Sleeping Through a Revolution

Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis,
Valley Beth Shalom, Encino, CA

The legendary Rip Van Winkle fell into a deep sleep for twenty years, awoke to find his wife dead, the inde-pendence of America declared, and himself forgotten.
It is dangerous to sleep through a revolution. The somnambulant not only loses the joy of participation in the revolutionary change, but misses the opportunity to seize hold of possibilities for shaping a nobler future.

Some twenty years after the second world war, a world-shattering event took place within the Catholic church that revolutionized its attitude and conduct toward Jews and Judaism. Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II, called for "aggiornamento," the internal reconstruction of the church’s doctrine and liturgy. It began a process to overcome two thousand years of the church’s contempt of the Jews. It led to the publication of Nostra Aetate, those fifteen Latin sentences that turned the church’s condescending and hostile attutude toward Jews and Judaism around and began a profound process of repentance and reconciliation which the present Pope, John Paul II has carried out with vigor and courage.

In an important symbolic gesture, the incumbent Pope, the first Pope in the history of the church, crossed the Tiber, clad in white robe and wearing a white zucchetto (skullcap), to enter and pray in the synagogue of Rome. As he himself remarked, while his predecessor Pope John XXIII once stopped his car to bless the crowd of Jews coming out of the synagogue from the outside, he had come to pray and to speak within the sanctuary. Within its walls he expressed the deep sorrow for the failures of the sons and daughters of the church in every age. He called for the members of the church to do "tshuvah", and insisted that with Judaism the church had "a relationship which we do not have with any other religion." This Pope has been the powerful force that led to the issuance of Catholic guidelines for the purging of various anti-Jewish elements in the church’s liturgy. He is part of a new spirit within the Church that repudiates the catastrophic calumny that charged Jews with deicide, the murder of the Son of God, and which has removed the missionizing of Jews from its agenda. Against considerable opposition from right-wing Catholics, Arab states and his own secretariat of State, Pope John Paul II in 1993 established full diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, including an exchange of ambassadors.

One must pause to ask when in the history of religion has any church urged "tshuvah" upon its clergy and laity, the open admission of guilt and responsibility for its reprehensible acts and attitudes toward another faith.

A revolution is taking place and we dare not sleep through it. Tshuvah is a process, as real for the citizens of Nineveh as for those in Jerusalem. "Tshuvah" is real. People change. Prelates change. Institutions change. We must be prepared to change. That change will not be easy for us. We own deep wounds, deep angers, and deep memories. We have locked up in us, under-standably and justifiably, a rage that philosopher Max Scheler characterized as "the secretion in a sealed vessel of prolonged impotence." That anger must be understood, appreciated, and mastered. For if not mastered, it will inadvertently lead us to betray the homage we pay to those martyred and murdered in the Holocaust. Those victims of the killers of the dream did not want us to dwell in the valley of the shadow of the Shoah, but to go through it and create a better future for their children and children’s children.

These are dangers in sleeping through a revolution. One of them is to wake up so confused and blinded by anger that persons, issues, and events are distorted. It is understandable to want to fight yesterday’s wars and this time to give it a different ending. But to wage war with the wrong enemy, at the wrong time and on the wrong occasion is to fall into a trap of dangerous anachronism. Pope John Paul II is not John Chrysostom. The church of Vatican II is not the church of the Middle Ages. The new Catholic catechism is not the old Catholic catechism. Barak is not Chamberlain. Oslo is not Munich. The PLO is not the SS. Arafat is not Hitler.

There is something new under the sun. And it requires a new statesmanship, a new politics, a new theology as we enter a new century. In a post-Holocaust universe what is required of us is wisdom, statesmanship, patience and purpose. Therefore, the news of the tragic dissolution of the I.J.C.I.C., the International Committee for Interreligious Consultation, a liaison created thirty years ago, is deeply disturbing. Cardinal Edward Cassidy, a known friend of Jews and of dialogue, the head of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, has early spoken out against the anti-semitism that has found a place in Christian thought and practice and called for an act of reconciliation on the part of the church for its failure to be authentic witness to its faith in the past. The same Cardinal Cassidy publicly expressed his exasperation with some representatives of some Jewish organizations. We have to listen with empathy to that complaint. Cardinal Cassidy writes that the criticism to the church’s effort toward reconciliation is being undermined by a negative and unappreciative response. The criticism is "often so negative that some now hesitate to do anything at all for fear of making the situation worse . . . we expect and hope that the Jewish partners will at least show us respect. You can hardly claim to respect someone if at every possible oppor-tunity you are ready to criticize the person, even without making a real effort to understand and appreciate the position of the other person." I hold no brief for the church. I do not subscribe to the infallibility of any church or any synagogue. But I believe that we must be sensitive to the church and wise in the delicate process of reconciliation. For example, some are upset with the beatification and canonization of Edith Stein, a Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism, became a nun and went to her death at Auschwitz. I, too, am regretful about the loss of Edith Stein, but I do not believe that it is wise or proper for us to interfere with the church in its beatification and canonization of its saints. That is not our place.

The Pope is criticized for meeting with Arafat, but I seriously question whether Jewish leaders ought to interfere with the church’s own political conduct. In the matter of the Carmelite nuns who set up a convent in Auschwitz, some Jewish leaders charged the Vatican with an effort to Christianize the Holocaust. Those who have read the statements and positions of the Pope know that accusation to be false. Too few have read or announced the Pope’s statement addressed to the Carmelite nuns on April 9, 1993: "Now according to the will of the church, you should move to another place in Osweicim." The nuns were relocated.

The church in March of 1998 put out a "mea culpa" document asking for forgiveness and confessing its sins for the passivity during the Holocaust. Instead of encouraging the church in its process of "mea culpa," the response from many Jewish organizations was headlined in the Jewish press as "disappointment." I know the document did not condemn the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi era. But did anyone seriously expect one infallible Pope to challenge another Catholic Pope? More importantly, such criticism does not belong in the public venue. These are sensitive issues that require patient and persistent diplomatic and sensitive negotiations to advance this unparalleled act of "mea culpa." This unique and historic dialogue ought not to be treated as the end but the beginning of a new engage-ment between two communities of faith. Instead of encouraging the document of repentance, it was damned with faint praise. If you apologize for the wrongs you have committed toward me, it is morally obtuse on my part to respond by reminding you of all the past wrongs you left out. To the contrary, I should encourage your initiative and recognize that this is a part of the process of renewal.

The post Vatican-II church and this Pope are not our enemies. They are our potential allies. George Santayana was only half right: "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." But if we remember only and solely the dark past, we will doom ourselves to repeat it. As much as I would welcome, appreciate and encourage a more thorough mea culpa of the church, I am more concerned with the church’s present and future conduct. We cannot reverse history, but we can create a future. To eclipse today’s light behind the shadow of yesterday is to rob us and our children of the promise for a better future. Because our emotions are raw, our wounds deep and our angers of impotence explosive, it is tempting to let old habits of mind continue undisturbed, to submit to the irrational but understandable mutterings of our aching heart that behind every Gentile lurks an anti-semite. That piece of bigotry is false. It is neither wise nor fair to spite the future for the past. We must not inadvertently endow anti-semitism with immorality. Not all roads lead to Auschwitz. We need other instruments with which to deal with the new world. If all we have is a hammer, the whole world is a bed of nails.

Franz Rosenzweig ended his Star of Redemption with words that apply to us and our times: "How difficult is every beginning. Whither, then, to the wings of the gate opened? Thou knowest it not -- into life."

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