The Doonesbury comic strip of this past Sunday has caused a little bit of a stir in some of the rabbinic circles I travel in. It also prompted this letter to Gary Trudeau from Rabbi David Saperstein, of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center.
The eight colorful panels depict a young girl (it’s been a while since I’ve read the strip, but my perusal of Wikipedia seems to suggest that she’s Samantha, the 17-year-old daughter of Boopsie and B.D.), reacting to a church service led by the venerable Reverend Scott Sloan. The reading of an “Old Testament” passage about the wrath of God leads Samantha into an extended meditation on the superiority of Jesus, the loving pacifist, over the vengeful deity of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus “only really snaps once,” she concludes, and then it’s in response to “the moneylenders.” “Oh, right, what is it about moneylenders?” her mother asks. “They do seem to set people off, don’t they?” the reverend avers.
Now, what is it exactly about this interchange that might raise Jewish hackles, I ask you? No one has suggested so far that Trudeau is motivated by anti-Semitic impulses, though Ron Kampeas, blogging at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, offers the intriguing suggestion that Trudeau has never been able to escape the basic parameters of his WASPish weltanschauung, and, as corroboration, talkbackers have discerned a tendency to stereotype Jewish characters (Phil Slackmeyer, Sid Kibbitz, Marcia Feinbloom.)
This one doesn’t really fall under the heading of a serious affront, and I hope the Anti-Defamation League will, accordingly, save its resources for another occasion. But I also don’t think Trudeau deserves a free pass, either. He has, let’s say unwittingly, conjoined and perpetuated two rather pernicious canards that still have traction in the contemporary world—all the more so given the current state of the economy, and the extent to which people with names like Bernie Madoff and Lloyd Blankfein have been used to metonymize what has been, in reality, a beautifully multi-cultural clusterfuck. So, if it’s not the occasion for a full-on ritual of public apology, at the very least it’s a teachable moment.
Christians, if you haven’t already, please take some time to recognize that the division of your scriptures into “old” and “new”, with a panting demiurge presiding over the first and a Guevarist lovegod community-organizing his way through the second is a false dichotomy, and a dangerous and frustrating one, at that, when it is used as a thumbnail sketch of Jewish-Christian difference. Your “old testament”, what we call the Tanakh, portrays a God of manifold characteristics—from the friend and confidant of Abraham and, yes, the ferocious goader of the wilderness, to the ironic moral conscience of Jonah and the mystical whirlwind of Job—that have served as the basis for kaleidoscopic articulations of Jewish theology.
There’s a lot in there I could do without, but remember too that the text accreted over at least a thousand years. It is not, like the “new testament,” a concentrated response to a singular spiritual revolution. It is an encyclopedia of images of God, and standard readings of Jesus, by contrast, can seem rather reductionist, and the Christian message of love all too often the mask of a repressed anger with a very strange and public act of sado-masochism at its core.
As for the moneylenders, it’s just pure fun to point out that Trudeau misread the book of Matthew. “Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the benches of those selling doves.” The text is not actually about liberating the poor from usurers. (When we start to speculate about what unconscious association of ideas led Trudeau to make this slip—to associate those opposed to Jesus with usury—the game grows a little less fun.) The money changers, who most likely provided a necessary service to pilgrims coming to the Temple from afar, seem to get caught up in Jesus’s frenzy against those who conduct business in the sacred precinct. That is to say, when Jesus gets mad, Mr. Trudeau, it’s not like those vicious “old testament” prophets Isaiah and Amos, who were inveighing against the oppression of the poor.
Jesus, it turns out, is zealous in the defense of that old time religion, a “nice Jewish boy,” as the joke has it, “who went into his father’s business.”
Tags: doonesbury, god, hebrew scriptures, judaism, matthew, moneychangers
Thank you. I found the strip outrageous. Anti-Judaism is alive but it is never a sign of mature religion.
Never read the post, just the first comment. "Mature Religion"_interrobang_ If there ever was an oxymoron, it's "Mature Religion".
Goosh, Ervin Goodenought thought that there was--even wrote a good book about the topic.
Hey Ben,
That was great!
Thanks for this perspective. You speak the truth.
I don't want to be nit-picky and overly sensitive, but don't you think it's a bit self-contradictory for you, as a Jew, to bemoan Christian reductionism of the "Old" Testament, while simultaneously reducing the crucifixion to sadomasochism?
I hope it's clear from the post that I was not reducing the crucifixion in its totality to S&M. I used words like "can" and "often seems," which, granted, might be a little vague.
