead of seeing strangers, I saw a group that included that shrouded figure who, despite everything, remained my dear companion. This was what the Third Quest for the historical Jesus had boiled down to for me. "Before it was anything else," Ruether wrote, and certainly before it was a species of Jew hatred, "the Christian messianic experience in Jesus was a Jewish experience, created out of Jewish hope."
¹⁷

The wall of the Temple is the last remnant of the world in which ours was born. Here is what I saw from my perch above it early in the twenty-first century: Everything we know and believe about Jesus began when he walked the same ramp, or one near it. He crossed into the sacred precincts of the Temple Mount, there. Twenty-five years before, I had thought the decisive threshold was one leading to Golgotha, but now I saw it was one leading to the Temple, for we are talking about Jesus here, not me. The witness of the davening Jews below underscored what the Temple must have been to him, and at last I saw it. Jesus and I were drawn to Jerusalem by like yearnings, but with this difference: What Jesus is to me—"the sacrament," in the great phrase of the Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, "of the encounter with God"
¹⁸
—the Temple would very likely have been to him.

Here was the
place
that would have most revealed Jesus to himself and others as a Jew to his core. We saw earlier the ways in which such an identity in his time was problematic, and we saw that, whether Jesus was one of them or not, some Jews would have been appalled by the contamination of the Temple by a collaborating priesthood. But that only underscores the basic fact that the Temple could only have been sacred to one identified with Israel. The assumption that Jesus came to the Temple to oppose it—to destroy it—not to worship at it or to defend it, is the first mistake that second-generation non-Jewish followers of Jesus would have made—because as non-Jews they would not have known what the Jews who preceded them knew: God had touched the earth in this place, and still did.

Instead of Christian disparagement of the Temple, here, from the Midrash, the collection of Jewish commentaries on the Scripture, is a Jew's assessment of the Temple's meaning: "Just as the navel is positioned in the center of a man, thus is the Land of Israel positioned in the center of the world, as the Bible says, 'dwelling at the very navel of the earth' (Ezekiel 38:12), and from it the foundation of the world proceeds ... And the Temple is in the center of Jerusalem, and the Great Hall is in the center of the Temple, and the Ark is in the center of the Great Hall, and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, and beginning with it the world was put on its foundations."
¹⁹

Even the worldly Josephus attributes a transcendent significance to the Temple.
²⁰
That attitude was central to his being Jewish.
²¹
Indeed, judging from the fact that the mountaintop site marked by the "Foundation Stone" shows signs of having been revered since the Middle Bronze Age (2800–2200
B.C.E.)
,
²²
one could say that attitude was central to his being human. That such numinous sites are universally recognized as places where the divinity can be contacted only emphasizes the importance of this one since King Solomon, fulfilling the hope of his father, David, constructed his Temple here in the tenth century
B.C.E.
In the fifth century
B.C.E.,
after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, the Temple was rebuilt, and then enlarged by the two Herods just before and during Jesus' lifetime. Throughout its history, the Temple's function as a gathering place for worship—actually, the gathering occurred in the courtyards and porticos of the complex—was always secondary to its character as God's dwelling place on earth. That was the Holy of Holies, to which only the High Priest had access, and then only once a year, on Yom Kippur.
²³

The "Foundation Stone" on the site of that forbidden inner sanctum is regarded by many scholars to be the dramatic stone over which the Dome of the Rock stands. The rough outcropping, about the size of the bed of a truck, is surrounded now by a spread of Persian carpets and enclosed by an elaborately carved eye-level screen. Above this sanctum is the fantastic mosaic elaboration of Islamic geniuses. The stone revered by Jews as the site of the binding of Isaac in Genesis
²⁴
—the story of a father's readiness to kill his beloved son, which has such resonance in the story of Jesus—is the stone revered by some Muslims as the site from which Muhammad ascended to heaven. When Muslims took control of Jerusalem from the Christians in the seventh century, the ban on Jewish settlement in the city, in force throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods, was revoked, and Jews returned.
²⁵
When the Temple Mount was consecrated as a place of prayer for Muslims, Jews were allowed to serve as the caretakers of the Dome of the Rock. They swept it lovingly.
²⁶

Today one enters the Dome of the Rock in stockinged feet. Hanging oil lamps flicker, making the golden chips in the mosaic dome sparkle. Columns and hexagonal portals ring the broad open space in which the stone lies. There is a hole into which a pilgrim can slip a hand to touch the spot revered as one the Prophet touched. Exotic as it is, the place seems vaguely familiar, because it inspired the design of some of the great churches in Europe. Oddly, it conveys more than a hint of St. Peter's dome, above that other "rock." But this rock, one sees soon enough, is no metaphor. One moves slowly around it, eyeing the rough surface, an uneven igneous slope of the kind boys slide on everywhere. Isaac, David, Solomon, Muhammad, God. Pilgrims sink to their knees on the soft carpet to pray, to sit in silence before the impulse that has brought humans here for four thousand years. Lingering pilgrims, poked by stern ushers with sticks, then stand to resume the slow-motion pedestrian circuit that can also be an act of contemplation.

