Pope appreciates Jewish quest for continuity

Because of his close ties with Jews in his native Argentina, Pope Francis may be familiar with contemporary Jewish theology. He alluded to one of its important tenets in his Sept. 11 letter to Eugenio Scalfari, editor of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Scalfari, a prominent atheist, had challenged the Pope on several issues of faith. One of them was about the Vatican’s position with regard to the Jewish people. He wanted to know if God’s covenant as described in the Hebrew Bible had “come to nothing” after the emergence of Christianity. The reference is to Christian supersessionism. The belief that Christianity has superseded Judaism and thus rendered the latter obsolete would make it virtually impossible to relate to contemporary Jews other than with pity and/or contempt. But nowadays many prominent exponents of the Church, including the Pope, are engaged in and committed to maintaining friendly ties with the Jewish people. Therefore, they are often asked how they square it with supersessionism. Pope Francis admits that “this is a question that challenges us radically as Christians,” but adds that in recent times “we have rediscovered that the Jewish people are still for us the holy root from which Jesus germinated.” With obvious reference to the persecution of Jews, much of it by Christians, culminating in the destruction of their six million by the Nazis in the Holocaust, the Pope writes that “through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God.” He thus echoes, for example, the thought of Rabbi Irving Greenberg who has written that at the time of the Holocaust even many Jews feared that God had indeed abrogated the covenant with Israel. Yet “the Jewish people, released from its obligations, chose voluntarily to take it up again” because “it was so in love with redemption that it volunteered to carry on its mission.” Greenberg writes that after the Holocaust “the overwhelming majority of survivors, far from yielding to despair, rebuilt Jewish lives and took part in the assumption of power by the Jewish people.” The establishment of the State of Israel is one of the results, as is the rebuilding of Jewish life in Europe, including Germany and Poland, the sites of most of the Nazi atrocities. This brings Greenberg to the rhetorical question reflected in the Pope’s comment: “Was there ever a faith like this faith?” But it’s not always faith in the way Christians see it. The survivors among whom I grew up didn’t talk much theology. However, for example, even those who had been widowed by the Nazis and had lost their families wanted, first and foremost, to marry again and have children. Even if these unions were seldom made in Heaven, the partners were determined to return to normality as soon as possible. Having a family again would be an obvious affirmation. As soon as they could, they left the displaced persons camps and the ruins of Europe for what in 1948 became the State of Israel, or they migrated to countries like Canada. Today, several prominent Canadians are children of Holocaust survivors born in European transit camps. The late Emil Fackenheim of the University of Toronto was an internationally acclaimed exponent of post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Surmising that many of the survivors might have agreed with Scalfari’s atheism even though they lived according to Greenberg’s understanding of faith, Fackenheim taught that the Holocaust revealed to Jews a new commandment: “Don’t give Hitler a posthumous victory!” Survival would vindicate, perhaps even replace, faith. The faith to which Pope Francis refers is the result of this Jewish quest for continuity.

It’s reassuring that he appreciates it. Dow Marmur is rabbi emeritus at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple. His column appears every other week.