But, in another sense, I was trying to offer a Christian reader a comparable sensation to what it's like for a Jew to have the entirety of our sacred literature reduced to "angry God," and to demonstrate that the question of where is the love and where is the anger and violence is not as simple as Trudeau seemed to be making it.
Going forward in conversation, I would certainly want to cultivate an attitude of mutual respect, but, in response to this particular very public cartoon, it might be that I got it right if a Christian reader feels his or her core narrative reduced for a moment.
-B Weiner
You might have, Ben, in the end, been clearer about the desired rhetorical effect that you were trying to achieve, so that rather than leaving the reader with a sense of anger or violation, there could have been a teaching moment, or a place in which—having experienced the anger of reductionism—the Christian reader could be called to empathy with the Jewish reader.
THEN there would be space for mutual respect, dialogue, and understanding.
Again, you seem to be missing the point. The larger goal was not to give the Christian the experience of reductionism. I guess that's just a side effect, and was not really what I was after. The point is to show that there is plenty of violence in the Christian tradition, but that it is often rendered transparent, especially through the strategy of saying all of God's anger is in the "Old Testament."
I seem to have struck a nerve, and I'm sorry for that. I hope you'll be able to see beyond that to grasp what I'm really saying.
-B. Weiner
I do, in retrospect, regret offering the "I was trying to offer a Christian reader a comparable sensation" justification for the piece, though I still wholeheartedly stand behind the piece itself, including the S&M bit. I can see how this response might give the impression that I was just trying to settle a score, though the suggestions that I am intellectually immature, or just some angry Jew, seem more than a little ad hominem.
But the article is, in a sense, about leveling the playing field--neither Judaism nor Christianity has a monopoly on love or anger. It's not enough just to say that the Hebrew Scriptures portray God in more way than just angry. The corollary point--that the NT, in addition to the loving God, contains the seeds of rage and violence--is equally significant.
Ok, fair enough!
For anyone who thinks that "Old Testament God" is simply one character, there's just a malformed ignorance there, one that Trudeau (who's better educated and should know better) plays all too easily into.
For my money, the best analysis of the multifaceted God images of the Hebrew Scriptures is Jack Miles' *God: A Biography.* Miles is an Episcopalian, former Jesuit, Harvard PhD in Near Eastern Studies and Hebrew-Christian scriptures. And if you read it, you won't be able to sustain the idea of "Old Testament God."
But the author of this piece, Benjamin, as arnizach points out, does pretty much the same thing as Trudeau with respect to the Christian New Testament. Reading it, one feels as if his anger with Trudeau led him to commit the same error, doing simplistic reduction on the Christian God.
The number of images of Jesus that appear in the CNT are also multi-faceted and have been subjected to a variety of interpretations over time. Jesus isn't a "Chevarist" militant until fairly recently in time and only in certain crowds. But he does inveigh against the oppression of the poor, advocating the overturning of an old order that allows for power and wealth to be used against one's fellow Jews and (later) other people. Ben reads the Matthew passage in question correctly but fails to acknowledge there's much beyond it.
It's quite fine that Benjamin doesn't seem to care much for Jesus or the CNT, etc. (I base this on the S-M comment.) But it's not a very effective strategy (nor does it indicate much intellectual maturity) to similarly criticize the Christian scriptures in the same fashion as he dislikes being used on the Hebrew scriptures.
(Actually, Jesus had something to say about that: "First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's.")
All that said, Ben, I'm glad that you called Trudeau out on this. But go him one better instead of imitating him.
I get what you're saying, but, in defense of my intellectual maturity, I want to point out that I was not offering a simple tit-for-tat, plank in my eye strategy. I was most certainly not trying to say, "You insult my God and I'll insult yours." I was, as Prof. Boyarin rightly explains in a few comments below this one, trying to point out that the apportioning of "violence" to the Hebrew Scriptures and "love" to the New Testament, a trope that Trudeau employs in his cartoon, is not so simple. The reference to the crucifixion as S&M was not a definitive statement on Chistology and Christinaity, and I understand both are very rich and full of messages that I appreciate, even as a rabbi. I was, however, trying to look behind the message of love that is often given as the sum total of Christianity, and point out that there is quite a bit of violence lurking there too--especially, perhaps, in the very story of what is done to the God of love in the name of that love. This could be taken even further: what is the strange Christian historical move of both needing the crucifixion to take place for the sake of salvation, and assigning the blame for that action on Jews? Is this an evasion of responsibility for the violence implicit in the Christian tradition, that is somehow parallel to the assignation of all of God's violence to the Hebrew scriptures?
