This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
On this last day of Passover, I received an email invite to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day at a Brandeis- sponsored conference, “The Shoah in Israeli Culture, Memory and Politics.” Featured speakers include Nobel Peace Laureate, Elie Wiesel, Dan Michman of Yad Vashem and Stuart Eizenstat, Special Advisor on Holocaust Issues for Secretary of State John Kerry.
The usual Holocaust suspects.
Wiesel is checking in by video. Will Eizenstat bring along a special message from our flailing (somewhat Jewish) Secretary of State?
There might be a few interesting twists and turns at the conference. The perennial accuser of Jews of Conscience, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, has been hawking his tired wares for decades. His lecture “The Use of the Holocaust as a Form of Anti-Israel Rhetoric” will be like most sermons – when you hear the first sentence, the rest is easy to figure out. “The Embryonic Israeli Right, Fascism, and the Shoah,” by Colin Shindler, professor of Israel Studies at SOAS in London, promises to be a tad more interesting. At SOAS, his job is to keep the anti-Zionist internationalist barbarians at the gate long enough to allow Israel to get it right. At least he’s willing to face a challenging lecture audience.
But balancing the right with the left – painting the extremes as a way of holding the occupation middle together – doesn’t do much anymore. It’s an outdated concept whose sole purpose is to move the goal posts and buy time for Israel’s occupation regime.
I doubt the proceedings at Brandeis will be monitored like the One-State conference at Harvard was a few years ago. This might be the rub as Passover comes to a close.
Neither Holocaust remembrance nor the one-state hope is going anywhere in the immediate future. The Holocaust is already in our rear-view mirror. Its days are numbered. The one-state hope isn’t even on the horizon. Right now any positive one-state future is blocked by the one-state panorama already in place – Israel in control from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River.
These endless Holocaust conferences testify to the money that the Jewish establishment has and is willing to spend to prop up Israel’s occupation. And to censor Israel’s critics. It’s their last ditch attempt to keep the tide of Jewish history from being overwhelmed by the Jewish prophetic.
Remembering the Holocaust is used to keep our Jewish heads above water. The Holocaust has become our lifeboat.
The Holocaust/Israel/Palestine issue continues to widen the divisions in the Jewish community. The division: Jews with money, influence and political power versus Jews of Conscience without money, influence or political power. In the middle is apathy and flight. Most Jews today don’t want to get near any of it. No wonder Passover has become vacuous.
Some Jews I’ve known mock the Easter-driven “He is Risen” church billboards which, surprisingly, aren’t much different from the Facebook postings by our more enlightened Christian comrades in arms. Our thoughts: Christians can’t help themselves. They’re on self-congratulatory auto-pilot. But then, how do our Passover liberation greetings sound to those outside the Jewish community?
Easter auto-pilot. Passover auto-pilot. The prophetic barred entry. Until the next round of holy days?
I am not sure how praising Jesus is “self”congratulations, unless you mean very indirectly. Namely, some people follow the hero or Messiah, and He triumphs, and so by praising their hero it is self-congratulations.
In any case, it is a story where a prophet (ie the Messiah) is killed by his enemies and God lets Him overcome it, as per Psalm 21-22.
I attended Good Friday service at the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. It was moving, and crowded. It’s tempting to write, “There was a cross-section of humanity,” but that’s not exactly true: I didn’t see a lot of obvious displays of wealth. Lots of people in their blue-collar best; plenty of Asians, Hispanics, and Africans in native dress. I was troubled to see that the last ten or so rows of pews in one section were almost all Black people — is there still “back of the bus” segregation even in church, even on the day we contemplate Jesus’s message that only by dying to ourselves and thinking of ourselves as no better and no worse that every other human person do we attain the fulness of life?
There were people from every race and ethnicity devoutly following the innumerable, “Let us kneel, … Let us rise” rubrics. Catholic congregations are not noted for their participation in song, but this one joined the superb choir.
I was moved and impressed. I intended to attend Easter Sunday Mass at a suburban parish, but when I checked their website for the times, I was put off by the message.
Instead, I decided to immerse myself in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The great poem takes place in Holy Week: it starts on “the day before Good Friday,” which Catholics call Holy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper. and ends on the Wednesday after Easter in that same Holy Week in 1300. The Allegory is one of sin and redemption, a universal theme.
A group used to celebrate Easter by meeting at sunrise on Sugarloaf Mountain, about 30 miles NW of Washington.
I think that group, and Dante, are fine ways to commemorate the journey of all men and women of good faith (not necessarily ‘creed,’ but faith), who seek to make sense of their own lives and renew their sense of what it means to be part of the Community of Humankind.
Doing so, we not only find no need to have to elevate our own little gaggle of humanity by derogating another little gaggle of humanity; we come face to face with nature — a mountain that’s bigger than any and every gaggle of humanity; and with the universality the hero’s journey.
How is it self-congratulatory? What hand do Christians think they had in the resurrection? None.
Look, Christian evangelism frankly bugs me, but how is it self-congratulatory to say “He is risen!”?
Expressing your discomfort with any form of Christianity that is remotely close to the historical mainstream of Christian credal statements doesn’t shed any light on the political and cultural issues you write about, although it does explain why Phil Weiss would pick you to be this site’s unofficial religious authority in residence.
I’m really not defending Christianity here. I just think it’s bizarre that you are shocked your “more enlightened Christian comrades” would celebrate the resurrection in simple and direct terms.
On my way to many visits to French friends or my favorite cousin who lived there a long time, I kept reading French novels to get into the language, which for this Anglophile wasn’t that present often at the start of the journey.
The only novel or more precisely the plot I distinctively remember–I have forgotten both author and title, since sadly enough I always left the book behind after having finished it during the visit–is this one:
There was a town or village, I think it was a town. Where the inhabitants had this odd custom. They killed a scapegoat, an animal after having loaded it with their own sins over the year. For whatever reason, I remember they drowned it in the town’s river. After it was dead, also their sins had gone with it. In other words it carried their sins away.
This to me felt like a parable on my Catholic believe and strictly the chances are high that a French author also is a Catholic. But it could also be regarded as a critique of core Christian tenets.
Now pray tell me, what is religious, or Jewish if you like, about this planned event at mass entertainment: Israeli Settler Priests Prepare to Build Holy Temple, Resume Animal Sacrifices. If you haven’t you have to watch the video. Like Shmuel and Richard and a lot of others here you have the advantage of actually understanding what is said in the context.
One minor note. The gestures of the kohanim don’t feel reminiscent of the specific gestures that my ancestors had to perform at a certain time, not a bit. I think Richard is a little bit hysterical in this context, or tries to read something into it, that isn’t really present.
Strictly the other gesture that lately has been moved into the large symbolical context doesn’t on its own trigger that association either. For one reason, a gesture to the heart may have much older roots. This is not meant to be a defense of the French comedian with African roots, I am just not sure what came first. His movement towards the French right or his attacks based on that gesture. And I don’t really have the time and interest to find out.