ONE OF THE SECTION HEADINGS in Abraham Joshua Heschel's book Man's Quest For God has the provocative title, The Separation of Church and God. Before starting on this first section from his essay No Religion is an Island originally published in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, January 1966, I wanted to say that I think for a large part of Christianity and much of Judaism, that separation is a definite reality. I am hardly an expert but I think it's as true for large parts of Islam and, in fact, all organized religion. "Religion" is hardly ever an easily addressed or coherent thing. But, as I'm no expert, I will confine myself to what Heschel addressed, mostly Judaism and Christianity.
The Christianity of the Roman Catholic Latin mass fanatics, the billionaire financed neo-integralist reaction against Vatican II, the Protestants of the "prosperity gospel," white-supremacist materialist-As Seen On TV, Hollywood "Christianity," the kind of "Orthodoxy" that nourishes cults of personality and dynasties of corrupt leaders, all of the above having influential gangsters having entirely more of an influence within them than Moses, The Law, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul and, especially, James are excellent examples of religions separated from God, without the Prophets, without Jesus.
If a Christian is someone who believes what Jesus said and tries to live their life in light of those teachings, inevitably falling somewhat short - which were firmly established in The Law and, as if there's a difference, the Prophets - then Christianity is, in fact, a small minority religion whereas Mammonism, especially in its "Christian" sect, is the state religion of the American empire. As you can, no doubt, see later today during the state religious gladiatorial events of NFL and big-time college football and the Christmas ads which are the real reason it's on TV. Mammon rules America's popular culture as certainly as it did in pagan Europe of the classical and medieval eras.
As I said the other day, I have become convinced that that separation, the rejection of the responsibility to act morally, to take moral responsibility, to even refuse to accept that the truth is true is what is at the very foundation of our political crisis, the basis of the attack on egalitarian democracy, and even more so Mishpat or its equivalent in other religious traditions which is the actual true basis of government of, by and for ALL OF THE PEOPLE.
It is the reason that the legal response to the insurrection of the sixth of January is impotent and willfully so on the part of the secular legal system, it is the reason that two lawyers in Georgia can rig a jury to try to get white jurors to acquit the cold blooded murderers of an unarmed black man they hunted down and killed like he was a hapless game animal and why another judge will allow the slander of murder victims on behalf of an illegally gun toting white-supremacist punk at the same time. It is the reason that the mass media is permitted to lie us into fascism and violence and Covid-19 type hell for eternity with highly educated, high-price lawyers and judges and "justices" holding that is a right, indeed that it is a "right" for neo-Nazis to bring us close to the opposite of "Never Again" here, now, today in 2021. That is another effect of the "enlightenment" which Heschel mentions too briefly in his essay.
But I think from now on in this series, I'll concentrate on what Heschel said.
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Nazism in its very roots was a rebellion against the Bible, against the God of Abraham. Realizing that it was Christianity that implanted attachment to the God of Abraham and involvement with the Hebrew Bible in the hearts of Western man, Nazism resolved that it must both exterminate the Jews and eliminate Christianity, and bring about instead a revival of Teutonic paganism.
As I noted the other day, the WWII generation, those who fought in it, those who were alive to live through it are passing very fast now, and with them the direct and personal knowledge of that reality. Clearly the succeeding generations have not learned even what those people learned from that hardest of learned experience. Indeed, the lesson that Abraham Joshua Heschel lays out here is widely denied in the fashionable desire to use vague and often inaccurate notions of Nazism to attack religion in general, Christianity in particular and, largely flowing from a fashionable and lying play of a Marxist (now neo-Nazi apologist) playwright and as produced by anti-Catholic Brits and then in fashionable NYC, Catholics.
Indeed, even as recently as the early 2000s, it was possible for people within science to publish, AS SCIENCE, the implication that Jews brought on their own targeting for genocide due to the things which have allowed them to remain a distinct population of people, even attributing to them genetic predispositions of what the Nazis gave as their excuse to murder them in their millions. As recently as the late 20th and early 21st century, that could get you a tenured professorship in science at a reputable American university.
