Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2003-2004
Session #1

Scripture Forum
Session #1
Goucher College
October 31, 2003

Introduction to 2003-2004 Scripture Forum by the ICJS scholars:

   The session began with a brief summary of the original goals of the ICJS Scripture Forum: to make Christians aware of the history that Jews and Christians shared, to show what the implications would be for Christians of breaking out of their triumphalist history, and to disarm Christian anti-Judaism.
   The next step was to encourage reciprocity from the Jewish side in helping to carry out this program. Chris-tians and Jews began to study texts together to see how these texts get refracted through each tradition's interpretation and to see if there was something to say to these traditions.
   A few years ago a change was made in the way the Scripture Forum was conducted: A smaller group was brought together to think through specific issues that were to be turned into ICJS programs.
   The topic of ICJS programs this year is a study of the relationship between religion and violence.

A Discussion of Mel Gibson's The Passion:

   At a recent meeting (attended by Rosann Catalano) of an umbrella organization for centers involved in Jewish-Christian relations, there was a serious discussion of Mel Gibson's film The Passion, which will be released on Ash Wednesday in 2004.
   This film has caused a great deal of distress, especial-ly in the Jewish community, despite Gibson's claim that he has taken Jewish concerns into consideration. Jewish communities in Europe and Australia are extremely wor-ried about what may happen after the release of the film.
   The film is currently being shown to "select" audi-ences, consisting for the most part of conservative evangelical Christians.
   Some of the concerns mentioned regarding the film:

• Gibson says that The Passion is not an interpretation, a dramatization, or a movie. Instead, he claims, "It happened, it was said, and I put it on the screen."
• Gibson belongs to a Roman Catholic group that does not accept the work of the Second Vatican Council (Nostra Aetate) and that goes against Roman Catholic teaching across the board. Gibson's father is a Holocaust denier.
• Although he has not admitted it, Gibson has used extra-biblical materials in putting the film together.
• The actor playing the part of the high priest is an imposingly large, sneering man; Pilate is portrayed as weak, powerless, and ineffectual. It is clear in the film that "the Jews" hate Jesus.
• Jesus is tried in the Temple in front of the screen before the Holy of Holies.
• The Passion is emotionally powerful and blatantly violent: The beating starts at the twenty-minute mark of the 159-minute film, and the excessive violence never stops. What it shows is in effect the slow torture of a human being in incredibly graphic detail ("It makes Braveheart look tame.")
• This film is so powerful and so blatant that it has the potential to do enormous damage and to undo the hard work that Jews and Christians have done together for the past thirty years.
• The perception is that the people attacking the film are always Jewish and the defenders are always evangelical Christians. Gibson has turned the pre-release publicity into a great liberal Jewish-Christian conspiracy and run with it.

   Every center involved in Jewish-Christian relations represented at the meeting plans to do a pre-release educational program.

The proposed plan for the 2003-2004 ICJS
Scripture Forum:

   The ICJS prefers to examine the theological underpin-nings of an issue rather than the political or public relations concerns that surround it. The Institute would like the participants in this year's Scripture Forum to study the Jewish narratives that underlie the Gospels' Passion narratives -- those portions of the Tanakh that served as the template for the work of the evangelists.
   The theological narrative arc in the stories of the Passion is the same as the narrative arc in the psalms of lament: An address to God, a statement of the issue, a plea for relief, and a promise of praise constitute the rhetorical structure of all the lament psalms; and this structure is the template Mark used to write his Passion account. [Note: Mark is considered to be the earliest of the four canonical Gospels.]
   The idea is to study psalms of lament to see how they are treated in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and then to look at the Passion in order to see that what is being taught in the Passion account requires an under-standing of the rhetorical structure of the lament psalms.

Initial reactions to the plan:

   The topic might be placed in a larger discussion of the current upsurge of violence in film (e.g., Kill Bill), the feminist critique of violence, and the critique of exces-sive violence in video games.
   It might be interesting to look at the development of the Passion narrative. Reference was made to The Cross that Spoke, by John Dominic Crossan.
   The ICJS does not want to turn the Scripture Forum into a discussion of what to do about Mel Gibson, but taking note of what is happening around the world in reaction to this film dovetails with other issues, like in-creasing antisemitism in various places in the world.

