The Jews and their State

A puzzle for us all

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Giotto, Massacre of the Innocents

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In the Holy Land it has been a year of bloodshed, inaugurated not by Herod but by Hamas. Unless the Netanyahu regime was and is Herodian, as even in Israel some think, capable in its libido dominandi of the most horrid sins of omission and commission. It might well be, for such regimes are the norm these days, not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world. My own country is a case in point, though feathers are flying in Ottawa and it seems that Castro the Younger is about to be toppled from his politically rancid perch.

We know with certainty what vile things Hamas is capable of. Yet we cannot muster the moral courage to go out with sling and arrow against its supporters. Many here are implicated in its deeds, if only by silence. As I began writing this, on 7 October, the gates of McGill were again shut for fear of its agitators and sympathizers. Police were present on Sherbrooke. Hired security guards surrounded the campus. Many lectures this past week were conducted remotely, though some of us gave ours in person to those who would come. In the upper rooms of the James Building, administrators huddled to decide how long such measures must prevail.

Not long, as it turned out, but it’s hard to shake that New Normal feel. These days, we are frightened of our own shadows, never mind chanting mobs. An ill wind is blowing, a hurricane of hatred is rising, and we have no answer beyond the bromides of safetyism. That safetyism is the surest road to destruction seems to have escaped our notice. What have we done to ourselves since 9/11? And what was 9/11, if not a trigger, deliberately pulled either before or after the fact, for the triumph of safetyism—and, just so, of the biosecurity state with its imperial ambitions and its commitment to total war, war that begins with attacks, physical and psychological, on its own people?

Today is Yom Kippur, but there is no atoning for such behaviour. No doubt the notorious October War of 1973 is being remembered, but it is not what needs to be remembered. What needs to be remembered is the moral maxim that it is never licit to do evil that good may come.

This maxim, on which the Catholic moral tradition insists, we have forgotten or rejected, for we are beyond good and evil now. Which means that we are also beyond atonement. Not because no adequate atonement has been made available, no satisfaction capable of averting divine wrath and punishment. It has been made, made once and for all by that Israelite who pronounced the judgment of God on his own people, then permitted himself to be judged in their place—their place and ours. But we are beyond atonement when we blaspheme against the Spirit of God who would render us grateful to the Son and obedient to his Father, the Spirit of true repentance. What otherwise is left to us but the wrath of God?

Between last October and this, the subterranean temples of Dagon built by Hamas have been collapsed on their own heads. Hezbollah pagers and cellphones have exploded. The Party of God, backed by Persian ayatollahs and their partners in the land of Dagon’s origin, is under sustained counter-assault in Lebanon, a country these Jews-haters and Christian-haters have quietly occupied and ruined. But to our Jewish friends we must say, if after last October they still need someone to say:

“Put not your trust in princes. Put not your trust in Mossad or the IDF. They may be still more impressive than was Shimon bar Kokhba, but on their current course they will come to the same end. For they, too, just where they are beyond good and evil, fancy themselves, like Irgun and Lehi, the Party of God. No, what you really require is Shimon the Righteous, who knew the Morning Star when he saw him.”

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Simeon the Righteous

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Jew-haters? There can be no doubt that the Middle East is full of Jew-haters. So are the streets and campuses of Western cities. Between the state of Israel and the people of Israel, no meaningful distinction is made by friends of the ayatollahs. Both must be obliterated and the sooner the better.

Now, some in the West purport to make such a distinction, which surely must be made. For the Israeli state, like our own state, suffers gravely from the corruption of corrupt men and the godlessness of godless men. “In the last days,” warns Paul, “there will come times of stress.”

For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.

“Avoid such men,” he advises. Do not invest, we might add, in the things in which they invest, including their idolatrous patriotism or their Gaian globalism. But we must, I repeat, distinguish between peoples and states, for not all men are godless or beyond good and evil. We must, in the present case, distinguish between the Jew and the Jewish state.

Unfortunately there is little appetite for this distinction. The real problem with the Israeli state, in the minds of far too many, is that it is a state of and for the Jew. And why is the Jew hated? Make no mistake. The Jew, at bottom, is hated for Christ's sake.

