Jewish Religious Humanism and Christianity

In a chilling episode from Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, the author describes an incident that took place during his internment in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. A young boy, a Jewish prisoner who was accused of blowing up a power plant in the camp, is hanged for his “crime.” Wiesel explains that the boy, being so small and light, did not die immediately from the hanging, but remained alive, dangling from the rope for half a day. “Where is God?” one prisoner implores, responding to the utter horror of this child struggling for life at the end of the hangman’s rope. “And I heard a voice within me answer him,” the author ponders. “Where is He? Here he is… he is hanging here on this gallows.”

It is striking that a Jewish Holocaust survivor recalling this tragic event would use an image so markedly laden with Christology; that at this moment the suffer would be struck with a vision of a suffering, incarnate God.

As I note in the “Religious Humanist Manifesto,” I’m a Jew. This means for me that I have entered into a covenant relationship with God. I incorporate God’s Torah—God’s sacred teaching as I encounter it in scripture and in the world—into my life and project it into the world as a way of creating kedushah, sanctity, divine influence in my life and in the world.

From a Christian perspective, one might say that I am more “Jamesian” than Pauline. While I’m no fan of child sacrifice, I can relate to James’ understanding of deeds as a demonstration of faith when he says:

“Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. You see that people are justified by what they do and not by faith alone.” (James 2: 21-24)

I demonstrate my faith, my connection to God, by the way I behave in the world. But how do I then relate, as a Jew, to the larger Christian message? The question is more than academic given the millennia of enmity that has endured between these two religious cultures, and the pain and suffering that has been inflicted on Jews by a supersessionist, triumphalist Christendom.

It is not my purpose in this essay to rehash that tormented history. Rather, as a religious humanist, as a student and teacher of religion and as an active participant in the interfaith community, I have encountered aspects of Christianity that resonate deeply in my yearning for connection to the divine.

There is a certain sense of alienation in the experience of a transcendent God who resides above and beyond the world, nature and history and is its creator, engineer, director and law giver. The image of God as celestial Father and King reinforces that sense of distance, and, in fact, the absence of a feminine element may exacerbate it. Humans long for contact, connection to an immanent divinity. There is, undoubtedly, within the Hebrew/Jewish tradition an encounter with an immanent God. Psalm 113 describes God as “the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth.” More profound than the scattered indications of divine immanence are the unambiguous expressions of the human/divine connection that emerge from the biblical account of creation—that on the one hand, humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27), and, on the other, that the soul, the life force present in humanity is nothing less than the divine breath (Genesis 2:7). Moreover, Jewish tradition bridges the gap between the terrestrial human community and a transcendent divinity through the image of the shekhinah, God’s indwelling presence that suffers the pain and humiliation of exile along with God’s covenant people.

Nonetheless, the prevailing picture is of a supernatural, transcendent divinity whose ongoing connection to humanity is manifest through scriptural teaching and other emanations of divinity. It is no wonder that humans would be powerfully drawn to the image of God incarnate, particularly at a moment in history—the Roman occupation of Palestine—when a yearning for God’s presence would have been especially acute.

The theologian M. Thomas Thangaraj writes of Christina solidarity and compassion in his 1999 work titled The Common Task: A Theology of Christian Mission,

“In whatever ways one may interpret the idea of incarnation, the point of incarnation, as most theologians would agree, is that God’s solidarity with humans is expressed in concrete terms.”

He goes on to cite Wendy Farley describing compassion as

“…not simply a matter of ‘handwringing sympathy’ but rather a ‘communion with the sufferer in her pain, as she experiences it”’ (emphasis in original).

A divinity whose love for and sense of solidarity with humanity that includes a willingness to assume human corporeal form and experience human suffering, pain and death is a powerful and poignant portrayal. What it especially reinforces is a kind of spiritual anthropology that is most pronounced in the Gospel of John and in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. In communion with Christ, the worshipper abides with Christ, becomes Christ, and abides with God. As much as Christ represents a human incarnation of divinity, he also exemplifies the divine presence in each human incarnation—that is, in each of us.