The biblical tradition emphasizes that while the Temple cannot contain God,
²⁷
any more than heaven can, still God has chosen the Temple as an earthly dwelling place. The Holy of Holies is the particular in which the universal resides—which is the Greek way of putting an idea that is also expressed by the Christian notion of Incarnation. How is God present to the world, not in the abstract but in the concrete, which is the only meaning "present" can have? As a Christian believer answers "in Jesus," and a Muslim "in the Koran" (not Muhammad), so a Jewish believer today might answer, "through Torah." But all three—Christ, Koran, Torah—effectively replace the Temple. Following a tradition that begins with the Temple, all three religious impulses are incarnational. In Krister Stendahl's image, the Temple served as the magnet that organized the filings, but that role is now played by Christ, Koran, Torah. Yet among Jews, the idea of the Temple continues to have vibrancy and relevance.

Rabbi Heschel wrote that the Sabbath is like a temple in time. Levenson elaborates the idea: "The Temple is to space what the Sabbath is to time."
²⁸
As observant Jews take a weekly break from the mundane as a way of entering the realm of holy time—not only the time when the Creator rested, but the time when the Creation was, as Genesis puts it so simply, "very good"—so do such Jews approach the Temple of Jerusalem. This is true even in the aftermath of the Temple's destruction, for the banished Jews created an imagined Temple in the Mishnah, the first great work of rabbinic Judaism, a collection of oral traditions compiled at the end of the second century. As Jacob Neusner points out, the Mishnah is a response to the catastrophe of the destruction, a stunning act of imagination, a continuation of the idea that the center of an ordered cosmos is in a place and a ritual. But the place and the ritual must be temporarily made of words—here is the Jewish hope that, apparently, survives everything—until the physical Temple is restored.
²⁹
"The world which the Temple incarnates in a tangible way is not the world of history," Levenson writes, "but the world of creation, the world not as it is but as ... it was on the first Sabbath ... The Temple offers the person who enters it to worship an opportunity to rise from a fallen world."
³⁰

This is the Temple held in the imaginations of davening Jews at the Western Wall. Christians behold such Jews in their relentless bobbing and assume that the motivating impulse is grief for the loss of a great church, as if the Temple were a St. Peter's Basilica. Levenson points out that such a comparison inevitably confuses the matter, for as St. Peter's became an emblem for Protestants of the excesses of Renaissance Catholicism, so it is easy for Christians to think of Jesus storming the Temple as a kind of Luther, as if the gilded marble were the scandal, as if the corruptions of high religious office were the issue, as if money were.

On this point the religious imaginations of Jews and Christians are mismatched. The Temple was never a St. Peter's Basilica enshrining the bishop's seat, not even the greatest bishop of them all. The Temple was from the first the flashpoint between "Christians" and "Jews"—a navel, but also the core of conflict around which so much is twisted. Having affirmed that Jesus, a Jew, could have come into the Temple only in devotion, it is necessary also to say he may well have been one of those whose very devotion led to opposition to the collaborationist priesthood. Scholars are divided on the question, but most agree that the Temple was in fact the scene of whatever act got him into trouble.
³¹
As the Gospels re-count it, the crime of Jesus was against the Temple; then, upon his death, as Mark relates it, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, a symbolic—vengeful?—destruction.
³²

The story involves not only Jesus. Paul may have been a member of the Temple guard on the day that guard arrested Jesus.
³³
Acts of the Apostles places Paul as an antagonist at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose crime was a violation of the Temple.
³⁴
James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem Christians, was executed by being thrown from the Temple parapet, and Paul himself was probably put to death for violating the sacred Temple.
³⁵
To first- and second-century Christians, the destruction of the Temple by the Romans was "proof" that God had sided with them against "the Jews," and Christians promptly appropriated the savage Roman war crime for their own theological purposes. Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Christians take the ongoing Jewish attachment to the ideal of the Temple as a kind of retrograde idolatry, and, by extension, many Christians take modern Israeli attachment to the land around the Temple as rank imperialism, pure and simple. As the destruction of the Temple once proved the Jews' unworthiness, so the intractable conflict with Palestinians today does too.
³⁶

But all of this shows a Christian misreading of Jewish belief, past and present. With the destruction of the Temple and the exile from Israel, Jewish belief and practice coalesced under the leadership of the educators known as Pharisees, around the study of Torah in the synagogues, and around the observance of the Law. The family table became the center of cult. The Pharisees became the rabbis. But the Temple continues even now—if only in the idea of it—as the solitary site of Jewish worship.
³⁷
While the idea thus remains central, the Jewish hope is rooted not in a mythic never-never land but in a place on earth. Its specificity is the point. The Temple and, by extension, the land are tied to the unbreakable covenant God has made with this people. There will be no understanding of Jewish religion, or, for that matter, of modern Israeli politics, until the significance of that tie is grasped.
³⁸