If there was a tit-for-tat somewhere in my consciousness when I wrote this piece, if it was motivated in part by an anger at yet another trotting out of an old canard, especially at such a sensitive time, then I suppose there's something there I should work on. But this should not be used as a means of sidestepping the basic point, which I think is sound.
Now here comes the "some of my best friends are Christian" part: I've engaged in plenty of dialog with Christians and Christianity, especially as an intern at the Institute for Christian Jewish Study in Baltimore. I have learned a lot from them--I'm not speaking out of some primal, tribal defensive posture when I level my criticism, which I think was fairly measured, at Trudeau, but because I think it is precisely these points in the Christian-Jewish encounter that need to be addressed clearly and honestly.
-B Weiner (I would sign in as myself if I could remember my password...)
you are a "moneychanger"... I took it as a swipe at the Wall Street folks... which could use a smack aside of the head...
Intersting to read E.P Sanders' interpretation of the Temple scene in his Historical Figure of Jesus. The money changers were doing nothing unusual or illegal or immoral, just assisting travelers in making their offerings, and it is doubtful the scene ever took place. So what did it mean and why is there? A later "creation" or lesson by apostles in their teaching, struggles within the Jewish community?
I actually think that Trudeau gets too much of a free ride here. He is mobilizing simple antisemitic tropes that have already done enormous damage to Jews and Christians for hundreds of years or more. It is, in fact, classic antisemitism (whatever his "motivations"). I don't think Rabbi Weiner's point was to stereotype Jesus but to say that the characterization of the so-called NT god as a god of love and peace misses a whole lot there too (blasted fig trees anyone; how about I come with a sword). This is not to be construed in any way as an attack on Jesus or the NT but simply a call for recognition of similar complexities and contradictions in both Testaments (they are actually so similar, so so similar).
God and the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, seeking love, spirit, and not
religion. People have wanted to be as close to God, Lord, so they made a hundredth faith and religion, and God is looking for a good heart and spirit. Everything else is the Pharisees and snobbery, thank you and regards
traži
Trudeau has given expression to a contemporary religion much like what I learned at the knee of my mother. Jews weren't favored in the 'new testament' (not necessarily referring to the book here), just as Gentiles were not favored in the old.
Rather than complaining, you might consider letting go of the old testament, not the accumulated wisdom of the people but the claims about God that serve to divide us. You give up the old testament and I'll give up the 'new'.
Not sure I follow you, but, if this is a "chosen people" thing, you should know that the Reconstructionist movement, in which I am ordained, long ago deemphasized "chosen-ness" as a principle of Jewish belief, including removing it from the liturgy completely.
-B Weiner
I realized, on reflection, how the reading of the crucifixion as S&M dropped into my mind. It was actually inspired by Jonathan Walton's RD post about a month ago called "Evangelical Church of Torture and Jack Bauer" (5/6/2009), along with the illustration that accompanied it of a bloody hand spiked with a nail, and the words "His Pain is Your Gain." I don't hold Walton responsible for my response to his material, but I do think it's important to note that my point about the interrelationship of love and violence in Christianity is not, as some here seem to be suggesting, the result of some sort of Jewish antipathy toward Christian scripture, but actually based on some observations of how some Christians seem to construct the meaning of their religion.
I have to say, the "false dichotomy" between mean, nitpicky God and sweet, loving Jesus has bugged me for a long time. It wasn't until I got to seminary and took Hebrew Bible from a prof who insisted we view the Hebrew Scriptures as a canon of their own, leave off using them to "predict" the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, and find the complex and highly relational God within them that I found God-images that made any sense to me at all. The very limpid Jesus that so many Christians find in the New Testament is a figure I have a hard time with, perhaps because the writers of the NT had so much Greco-Roman stuff around.
demand a refund. An educated man ought to know better. The cartoon offends me and it ought to offend most others. Some of the posts here are excellent and describe the evolution of God in history.
Read Jack Miles' "God: A Biography" and "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God." His largely literary - though not ignoring historical and theological insights - reading of both the Tanakh and the (Jewish!) Christian Testament points out that there is far more in common between the Christ of the early church and the YHWH of pre-Rabbinic Judaism (of which "Christianity" was merely one strain) than we often realize. Miles also finds, implicitly, no small amount of "sadomasachism" in the "suicide" of Jesus, who is experienced by the early (mostly Jewish!) church as God (that is, YHWH) incarnate. One need not agree with Miles' reading to appreciate the insights he brings to our shared (Judeo-Christian?) religious traditions. Trudeau's ignorance of the historical/theological/literary aspects of the Wests spiritual heritage is just one more indication of the sorry state of what passes for "education" and public discourse in this country at the moment (to say nothing of the World).
