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.
Yeah, the women should have carried Gucci Purses and couldn't Punchass Pilate at least have worn a Rolex? I mean, what were the producers thinking anyway?
At the beginning of the film, we are all reminded that Christ CHOSE the sacrifice. The overwhemling lesson of the movie was that of love and forgiveness.
The film portrays Pilate as fearing a popular uprising and fearing one regardless of whether he freed Jesus or crucifies him. This is depicted in the film as the reason why he does the "Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas" ["I will wash my hands among the innocent"] washing his hands of Jesus' blood and fate but nevertheless directs his soldiers to do what "they" want, menaing what is desired by "the Jews" including mostly the high priests--after "they" have just demanded that he be crucified.
It is interesting that scholars report that the gospel writers might have had reasons not to emphasize Pilate's actual role, but I suspect such scholarship of possible revisionism with an agenda to avoid blaming Jews. I grew up in Catholic schools in the 50's and 60's and I never ever heard the Jews blamed for the death of Jesus. My testimony must sound amazing to those who for some reason believe that Catholic schools in the US were foaming with haterd of the Jews, but I never even heard a stray antisemetic remark. Perhaps it is more of a European phenomenom, but for my part, it really struck me as weird when I first heard that anti-Semitism was in part based upon a belief that the Jewish race was responsible for the passion and crucifxion of Jesus.
This is among the many reasons that I agree with the posted article that it was foolish for Jewish figures and groups to attack Mel Gibson's film project, and they have been doing it for almost a year. It really seemed to have a leftish Jewish orientation centered around the Frank Rich approach from his perch at the NY Times. Rich is a classic distortionartist and his attack against Gibson appeared to be particularly unfair. I really wonder at the true motives beind the early attempt to censure Gibson and warn the studios against his project. It appeared to be an attempt to snuff out a fil project but it also became part of another leftist attack against the so-called "Christian Right" of the imaginations of the NY Times and the rest of the leftist media-political nexus.
I believe that this was not an attempt to ward off anti-Semitism but rather an cynical attempt to find a vehicle with which to castigate the Christian right by tarring it with the imagined anti-Semitism supposedly inherent in Gibson's movie. The goal was to deaden the right for this 2004 election season.
I believe that just the opposite will occur. The christian right will now be unbelievably mobilized and energized in this election year, in many respects because of this movie and the way that there was this mob squad of detractors set against it. Of course, now the very culrits are now accusing Gibson of having master-minded their entire debacle as a marketing tool. [This is why the left is always too clever by half and never learns what should be its lessons.]
You changed my comments into a doctrinal question, not so. I did not experience even that in Catholic schools, that was something I am talking of the popular level. My impression has always been that American anti-semitism has been over played. Most of my friends today happen to be Jewish and they have not had experiences of such anti-semitism which is a substantial problem. I think when you resort to the stories of some school children, that you never know what you are really dealing with. Iam sure that there is antisemitism here and there. But I do not think that there is any significant historical record of antisemitism in the US. We never had pogroms, etc. I know that some schools would have jewish quotas and they probably had Catholic quotas too. Some clubs would not admit jews and a lot of other types of people. That can be called anti-semitism but is nothing like in Europe. Don't tar the US with that brush so easily.
The movie I saw conveyed just that.
You nailed it. Nicely done.
SHHHHHH!!! Not so loud - Foxman might hear!!! I like listening to him and his gang of leftist screwballs at ADL scream and howl... Don't spoil my fun!
Compared to these modern rabbis, those guys were regular peacocks....:)
I didn't notice any "hooked noses" either, but then again I wasn't on a "spot the stereotype" quest.
If he wants to complain about "negative vibe" outfits he should check out the Pharisees in Jesus Christ Superstar.
Could someone...ANYONE...please point out exactly where that Scripture mentions that Jews are to be blamed for Jesus' death?
As a Christian, I don't BLAME the Jews...I THANK the LORD!!! Jesus' death and resurrection are the BEST things that have EVER happened! And we should all be THANKFUL that God is so loving, thoughtful and full of grace that He provided a way back to Him.
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