When do we start Teshuvah?
I want to do more than apologize to all the Jews I know and love. I’ve been a Christian all my life. A life-time follower of the man called Jesus or Yeshua in the Jewish language of his day. He was a Jew. He lived and died a Jew.
So, why would my fellow Christians hunt Jews down, force them into boxcars and drive them to execution in a gas chamber? It doesn’t make sense. And it’s not just the horrible Nazi Holocaust. Nor even the horrific Inquisition in the Middle Ages. But it was the persecution and segregation and prejudice, day after day, in different parts of our great Christian country of America. Where did it start? I’d like my Jewish friends to know.
It started about 10 or 15 years after Jesus died. But not with his Jewish disciples. Those first Jewish followers started a Jewish movement within the synagogue system, much like the Orthodox and Reformed movements of today. Their idea was that Jesus of Galilee had been their promised Messiah. His brother, James, was now their leader in Jerusalem.
They began to tell stories about this Jesus and what he had said and done. Central to all their stories was the historical fact that Jesus — like hundreds of other Jews who had opposed the Roman law — had been crucified by the Roman ruler, Pontius Pilate. There is no doubt that Jesus was also a nuisance to the chief priests but they had no power to execute him. Only Rome could do that.
But then a strange thing happened.
This Jewish movement migrated out of the Jewish synagogues and into Greek and Roman communities where the people lived with the Romans and ate with the Romans and supported the Romans every day of their lives. When the stories of Jesus were told in Corinth and Galatia and Rome – guess who killed Jesus? The Jews. The Jews are the Christ-Killers, not the Romans. In fact, Pontius Pilate becomes a Christian hero, even a saint in the Abyssinian Church.
The Christian gospel of John was written around the year 110 by a Greek speaking man who gathered stories about Jesus from the Roman-controlled Greek cities, not from the synagogues around Jerusalem. When John talks about the influence of the “Jews” on Pilate, he is reflecting on the memories of the Roman Christians, not the Jewish Christians. Thirty-two times in his gospel, the people who killed Jesus are the “Jews.” The gospel of John spread throughout all of Christendom and was read every Sunday in Nazi Germany.
Where’s the apology? Three Catholic popes have publicly apologized. Pius XII, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. But I haven’t heard other Christian leaders and pastors publicly acknowledging the cover-up which took place in the First Century and which was never corrected. The professor of Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, Rabbi David Novak, put it very succinctly. “Apologies are cheap,” the Rabbi said. And the Rabbi was right.
David Novak goes on to say, “apology is an event; teshuvah is a process.” Teshuvah is the Hebrew word for the act of repentance. It literally means “returning.” When we apologize, we think we got over the past. Teshuvah means we keep returning to it. Jews pray three times daily to Yahweh for the strength to return to him. In the Talmudic teaching, “Every Jew is responsible for every other Jew.” Why isn’t every Christian responsible for every other Christian?
A horrible lie was told by those early frightened Christians who lived in fear of their Roman rulers. I can understand that. When they told the story, they put a spin on it. They said “You didn’t kill him. The Jews did it.” And this is the story that found its way into John’s gospel and into the hearts of Christians for many centuries to come.
When do we start teshuvah?
This story was originally published April 8, 2017 at 9:00 PM with the headline "When do we start Teshuvah?."