Grab the Hand of Unity |
If you can annihilate the State of Israel or kill all the Jews, you can make God a liar. Through the millennia of captivity, exile, dispersion, pogroms, Inquisitions, the Shoah, and October 7th, a spiritual agenda is at work. Yet the agents who act out this cruelty remain the same, though with different flesh covering the body. The goal is put into doubt the words of our Torah and prophets, to make a lie of the promises and the prophecies of old, as well as those that are unfolding before our very eyes. It’s the same question the serpent asked Eve in the garden, “Now the serpent was cunning, more than all the beasts of the field that the Lord God had made, and it said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat of any of the trees of the garden?’ (Gen. 3:1)
Did God really say? This formulation, by way of doubt, brings into question what God declares. Did God really say He would bring us back? Did God really say He would revive the language? Did God really say we would be a light unto the nations? Did God really say He would fight for us? Did God really say that His servant David would reign in the age to come? Did God really say?
Why are we so different? Because we have to be, we are the living proof of God. The very presence of the Jew shouts the truth of God. Before the state was re-established, the Church would say that God was done with the Jews; He rejected them, and now the “New Israel” is the Christians. However, this had to be reevaluated when the hyper-spiritualized version of Israel became a literal reality, fulfilling prophecy. Over the decades since then, the Christian Church has sought to examine introspectively what this meant for the doctrine of supersessionism. The idea that because of the rejection of Jesus as a divine messiah, the Jews have now been rejected by God and are no longer the true Israel or faithful Jews. The Nostra Aetate document, penned in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council, and the conversations between Jewish-Christian dialogue that followed it are the rejections of such an ideal.
Bad ideas die slowly, and what we are witnessing today, among a split Church, is the issue of the Jews and Israel. The Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson types have coughed up not only old tropes and blood libel accusations, but also a more nuanced form of supersessionism. Although they still agree with the formally rejected form, they find that by “just asking questions,” all in the name of “God,” they can call into doubt the millions of followers they have. If a literal return to the Land of the........