Jack Miles makes the common mistake of confusing "the Wests spiritual heritage" with Jewish (and African) mythology. Our spiritual heritage resides in our indwelling capacity to experience the divine. This at once subtends and transcends the religious mythologies that serve to divide us. Not quite incidentally, it is also the long-standing message of Doonsbury: "The enemy is us".
Honestly, Ian, my experience is that people who ask others to set aside their "mythologies" for some "true" form of religion, are actually asserting the supremacy of their own mythologies.
Ben, I was thinking of Martin Buber when I wrote that but anything that brings one to question the 'is of identify' fits in here for me. A quick Google search brought me this: "Korzybski's remedy was ...to be continually aware that 'Joe' is not what we call him." You may call yourself Yiddish, think that you're Yiddish, act like you're Yiddish, but you're a real honest-to-god human being to me.
It is one thing for a participants in a religious tradition to openly and honestly criticize and admit the failings of that faith to their co-religionists for prophetic reasons. It is entirely another thing for a member of a different religious tradition to use that openness and honesty to in turn hone a polemical dagger and stab a rival tradition in the guts...
Such tactics have a long history and perhaps a psychological appeal; but surely they are counterproductive and not to be encouraged as people of good faith try to reconstruct their traditions.
Polemics is NOT true dialog – and only true dialog can lead to real understanding and the peace between the nations for which we hope.
But the author of this piece, Benjamin, as arnizach points out, does pretty much the same thing as Trudeau with respect to the Christian New Testament. Reading it, one feels as if his anger with Trudeau led him to commit the same error, doing simplistic reduction on the Christian God.
The number of images of Jesus that appear in the CNT are also multi-faceted and have been subjected to a variety of interpretations over time. Jesus isn't a "Chevarist" militant until fairly recently in time and only in certain crowds. But he does inveigh against the oppression of the poor, advocating the overturning of an old order that allows for power and wealth to be used against one's fellow Jews and (later) other people. Ben reads the Matthew passage in question correctly but fails to acknowledge there's much beyond it.
Emil, please read my comments above regarding this criticism. I am learning that it is best not to be subtle when talking about contentious issues, because you leave so much room for people to (willfully?) misunderstand what you are saying. Of course, I am familiar with the very powerful statements in the NT about poverty, and also the fact that there are numerous Christologies. I have a lot of respect for both, and certainly number myself among the rabbis not afraid to hear in the voice of Jesus a powerful reflection on the Jewish tradition (though I stop short of the whole divinity thing.)
My point in this particular piece was to respond to an incident in which a very public cartoon had once again trotted out the old canard that the Hebrew Scriptures is all about anger and the New Testament is all about love. In the context of my argument, it seemed valid to point out that the "OT" is full of complex images of God, and the NT is often read in a "reductionist" fashion that reduces Jesus to some dewy-eyed community organizer, or tragic-romantic social revolutionary, and overlooks the violence that is implicit in the act of a God of love being nailed to a piece of wood for the sake of that love--not to mentioned the other aggressive moments pointed out in this talkback section by Professor Boyarin. This was in response to Trudeau's cartoon, and the widespread and simplistic understanding of the distinctions between Judaism and Christianity that it is built upon. It was not meant as a definitive statement on all of Christianity. (Note the use of words like "can sometimes seem"...)
Some seem more comfortable understanding me, instead, as just some angry immature Jew. That's really your business, when it comes down to it, but please don't use it as a means of sidestepping the point of what I've said. It is not enough to say that Judaism is not just about anger. It is equally important to point out that Christianity, in addition to everything else, contains the seeds of an aggression and hostility that it has been all too convenient over the centuries to project onto Judaism. I'm not going to speak for arnizach but if you'll look above, he seemed to grasp this in theory when I pointed it out to him, in response to his criticism.
Readers of my RD posts, should know by now that I am also quite even-handed in my criticism of Judaism, when the situation merits it. This was once situation in which I felt it was appropriate to level a criticism at a certain Christian self-understanding. I'm certainly sorry if some found my tone upsetting, but I continue to stand by the message.
