Posted on 03/10/2004 2:42:00 PM PST by ambrose
The big five losers from 'The Passion'
SHMULEY BOTEACH Mar. 10, 2004
Rather than being a wild triumph for Christianity, The Passion of the Christ has created a long list of losers. Here are the top five:
1. Christian conservatives whose ability to protest violence in Hollywood films has now been severely compromised.
The Christian community in the US earned my abiding respect for serving as the foremost guardians of the morality of the American nation. There are literally hundreds of Christian organizations in the US devoted to enforcing standards of decency in Hollywood, strengthening marriage, and teaching young teens to abstain from sex rather than use a condom.
But the Christian community's enthusiasm for The Passion has dealt a catastrophic blow to its credibility in condemning violence in films and squalid video games such as Grand Theft Auto. Gibson's movie is one of the most brutal and bloody in the history of film and rivals The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for sheer gore.
No doubt my Christian brethren would argue that the violence in The Passion is warranted, given the fact that the subject matter is religiously inspiring. But I predict that Hollywood directors famous for gratuitous violence, such as Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, will now find convincing arguments that violence in their films also serves an important social purpose.
2. Mel Gibson, who emerges as a talented fanatic at best and a full-blown loon at worst.
Yes, I know, every commentator has painted Mel as the big winner in this brouhaha since his Aramaic movie defied all expectations and so far earned him a cool $200 million. But money is not everything, and Mel must now contend with his new reputation as a violence-obsessed religious fanatic who said that all Protestants, including his own wife, are destined for hell, who claimed that the Holy Ghost helped him direct his film, and who has a Holocaust-denying anti-Semitic dad to boot.
Mel's violent streak has also been much in evidence. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes, "If he says that he wants you killed, he wants your intestines 'on a stick' and he wants to kill your dog - such was his fatwa against me in September - not only is there nothing personal about it but it's an act of love."
When the hoopla is over and Mel is searching for a new project, he'll be hard-pressed to find another controversial biblical story that guarantees controversy and profit. After all, you really can't much improve on the charge that the Jews killed God.
3. Jewish conservatives, many of whom now feel alienated from their Christian colleagues and are wondering who are their authentic allies. The Passion has forced upon politically conservative Jews like myself a horrible choice: either betray Jewish interests by pretending that a movie making the charge of deicide is no big deal and playing sycophant to the much larger Christian market by praising the film - a choice all too many high-profile Jewish conservatives have made; or be told that you are endangering Israel by undermining Christian support for the Jewish state.
But I reject the choice between the interests of the Jewish people versus the interests of the Jewish state. Any Christian friend whose support can so quickly evaporate when we object to being falsely portrayed as god-killers in a movie is hardly an ally.
PASSIONATE ADMIRERS of the Christian community, like myself, now feel distant from and disillusioned by our Christian counterparts. Where is Christian sensitivity to an allegation that has led to the death of millions of Jews throughout the ages?
I have been attacked by Franklin Graham on US television for opposing this film. His father Billy, one of America's finest sons and its foremost evangelist, has - for all his greatness - labeled Jews "devilish" in a secretly taped conversation with Richard Nixon.
If such an educated man can develop a negative view of Jews based on the gospel's depiction of Jewish culpability for the death of Christ, what conclusions will the less educated draw as they are shocked by the bloody images of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus? 4. Jews for Jesus.
I have thrice debated leading Jewish-Christian missionary Dr. Michael Brown on the messiahship and death of Jesus. People like my friend Mike must now defend a deeply anti-Semitic film that portrays his own people as devilish murderers who crucified the Creator, thus giving the lie to Jewish-Christian's central argument that believing in Jesus is not a betrayal of the Jewish people. 5. The Christian faith.
The biggest loser of all, tragically, is the Christian religion, which is now portrayed as a religion of blood, gore, and death rather than of blessing, love, and life.
Judaism and its daughter religion, Christianity, were a radical departure from the pagan world's earlier cults of death. Both emphasized the idea of righteous action on this earth and both were based on the Hebrew scriptures' demand for moral excellence and the need to perfect the world in God's name. Even in the New Testament, the passion of Christ occupies at most a chapter or two in each of the gospels, while the life of Jesus is spelled out more than 10 times that number.
But Mel Gibson, in his wearisome, monotonous, and numbing depiction of endless blood and gore, utterly ignores things like Jesus's beautiful ethical teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, focusing entirely on the horrors of the crucifixion.
Gibson tells us that what made Jesus special was not that he lived righteously but that he died bloodily. Mel Gibson - who told interviewers that he contemplated suicide before making this film - is clearly obsessed with violence and death.
The Passion is an evangelical tool. Is that really Christianity's central message - not that Jesus lived an inspirational life by which the faithful should be roused but that he died a horrible death for which the sinners should feel responsible? Indeed, the only winners emerging from The Passion are Islamic extremists who will no doubt take pleasure in seeing Jews and Christians squabbling at a time of considerable danger to both Israel and the United States.