The Jew who looks for HaMaschiach, however and wherever he looks for him, is hated for Christ’s sake; to the modern mind, he has an utterly unacceptable Judaeocentric view of history. The Jew who believes that the Israeli state îs the Christ is hated for Christ's sake; the crimes of this “Christ” are counted up against it and deemed to outweigh all like crimes, even those of Hamas or Hezbollah. Even the Jew who does not believe in a Christ at all is hated for Christ’s sake, if he still knows that he is a Jew and that everyone else is a goy. To be a Jew is to have been chosen, called out from among the nations, and the called out are perforce the singled out.

Hatred of the Jew for Christ's sake was already present in Christendom, as a remnant of imperial paganism, complete with sporadic episodes of brutal scapegoating, or as an insane and self-defeating theological aberration in Christianity itself. If the Jew was a Christ-killer, what was the gentile—a Christ-lover, whose immaculate conception meant that he bore no responsibility for the death of Christ? What nonsense! What wicked nonsense!

Anti-Semitism was much exaggerated in the Reformation, for which Luther must bear no small blame. But it was still more exaggerated in the Enlightenment. For in the Enlightenment there was a new “Christ”—the human race itself—as D. F. Strauss so eloquently explained in The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined:

Mankind is the union of the two natures – god become man, the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father, Nature and Spirit. 

Mankind is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power. 

Mankind is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one; pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does not touch the race or its history.

It is Mankind that dies, rises and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life, and through the abrogation of its finitude as personal, national and secular spirit it is exalted into unity with the Infinite Spirit of heaven.

It was this conceit, this rapacious conceit—read again the second sentence—that left no room for the Jew, the unassimilable Jew, whose most aggravating feature today is that he has seized a tiny tract of land and created a state with outsized influence in world affairs. It is this conceit that drives the progressivist to join the Islamist, who has his own triumphalist conceit (also tainted by bitter failure) in hating both the Jew and his state. The Jew and his state stand athwart the global ambitions proper to the Infinite Spirit of heaven. Likewise, the Jew and his state stand athwart the ambition of Islam to bring all into submission to Allah. Nor can we leave out the triumphalist conceit of a Candace Owens or of other “Christ the King” fanatics, whose grasp of the present age, in its relation to Christ the King, is so theologically deficient as to leave them free—nay, compelled—to hate the Jew as they hate the secularist.

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I said in my previous post that I stood whole-heartedly with the signatories of The Canadian Christian Declaration on AntiSemitism, but that I had not myself signed it, for reasons I would explain another time. So here is my explanation.

The Declaration’s payload, and its fundamental reasoning, is found in the following paragraph:

We are compelled to act through our faith in Jesus Christ. We confess Jesus Christ to be the Messiah, the Son of God who was born of the Virgin Mary. He is a Jew and it is through His coming into the world and dying and rising from the dead for our salvation that we are bound to the Jewish people as the church of the Gentiles and so grafted on to the Tree of Israel forever. As Christians, we must still repent for past expressions of antisemitism in our churches. In that light and in support of this declaration, we affirm that the Jewish people remain God’s chosen people. The law and the covenants that God gave to the Jewish people, which we see as fulfilled in Christ, remain intact.

This is a fine paragraph, and essentially right-minded. But I will venture several closely related qualifications and clarifications; then, these things being said, I think I shall sign it. 

First, it as not as Christians that we are “grafted on to the Tree of Israel forever,” but only as gentile Christians. The first Christians were all Jews like Simeon. They needed no grafting in. It is gentiles who need that, and gentile Christians who have attained to it. They have become one family with the seed of Abraham, with the first recipients of the covenant promises, with their elder brethren in faith. They are themselves members of Israel in that sense, which is neither an ethnic nor a nationalist sense. It is the sense Paul has in mind when he speaks to the Galatians about “the Israel of God.” The Israel of God is the people of God insofar as they are faithful to the covenant, as God himself is: God who indeed remains faithful even when we are faithless.

