Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

RELATIONSHIP OF JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
history. If they did not have power, they would be dead. The only
way to prevent a recurrence was for Jews to go to their land, establish
a state and protect themselves, to take responsibility so that the
covenant people could be kept alive. In this generation, the Jewish
people—secular as well as religious—took responsibility for its fate,
and for the fate of the divine covenant with Jewry. This is the
meaning, not always recognized, of the re-establishment of the state
of Israel.
Christians also have been forced back into history by the impact of
this event. Those faithful Christians realized that the evil portrait of
Judaism, the whole attempt to assure Christian triumphalism, had
become a source of the teaching of contempt and had convicted
Christianity or implicated it in a genocide to which it was indifferent
or silent. The Holocaust forced Jews and Christians to see that the
attempt to protect faith against history was an error and that both
religions can have no credibility in a world in which evil can totally
triumph. I have argued elsewhere that the true lesson of the
Crucifixion had been misunderstood by Christians because of their
past triumphalism. In the light of the Holocaust, one would argue that
the true lesson of the Crucifixion is that if God in person came down
on earth in human flesh and was put on the cross and crucified, then
God would be broken. God would be so exhausted by the agony that
God would end up losing faith, and saying, "My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me?" If God could not survive the cross, then
surely no human can be expected to. So the overwhelming call for
both religions is to stop the Crucifixion, not to glorify it. Just as Jews,
in response, took up arms and took up the power of the state, so
Christians are called simultaneously to purge themselves of the
hatred that made them indifferent to others, and to take up the
responsibility of working in the world to bring perfection. This is the
common challenge of both faiths; they can ill afford to go on focusing
on each other as the enemy.
There is another possible implication. Destruction of the temple
meant that God was more hidden. Therefore, one had to look for God
in the more "secular" area. Living after the Holocaust, the greatest
destruction of all time in Jewish history, one would have to say that
God is even more hidden. Therefore, the sacred is even more present
in every "secular" area. Building a better world, freeing the slaves,
curing sickness, responsibility for the kind of economic perfection that
is needed to make this a world of true human dignity, all these
activities pose as secular. But in the profoundest sort of way these
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