But rather than blame the Jews for simply defending themselves against Mel Gibson's attack, let's place the blame squarely where it belongs - on Mel Gibson, who could easily have made an inspirational movie about the life and death of Christ without blaming the Jews for Jesus's death and without mixing in enough blood to fill the Jordan River. Instead, he decided to protect his investment by courting controversy and has made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Will he put some of that money toward educating Jews and Christians about their common heritage and kinship? Only time will tell. And in that telling, we will better be able to gauge Mel's motives and sincerity.
The writer is a nationally syndicated talk radio host in the US and author of 14 books.
I agree with that point. I cannot know why, but nonetheless I am sharing my insights, flawed though they may be.
[Passion plays whipped Hitler's Germany into genocidal frenzy] ... weelll that would be an unfortunate oversimplification of a very complex situation; in any case, the Holocaust, Hitler, the Nazis, et al have been discredited and soundly denounced by just about everyone on the planet since 1945. Justifiably so.
Yet there are holocaust-deniers. If the underlying evil of Nazism is not well and truly dead, then there is a chance that re-enactments of the Passion may do again what it has (supposedly) done before. Can we sit here and guarantee to every Jew on the planet that nothing could bring back that evil? Or a different, perhaps more insidious, evil?
My opinion is that there is zero chance of a significant negative effect in the USA. I love Eastern Europe, but don't kid yourself. A Rumanian Christian girl told me "so many there hate Jews."
Why do you say that it morphed "several Jews" into devils and not "several people"? Who cares that they were Jews, why is that even important? (At least, you presume that they were Jews; did they have badges labeling them as such? How do you know these characters weren't, like, Samaritans?) You bring up the fact that many people think "Jews" (as in, "the Jews", meaning all Jews, as a people) are devils. But that is irrelevant or at least it should be. By your own description this film shows "several" (i.e. some) characters morphing into devils; it does not show "the Jews" morphing into devils. In fact the hero of the entire story is Jewish. Why are you focusing on the negative characters which are (presumptively) Jews and ignoring the positive ones which are (definitely) Jews?
Anyway, given where the story takes place, and given that the director has chosen to include some characters who morph into devils (in what is, admittedly, a dubious artistic decision), what nationality should those characters have appeared to be? Chinese? (That would've opened up a whole different can o'worms, I s'pose ;-)
I'm not just arguing because I'm argumentative. (Although, that helps. ;-) I'm really just irked by this idea that Jews need to be treated with kid gloves; I don't think it even actually helps Jews to infantilize them this way - it just reinforces their Otherness. Jews, like other people, are people. This means that some of them are good and some of them are bad. (And that, if people can morph into devils, then, why, so can Jews! What - you're saying they can't? ;-)
Someone mentioned Braveheart. Braveheart's story lacks the fantastical overtones of Passion, but imagine (because this could certainly have been done...) that in Braveheart, Gibson's character while being tortured looked out into the (presumptively, mostly English) crowd and had say a hallucination that some members of that crowd were morphing into devils. No one would then walk out of the film and say it showed "English people morphing into devils" and how badly this reflected on "the English"; they'd say it showed people morphing into devils and discuss the intent and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of that symbolism. I seek only the same blase treatment of Jews. :)
a perception which I can understand, if not share, that these are irresponsible artistic choices.
I can "understand" it too. I am merely saying that it is wrong. I understand lots of opinions I believe to be wrong.
Re: artistic choices, I am not attempting to speak to the artistic merits of such choices here. Just the concrete charge that the film in its objective content is anti-Semitic and/or "charges 'The Jews' with deicide". These things are no less untrue even if you convince me that the film is artistically crappy. ;-)
As far as "irresponsible" goes, I do not really recognize the validity of this notion. I take it you mean by this that a film can be "irresponsible" in the sense that even if it isn't, factually, objectively, in and of itself anti-Semitic, it "could be interpreted as such" (or something along those lines) and thus prompt the vicious pogroms and Jew-slaughterings which we Christians are always so itchin' to engage in at the drop of a hat. What I am saying is that even in such a case I would place the blame squarely on the idiots doing the interpreting and not on the film which got mis-interpreted.
As a conservative, I believe in placing responsibility where it actually belongs. Best,
Anger? For once I'm giggling. I guess I've read these charges once too often or something. ;-)
But I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie that put this fellow's knickers into such a twist.
This is flat out false. There are many flashbacks, including *the Sermon on the Mount*.
Sigh way to miss the point of the movie, the death of Jesus only means something because he did it for us. Every blow was borne of our sins..
Among the best scenes in the film.
And a complete idiot.
The alienation has always been there, only not recognised. The Christian Zionist interest in the dialogue has been almost entirely religious, driven by a late and spurious eschatological mythology, while the Jewish interest has been a political one. To a considerable extent the two sides have been in symbiosis, exploiting one another while never once engaged in the same enterprise. It's just as well that these pretences have been unmasked.
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