Second, we Christians, even we gentile Christians, are not “the church of the gentiles.” There is no such thing. We are, as Paul insists, the one church of Jews and Gentiles, the gospel being (per the opening gambit of Romans) for the Jew first, if also and equally for the Greek. In the church, Jew and Greek are bound together when they receive baptism and put off the old man with his rebellious ways. The one God does not have two churches, a point on which Paul (see further his letter to the Ephesians) leaves no room for doubt. The Declaration, unfortunately, leaves room for misunderstanding.

Third, though “the Jewish people remain God’s chosen people,” their fate is bound up with that of baptized Jews and gentiles, as the Declaration at least hints. This requires some teasing out, for it is something of a puzzle to many. I will attempt briefly to cast a bit more light on it.

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Construction of the people of God commences already with the promise of redemption made to Adam and Eve and again to Noah. Subsequently, it is pursued through the formation of a “peculiar” people, a people made by God to stand out from all other peoples, as the sons of Seth once stood out from the sons of Cain. When Abram is called out from Ur Kaśdim (as it was later known) and a covenant made with him, the divine project of redemption is formally inaugurated.

The Abrahamic covenant is both reaffirmed and modified at Sinai, through the mediation of Moses and Aaron, after Abraham’s progeny are called out of Egypt. Under David, it is given further institutional lineaments and guarantees. Eventually, after breakage upon breakage from the side of the people, beginning with David himself in the Bathsheba affair, it is renewed through the mediation of Jesus, the prophesied prophet, priest, and king—the king whose kingdom shall have no end—and transformed by the outpouring of the Spirit. It becomes “the new and eternal Testament, the mystery of faith.”

Now, if the law and covenants are fulfilled in Christ, who is in his own person the atonement between God and man, if they remain intact forever by reason of Christ crucified and risen, it does follow they do not remain just as they were. The most obvious evidence of that is the ingrafting of gentiles by the will and power of the Holy Spirit, such that all “those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith.” Thus does the law of liberty succeed the law that was added after Abraham to point out the path to liberty. Thus are the people of Israel made a blessing to all nations. Thus is their royal priesthood fulfilled.

Yet there can be no question, thereafter, of the Jews ceasing to be God's chosen people, for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, as Paul attests in Romans 9–11. God has not rejected his people! But the Jews remain God's chosen people only together with the elect from every nation. For God, who in his own wisdom and in his own time deals with Jew and gentile according to the situation of each, is not in any way double-minded.

Just as the anti-Semitic gentile Christian is an oxymoron, then, so is the anti-Christian Jew. Why should the latter be glad of his mother's genes—because they are an inheritance from Abraham and Sarah, and not merely from Adam and Eve? Yes indeed, but “the Israel of God” is not merely a genetic heritage. It is the Israel that, receiving the promise, is made ready for the Messiah and his kingdom. Such is the Israel of the shepherds, of Anna, of Simeon, of Joseph. Such is the Israel of Mary, the virgin who bears the Messiah.

This Israel is still gloriously physical, like Yeshua himself in Yegorov’s painting. Never was it more gloriously physical. Hence it remains capable, not only of stimulating the arts and sciences, but of stimulating political and even military exploits. Nothing proper to human culture, under the conditions of the fall, is foreign to it. Even as it gathers to itself men of every nation, it is capable of supporting nationhood. Yet one is not born into it by the will of man or by the desire of woman. Its boundaries cannot be marked out by passports or DNA tests. Circumcision itself does not suffice, nor is it a prerequisite. The Israel of God is quickened by faith and marked out by baptism. It is the Israel to which gentiles can and do belong by sacramental grace.

For the gentile to belong without the Jew is impossible, however. Christianity is not a coup against the Jew! The Marcionite or the Manichaean is always a monstrosity, a theological Philistine against which one must go out, sling in hand. Every lazy or militant supersessionist likewise, for he too is a Marcionite, be he ever so pious in other respects. But for the Jew to belong without the gentile is now equally impossible. The Jew who thinks it possible preserves neither promise nor law intact. He puts the promise in service of the law, rather than the law in service of the promise, which is a fatal mistake for Christian or Jew.

One further observation. The Declaration promises that Christians will not abandon the Jews. We should be equally concerned that Jews not abandon Christians. According to Aquinas, in his commentary on Romans, Jews who come to believe in Jesus (as many already have) will prove crucial to the survival of the church itself, in the days of greatest stress proximate to his return in glory.

