Posted on 02/28/2004 9:09:32 PM PST by Alouette
Jews concerned about Mel Gibson's The Passion face a classic tar-baby situation: The harder they struggle, the worse they make their situation. Though the battle may have helped a few Jewish defense organizations replenish their coffers, its principal achievement to date has been to ensure The Passion one of the largest first-week grosses in Hollywood history, and to allow Gibson to skillfully portray himself as the Defender of the Gospels under siege.
From whom? The Jews.
As Melanie Phillips astutely observes, the more Jews complain about anti-Semitism, the greater the anti-Semitism. Charges of anti-Semitism enrage real anti-Semites, who dismiss such charges as more Jewish whining, and dismay Christians who do not recognize any hatred of Jews in their hearts.
An even more fundamental problem confronts those worried about the effect of The Passion. It is impossible for Jews to criticize Gibson's film without being perceived as attacking the Christian Gospels upon which it is largely based. Given the relative number of Jews and Christians in the world, that is a losing proposition.
That is not to say that Jewish concern is unfounded. Passion plays, even without the mesmerizing effect of the big screen and Technicolor special effects available to Gibson, have a long and ignominious history of inciting pogroms.
As the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby points out, Gibson seems to have no interest in Jesus's life as a Jew, or even in why he would have been of concern to either Roman or Jewish authorities. His almost exclusive focus is on his brutal death at the hands - primarily - of the Jews.
Gibson belongs to a breakaway sect of Catholic "traditionalists" that rejects as illegitimate the reforms of Vatican II, including the absolving of the Jewish people of collective guilt for Jesus's death. Gibson's father, Hutton, dismisses Vatican II as a "conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews." (Last week, Hutton Gibson insisted that the extermination camps were merely work camps.) About his father Mel says: "That man never lied to me in his life."
Faced with the threat posed by Gibson's film, Jews needed a good measure of the brains for which former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad so "praised" us. The tragedy is that American Jewry today lacks a leader of the stature of the late Rabbi Moshe Sherer, long-time head of Agudath Israel, capable of activating an extensive network of Christian allies for common causes.
HAD JEWISH spokesmen been less eager to thrust themselves front and center, plenty of Christian allies could have been found to help blunt the impact of The Passion.
The Catholic Church cannot be terribly enthusiastic about a cinematic presentation of a theology that rejects current papal teaching on the Jews. Indeed, a group of mostly Catholic New Testament scholars, affiliated with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, submitted a study pointing out the departures of Gibson's original script from the Gospels and from papal teaching, as well as the "lurid details" imported from the ecstatic visions of an 18th-century German nun.
Catholic scholars are aware of the numerous contradictions between the four Gospels. They acknowledge that the different human authors wrote in a particular historical context that made it necessary to deliberately downplay the Roman agenda for Jesus's execution. Coming from Catholics, such comments may have some positive impact without any of the inevitable negatives when Shmuley Boteach says the same thing.
While evangelical Protestants will have little truck with such historical analysis of New Testament texts, they tend to overwhelmingly be philo-Semites and, unlike the Catholic Church, continue to view Jews as the Chosen People. With them, the proper approach is that adopted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center: an open appeal to Christians of goodwill to do for Jews what we cannot do for ourselves - i.e., work to ensure that The Passion does not become a vehicle for arousing anti-Semitic furies.
The Wiesenthal Center's "Appeal to People of Faith" expressly eschews any request that Christians renounce or censor their most holy texts. It places the focus on actions, not beliefs. And that is as it should be.
Believing Jews have no interest in dictating others' theology or demanding that they reject their most sacred texts. (One more reason for religious Jews to avoid a frontal confrontation with Mel Gibson.) All religion suffers when any religion is subjected to the strictures of modern-day political correctness. Already on many university campuses, it is a "hate crime," punishable by expulsion, to express the biblical abhorrence of homosexual acts.
Religion is drained of all its power and majesty when its adherents witness its sacred texts and thousands of years of exegesis adjusted in accord with the demands of the local thought police. Recently, I was asked by a BBC moderator of a discussion of the Women of the Wall: "But don't you think that a religion must update in accord with the times?"
"Not unless it wishes to be as irrelevant to the lives of believers as the modern Church of England," I replied.
AIIEEEEEE!!!!
Someone even more cynical than me!
..."don joe" crawls in panicked desperation in the general direction of the coffeepot, gasping "help, help, help, the fabric of the universe is about to come undone..."
For most of my adult life, I've been the one that my friends come to when they "need a cynical viewpoint" on any topic. They tell me I'm the most cynical person they know. One of them, a (Jewish!) psychologist, told me that I shouldn't feel too bad about being so cynical, because research has shown that people like this have the most accurate worldview.
But still, I don't get that impression at all from having watched Gibson in interviews. He just doesn't have that inevitable element that screams (to a cynic, at least), "I'm a phoney!"
I think he made the film because it was on his conscience to make it, and he put his money where his mouth was, with no guarantee that it would win or lose at the box office, and I just don't get the impression at all that he's stirring the ... well, you know, in order to create a fabricated controversy for publicity.
Who could muzzle their own father?
If I had tried to muzzle my father, I'd have gotten exactly the opposite result.
And therein lies all the proof anyone will ever need, to put the lie to the claim that "they killed Christ" is the basis for antisemitism.
The "Christ-killer" excuse is exactly that -- and excuse. When someone hates Jews, any excuse will do. Remove one, using logic and reason, and they'll just hang their hats on another, because the exuses are mere pretext. The underlying hatred is the issue, and it can't be addressed by debunking the excuses.
They should do so on the basis of his own merits (in the converse, as the case may be), rather than get mileage out of "this is Mel Gibson's father".
To do otherwise is to merely use Hutton as a vehicle for slamming his son. If they've got something to say about his son, then they should say so directly, using whatever proofs they have, rather than try to use his father as a weapon against him.
"Like father, like son" only goes so far. Otherwise, we'd all be in a world of hurt. I doubt any of us would have to go back too many generations to find a scoundrel or two.
I guess I didn't crawl to that coffeepot quickly enough.
Yep.
You're right. IMO, they've been relatively silent on Hutton, as Hutton.
Pilate's wife is mentioned in the Bible, and as I just posted about watching Jesus Christ Superstar again, and noting many of the criticisms hurled at "The Passion" could (but weren't) lobbed at that rock opera, Pilate's wife is also presented in JCS.
There is a newly revamped Broadway production of JCS touring, and it was just in Tucson. I didn't go but I have a friend who did. I was reading a review in the paper the other day and they noted that the production has updated the costumes, and Herod's court was described as Las Vegas style.
I've seen references by posters to this supposed estrangement, but I cannot see on what this assertion is based. At any rate, Mary was with the apostles at Pentecost, and common sense dictates to me her close relationship with them began before her Son's crucifixion, at which she was also present.
It is thought by some scholars that Luke is based on his speaking with Mary.
That is out and out nonsense. I have been reading about this movie for months, and to think Gibson made others print their vile denunciations of him in order to stir up controversy is stupid.
We are going to attend the movie (I have not had a chance yet) because we want to see it based on its content from the Gospels, not the vicious and baseless accusations hurled Gibson's way.
Educating yourself from faulty sources does not an educated guess form.
Gibson has stated flatly that his views are not his father's. He is not an anti-semite by any stretch of the imagination. But some here might be anti-catholic.
I say "might be".
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