Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

RELATIONSHIP OF JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
The Christians reacted to the destruction as the best proof that the
Jews had forfeited their covenant. If the main vehicle and channel of
Jewish relationship to God has been cut off and destroyed, is this not
decisive proof that God has rejected Jews? In fact, the Jewish
Christians left Jerusalem before the final destruction, thus, as the Jews
saw it, abandoning the Jewish people. Christians assumed that Jewry
had no future and went off to make their own religion, their own faith,
their own home, their own future.
The Christians were wrong. Judaism did not disappear, the Jews did
not disintegrate. The rabbis encountered a crisis equal to the early
Christians' experience of the Crucifixion, i.e., being cut off from the
channel of revelation and connection to God, with the question
gnawing at their faith: Why did evil triumph in this world? The same
questions that Christians raised, Jews understood, too. Does the
destruction mean that the Jews are finished? Does it mean the covenant
is finished? The rabbis responded with faith in the covenant and trust in
God and the goal. The rabbis answered, as the prophets before them,
that the destruction was punishment for sins, and therefore a mark of
divine concern—not rejection. The most fundamental insight of the
rabbis was: Why did God not vanquish the Romans, even as God had
destroyed the Egyptians? The rabbis concluded that God had "pulled
back"—but not to abandon Jews and not to withdraw from this world
because of some weakening of concern. Instead of splitting the Red Sea
again, God was calling the people of Israel to participate more fully in
the covenant. Instead of winning the war for the Jews, God was
instructing the Jews to participate in redemption themselves. The Jews
failed to do so adequately. They engaged in civil war and fought each
other instead of the Romans. Since they had timed and conducted their
rebellion wrongly, the Jewish failure was the Jewish failure, not God's
rejection. The lesson of the destruction was not that God had
abandoned Israel, but that God was deliberately hiding in order to
evoke a greater response, a greater participation in the covenantal way.
This "hiding" can be seen as a kind of "secularization" process. In
the temple, the manifest God showed overwhelming power. In the
old temple, God was so manifest that holiness was especially
"concentrated" in Jerusalem. If one went into the temple without the
proper purification ritual, it was like walking into a nuclear reactor
without shielding: one would inescapably die. The synagogue is a
place one can enter with milder preparation and far less risk. The
divine is present but its power is "shielded."
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