Ben-
I appreciated your article. Anyone who can use metonymous and clusterfuck in one sentence is a brilliant writer. I'm a Christian minister in a mainline denomination. Some thoughts about Jesus in the Temple:
1) The place this happened was the court of the Gentiles, the outermost of a series of concentric rectangles that made up Herod's Temple. It was designed by YHWH in love as a place non-Jews could go to pray, to hear the canting of the Psalms, smell the incense and sacrifices, and be drawn to worship YHWH. Thousands of God-fearers came to Jerusalem annually for the Passover-Pentecost season to do just that.
2) Jesus' anger was deliberate and modulated, not a fit of temper or an outburst. He plaited a whip out of cords and then drove the merchants out. I've never done it, but it seems like that would take a bit of time to do.
3) Although the moneychangers and sellers of sacrificial animals were facilitating worship by selling animals fit for sacrifice and exchanging Roman coins with Caesar's image for special coins acceptable for placing in the Temple treasury, there is, and I mean no anti-Semitic canard about Jewish merchants by this, the indication that the people were perhaps being cheated in the transactions. This is made fairly explicit by Jesus quotation of the text "a den of robbers"
4) Jesus' overriding goal was to make the court of Gentiles a place of prayer for the Nations. Ben, you rightly cited Jonah as an example of the diversity of theology in the Hebrew Bible. The reason Jonah was pissed at YHWH was he resented YHWH's willingness to be merciful to the Ninevites, people who had harmed the Jews. One way to read both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures is people having their understandings of YHWH progressively expanded from familial/tribal deity to creator of all the cosmos of lover of all persons, irrespective of ethnicity or creed. Trudeau's "sin" (beyond the WASPish anti-Semitism) is to reduce what is one of the most significant moments in Jesus' ministry to a punch line.
Ben-
I appreciated your article. Anyone who can use metonymize (one of my favorite literary devices) and clusterfuck in one sentence is a brilliant writer. I'm a Christian minister in a mainline denomination. Some thoughts about Jesus in the Temple:
1) The place this happened was the court of the Gentiles, the outermost of a series of concentric rectangles that made up Herod's Temple. It was designed by YHWH in love as a place non-Jews could go to pray, to hear the canting of the Psalms, smell the incense and sacrifices, and be drawn to worship YHWH. Thousands of God-fearers came to Jerusalem annually for the Passover-Pentecost season to do just that.
2) Jesus' anger was deliberate and modulated, not a fit of temper or an outburst. He plaited a whip out of cords and then drove the merchants out. I've never done it, but it seems like that would take a bit of time to do.
3) Although the moneychangers and sellers of sacrificial animals were facilitating worship by selling animals fit for sacrifice and exchanging Roman coins with Caesar's image for special coins acceptable for placing in the Temple treasury, there is, and I mean no anti-Semitic canard about Jewish merchants by this, the indication that the people were perhaps being cheated in the transactions. This is made fairly explicit by Jesus quotation of the text "a den of robbers."
4) Jesus' overriding goal was to make the court of Gentiles a place of prayer for the Nations. Ben, you rightly cited Jonah as an example of the diversity of theology in the Hebrew Bible. The reason Jonah was pissed at YHWH was he resented YHWH's willingness to be merciful to the Ninevites, people who had harmed the Jews. One way to read both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures is people having their understandings of YHWH progressively expanded from familial/tribal deity to creator of all the cosmos and lover of all persons, irrespective of ethnicity or creed. Trudeau's "sin" (beyond the WASPish anti-Semitism) is to reduce what is one of the most significant moments in Jesus' ministry to a punch line.
Thanks for the reassurance, and also for the very helpful context. Certainly a very plausible reading of the money-changers incident, and your reading of Jonah fits very well with Jewish midrashic understandings of what is actually going on in that book. Even though we class Jonah with the other "minor prophets," I've always thought of the book as more like Esther, Ruth, or the Jospeh narrative--the story of an individual's experience, in this case the learning of a powerful moral lesson.
The idea of the ever-expanding circle is a very compelling idea with some complications. I guess I would ask--can we see this ever widening circle as occurring within the Hebrew Scriptures, or do we have to see it culminating in Jesus and the NT? Obviously, I would find the second option problematic.
I guess if I have any defensive agenda in Christian-Jewish dialogue it's that the reading of the NT as the necessary culmination of the pre-existing body of Israelite sacred literature has become so engrained that it's hard for people to imagine any other relationship between the two. (Even a writer as perceptive and powerful as Elaine Scarry falls into this trap.) I'd like to advocate for other understandings of the relationship, because this is one way of stressing the truth that Judaism continued to flourish, even after it was dismissed as an outdated tradition.
Again, thanks.
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