That seems right to me, and not only because Paul tells us that “all Israel” will in the end be saved. It seems right to me because the temptation of the gentile Christian, if not to supersessionism, is to relativism. And relativism requires as its antidote a clear sense of the Jewishness of Jesus, a sense that only the Jews can restore when once it has been lost. As it is being lost, I fear, even in the Catholic Church, in its present fog. Different paths to God, different languages for God? As if Jesus were not himself the very Word of God made flesh!

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I return in conclusion to the distinction between the Jew and the Jewish state. The former belongs to the determinate will of God, the latter to the contingent providence of God. The Christian should give thanks for both, while refusing to regard the latter as messianic in its own right. Both the Christian and the non-Christian Jew ought to insist, at the very least, that no state, nor any man, is entitled to ignore the moral law or to subject it, in utilitarian fashion, to private ends.

Moreover, the Christian and this same Jew should question any attempt to equate a political ambition, however laudable, with pursuit of the kingdom of God; no direct association, in other words, if many indirect associations. Certainly he ought to repudiate every attempt by man to establish the kingdom of God by his own political arrangements. Was that not the very thing Jesus rebuked in his own contemporaries, and the reason that he himself, having refused to follow suit, was persecuted and executed? Was it not the error of Marx and of every modern advocate of totalitarianism, including those that slaughtered Jews?

Conversely, the Christian must point out to the non-Christian Jew that the major problem with Israeli politics today is not that they are complicated, as they were in Jesus’ day, by religious quarrels. The major problem is the same problem we have throughout the West—that politics are decidedly secularist in a religious sort of way.

What do I mean? The secularist claim is that politics can and should function as a non-religious sphere. If that is true, then there is at least one sphere in which God need not be thanked and obeyed. And if that in turn is true, then God is not really God at all. Nor is there any well-grounded moral law. Everything is permissible.

The nation of Israel, of all nations, cannot afford this antichristic secularism any more than it can afford its opposite—the presumptuous construction of a messianic “kingdom of God” such as that which led, as Jesus predicted, to the desolation of Jerusalem and the loss of a Jewish homeland for two millennia. A Jewish state can only exist for the sake of Jews, most of whom—not yet having taken refuge in the church, in the congregation through which God “has shown his people the power of his works, giving them the heritage of the nations”—feel a need for it, lest they remain unprotected or unable to flourish. Be that as it may, the Jew, whether he likes it or not, is a witness, and always will be a witness, to the fact that God is God. And how can his state be a Jewish state, if it leaves God out of account?

Or again, how can it be a Jewish state if it presumes to put God in the service of the national cause, as Karl Barth, at the outset of the World Wars, accused Germany— Germany, whose actions soon made plain the need for a Jewish state!—of doing? Surely the Jew exists for God, not God for the Jew, though God is willing to exist, and does exist, as a Jew.

If the Jewish Christian, like Paul himself, is the best person to point out the Jew’s need for Jesus and the church’s need for the Jew, perhaps he is also the best person to point out the irreducibly religious nature of the Jewish people and the impossibility of making “Zionism” work as a non-religious enterprise. Or of making it work as a religious enterprise in some pseudo-messianic sense. But even we gentile Christians must point it out. For the one alternative seeks to isolate the human from the divine, while the other confuses the human with the divine. Neither is viable, as every Christian ought to know, and every Jew too.

What then is viable? That is not a puzzle I can solve, and you would rightly think me a fool if I thought I could solve it. But I do know this: The precondition, the absolutely indispensable precondition for any genuine solution, is a repentant people that exists humbly between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, in remembrance of the divine deed that renders atonement and in anticipation of the divine promise that, because of atonement, will yield a harvest of peace.

With what kind of state would such a people equip itself, God helping it? A state that acknowledged divine law without appropriating to itself divine prerogatives. A state that eschewed evil as a path to good, because its people knew that God himself is good, and nowise evil. That state would look different in Israel from what it might look like in Canada, say, but it is the only thing viable in any country. It would also look very different from what we actually find in either state today.

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