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.
I agree that is was reprehensible to use an 85-year old man's statements to condemn Mel Gibson, and JFK was never held responsible for JoeKennedy's Nazi-loving views. But Hutton Gibson is a WACKO, no doubt about it. His views are historically ignorant, paranoid and just plain silly. But he's an old man, so I just laugh at it. Idiots like Abe Foxman and the NYT took the bait ad slammed him, leading to only increased publicity for "Passion".
Another alternative is that the cynicism isn't Mel's.
Hollywood cannot be successfully navigated if you don't have a cynical streak.
JFK in fact disavowed his father's views, in his writings (While England Slept) in his deeds, (going off to the war Joe Kennedy did not support) and in his words. In fact it could be argued JFK made his political bones by opposing his father's WWII isolationism. And nobody ever thought he loved his father any less.
I think it was absolutely fair game to expose the views of Hutton Gibson. Mel is a public person, from that flows all his power, and he had to know his father's views would come out. Under the circumstances his father's views are germaine. Nor did Gibson do much to muzzle his father, which in itself gives me pause. I have not seen the movie, so I can't say yea or nay on that matter, but I long ago made an educated guess about Mel Gibson, vis a vis anti-semitism.
Are you saying that w/o the controversy this film would not have filled the theaters? You are wrong.
The controversy may bring a few non-Christians to see what all the hubbub is about but Christians have been anxiously awaiting 'The Passion' since it was a gleam in Mel's eye.
I can't speak for other religions, but my Protestant religion, a major one, was always taught that the Jews were God's chosen people. Never was the idea that the Jews as a race, or the Italians (Romans) for that matter, were somehow responsible for Jesus' death.
In my understanding of the history of the day, the brutal scourging received by Jesus was enough alone to have killed most men and was extreme, even for the Romans. The scriptures also speak of Him drinking the cup of suffering....which, when you consider that that meant bearing the burden of paying for every sin that had been, or ever would be committed, by man, it is understandable. Also, when the time came that He had fulfilled His purpose on the cross, He is the one who determined that "it is finished." He had said that no man took His life, but that He gave it up willingly. That is evidenced by the fact that His legs didn't have to be broken to expedite His death, as was common practice.
I haven't seen the film yet....haven't been able to get tickets at a time I would be able to go. I hope to see it this coming week sometime.
Rather profound message when you think about it.
The more things change... Doesn't that sound like what we hear every day? What is truth? What is good? What is evil?
And, of course, who are you to say?
You are a sick person. I'll bet you like gawking at train wrecks too. Just kidding.
He may be getting old, but his views are long standing and public. His views are now in the national media, and he’s in demand as a speaker at the highest levels of the Holocaust denial community.
The ADL should spend more time condemning miscreants like Hutton rather than doing movie review.
Jews "concerned" about Mel Gibson's The Passion are either seriously deluded or are pursuing some other agenda, IMHO after having seen the movie.
Nowhere. If one group can be blamed for Jesus' death, then Christianity is short ciruited because it would make a lie of Jesus' words that "I lay down my life willingly and can take it up again." It would also mean that Jesus didn't suffer for the worlds' sins if Jesus was merely a good teacher who was killed by a more powerful rival religious group.
Anyone who says the Gospel teaches that the Jews are to be blamed will eventually claim that Jesus was just a good teacher, not the savior. Check it out, the two beliefs go together like hand-in-glove.
The Jewish prayer service does not include any anti-Christian curse.
The Passover Haggadah does contain these words:
"Pour our your wrath upon the nations that do not recognize you,
and upon those kingdoms that call not your name,
For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste the Temple.
It is Psalm 79, are the Psalms "anti-Christian"? Christians seem to like them well enough.
FEAR of YHVH: To hate ALL evil.
The Politics of Victimization.
I don't "get" this whole "The Passion is anti-Semitic" argument. Some Jews asked for Jesus to be crucified, and the Romans did it. But Jesus and all his followers were also Jewish.
If Jesus came back today I have no doubt the current Church hierarchy would regard him as a threat, and if he'd returned during the days of the Holy Roman Empire, the Vatican probably would have tried to kill him.
No kidding! I saw that, too, and kept on yelling at the "Christians" for saying such stupid things. They just didn't get it. Funny how the "Jewish guy" was the only one who understood the movie and had a grasp of history.
The closest thing to it was the dumb pastor in Colorado who put "The Jews killed Jesus" or something like that on the church sign. It was pretty quickly ripped down by local Christians and a number of Freepers (including me) e-mailed the church to take down the sign.Contrast that with the Dallas theater that I drove by twice yesterday that had "racist + evil" in fresh spray paint on the side facing LBJ Freeway of a movie theater showing The Passion. That will never get reported (but you heard it first here, folks!).
Abe Foxman does not speak for all Jews. I am glad this Rabbi has brought sanity to the debate.
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