The "enlightenment" was far less an excursion into the light than it was a plunge into the abyss that materialism is. That is clear if you read the major figures of it at length instead of the clipped, cherry-picked, sanitized view of them which turned many a depraved racist and white supremacist, hater of the poor, the ill and the downtrodden into heroes of ideological modernism.
Modernism, a few details of fashion and style sometimes excepted, has little to no problem with the most flagrantly unequal and unjust and even cruelly evil aspects of materialist paganism.
Nazism has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from the Consciousness of the western world goes on. It is on the issues of saving the radiance of the Hebrew Bible in the minds of man that Jews and Christians are called upon to work together. None of us can do it alone. Bot of us must realize that in our age anti-Semitism is anti-Chirisanity and anti-Christianity is anti-Semitism.
I do not know the extent to which Heschel knew that what he said was literally true, Wilhelm Marr, the man who invented the word "anti-Semitism" to give his ideological hatred of Jews the aroma of science said exactly that as did the later Nazis and, in fact, as was proved when some professional figures of religion, wanting to get along with the new regime, denied the very nature of Jesus and who found, when they tried to eliminate all Jewish content in the New Testament found that most of it would have to go. Even those nominal Christians, and they were by no means a majority of German and Austrian Christians, found that to reject Judaism they had to reject Christianity. Something which English language Christians have hardly realized nearly as much as some German speaking ones must have.
Man is never as open to fellowship as he is in moments of misery and distress. The people of New York City have never experienced such fellowship , such awareness of being one, as they did last night in the midst of darkness. [The great power grid failure and blackout of November 9, 1965.]
Indeed, there is a light in the midst of the darkness of this hour. But, alas, most of us have no eyes.
Is Judaism, is Christianity, ready to face the challenge? When I speak about the radiance of the Bible in the minds of man, I do not mean its being a theme for "Information, please" but rather an openness to God's presence in the Bible, the continuous ongoing effort for a breakthrough in the soul of man, the guarding of the precarious position of being human, even a little higher than human, despite defiance in in face of despair.
The supreme issue is today not the halacha for the Jew or the Church for the Christian - but the premise underlying both religions, namely, whether there is a pathos, a divine reality concerned with the destiny of man which mysteriously impinges upon history; the supreme issue is whether we are alive or dead to the challenge and the expectation of the living God. The crisis engulfs all of us. The misery and fear of alienation from God make Jew and Christian cry together.
That reference the halacha, of course, jumped out at me given what I've recently said about Mishpat being a more reliable foundation for egalitarian, economically just, and socially just government than the entirely inadequate and incomplete "one person one vote" representative democracy under secular, law. Given the dangerously rigged and inadequate law in the hands of a generations long scheme of manipulation by corporate oligarchic lawyers, our Constitution is certainly not up to the job. I think the establishment of those rules by figures of the so-called enlighenment is not in any way irrelevant to those inadequacies.
Heschel's identification of the central issue as one, not of fixed, permanent, laws but "the challenge and the expectation of the living God" which we can only know in relationship to the ongoing experience of living People seems to me to be in opposition to the various "fundamentalisms" "originalisms" "literalisms" that govern our thinking today. I think it is also a challenge to the academic "critical" method of reading the Bible and the quest for "the historical Jesus" that seems to me to miss the point of it all.
Jews must realize that the spokesmen of the Enlightenment who attacked Christianity were no less negative in their attitude toward Judaism. They often blamed Judaism for the misdeeds of the daughter religion. The causalities of the devastation caused by the continuous onslaughts on biblical religion in modern times are to be found among Jews as well as among Christians.
That onslaught, both external, from the ideologies of secularism, modernism, scientism, materialism, atheism, and far more effectively fashion and popular culture and internally from those who wanted to benefit from and conform to the esteemed and fashionable aspects of all of those, is far more advanced than it was during Heschel's life. They have swamped Catholicism even in the guise of neo-medieval disguise, Protestantism in fundamentalism and pentacostalism, the prosperity gospel and "mainline churches" which have pretty much given up Christianity except as a feel-good and banal sentimentalism.
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