Beginning the study: presentation and discussion
of Psalm 137 (Jewish Publication Society translation)

What this psalm has meant Judaically:

• The tradition of breaking a glass at the end of the wedding ceremony is attributed to v. 6 ("let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in my memory even at my happiest hour"): One must remember the destruction of the Temple even in the midst of the greatest joy.
• In traditional Judaism this psalm is used as the introduction to the grace after meals on weekdays (the grace is said whenever bread is part of the meal).
• The placement of the psalm is important litur-gically: The psalm is read on weekdays; on Shabbat and festivals, psalm 126 is read. On Shabbat and festivals the Jews are not in an
  alien land but in Jerusalem restored.
• Question: What do you make of v. 4 if you're in Jerusalem ("How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?")?
• Response: What Hirsch understands "alien soil" to be is the soil of alien ideas, a spiritualization. He did not see physical restoration as a necessity.

   A Jewish participant mentioned that he is very familiar with this psalm but that he didn't notice the last two verses for a long time ("Fair Babylon, you predator, a blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us; a blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks!"). He added that when the psalm is used liturgically, the tendency is to breeze through it.
   When this psalm is taught, the emphasis is put on verses 1-5.
   When Christians use this psalm liturgically, verses 7-9 are removed.

   Question: Is something vitally important left out when verses 7-9 are removed?
   Response: These verses are intended as a way to make sure that something like the Babylonian exile never happens again. It is like the story of pharaoh's decree that the Israelite male babies be killed: It is necessary to cut off the Babylonians and keep them from ever rising again.
   Another response: These verses are an expression of anger, of powerlessness, of a desire for revenge. It is prayer, not action; nothing happens here.
   This response led to another question: Is the language of prayer an act; is there something performative about a prayer?
   Another question: Is a movie a performative act?
   Response: Verses 8 and 9 are a gesture of telling God what to do. What is embedded in these words is: "I can't do this" or "I won't do this." Or is it: "I'll help you do this"?
   This psalm of lament doesn't end the way most of them do, so it is unresolved. The psalms give us lan-guage so that we can bring our concerns to God. We say it so that we don't have to do it, so that we can let go.
   Prayer is performative, but it depends on what "per-formative" means. Jewish tradition has not used this psalm as an incentive to kill the babies of those who have oppressed the Jews.

   There are gender issues here as well: Jerusalem is stripped (like a woman). This is violence perpetrated against those who are weaker. Consciously or subcon-sciously, we absorb this material on a very emotional level.
   Another participant reads vv. 8-9 as parallel verses expressing a "measure for measure" response, although the people exiled in Babylonia were powerless to make such a response. "It's not a big deal to congratulate yourself for something you've been powerless to do."
   Traditionally Jews have behaved better than Christians and Muslims because they didn't have guns. Now Jews have guns ...
   If Jews had had guns, they might now have a different kind of liturgy. We expurgate these stories for children and only explore the violence as adults, assuming that as adults we learn the ends of the stories.
   Not talking about the violence with children means that children are not properly prepared to deal with vio-lence as they grow up.

At this point the discussion becomes a bit less focused, moving quickly from one idea to another:

• We acknowledge that there are difficulties in the text, but we cut material out so that we can emphasize other things.
• But there are people who read the Bible on their own, and they know this violent material is in there. What do we do about these people? The gap between what they hear in church and what saturates the culture leaves them uneducated. The violence is part of who we are and what we need to be redeemed from.
• We need to acknowledge, talk about, and do something about the really dangerous stuff in our tradition.
• This sort of violence is portrayed as something to be overcome. There is a problem in how Christian piety deals with revenge: The dream of taking revenge as a real desire is repressed because of how the Crucifixion is played out. Repressing real desires is a problem.
• Gibson is emphasizing what for some people is the core of Christian teaching.
• A problem with the Gibson film is that it doesn't end with the resurrection (except in a superficial way).
• A strategy that is often invoked is to portray bib-lical violence as something that belongs to the Old Testament, the problem that Jesus came to solve.
• What is the central teaching of the Christian faith -- the redeeming reality of what God did as revealed in the resurrection, or the focus on the cross? What is the lens through which we look at God's saving activity in the world? This is what the discussion around the Gibson film should be. It's a Christian issue, not a Jewish one, which is not to say that Jewish concerns about antisemitism are unimportant.
• There was a mention of C. S. Lewis and the notion of "saying it so we won't do it." This might be a topic for further discussion.
• There is a difference between reading the Bible and studying it. When the Bible is studied, the last three verses of Psalm 137 are not left out or for-gotten. Studying the psalm to discover what it might have meant to the people for whom it was written and using the psalm liturgically are very different. In liturgical use there is a move to sanitize the psalm and/or pscyhologize God. But such a move isn't God, and God doesn't need it.

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