Mark Braverman (born 1948) is an American psychologist and Jewish activist for Palestinean rights. He is the executive director of Kairos USA.
The following is a transcript of Dr. Braverman's contributions to The Jim Forest Institute's online conference, "The Experience & Practice of Mutual Respect Across Faiths."
JUDAISM & CHRISTIANITY: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONVERSATION & CONFLICT
The relationship between Jews and Christians or Judaism and Christianity—Judaism and the church—began in the 1st century in Roman-occupied Palestine with a Jewish conversation that was happening at the time. I'm oversimplifying this, but it's really true in its essence.
The conversation was about whether one worships God on one mountain in a house that you built for God or whether creation and God's love are for everyone. The conversation was about whether God chooses one family, one tribe, one people as his special people, devoted to his worship, or whether, as was made clear on the day of Pentecost, the power of the Spirit is truly in the Spirit, and it is for everyone. And those distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, male and female, as Paul said, are dissolved. This is the issue for humankind throughout history, up to the present day. So in the crucible of the 1st century, where we had this conversation between Jews, spearheaded by this charismatic, radical, rabble-rousing, grassroots organizer—Jesus of Nazareth—that conversation is continuing, and we have to confront this for the sake of humanity, for the sake of creation itself.
So what does the Bible record? This story begins in Luke chapter 4, where Jesus initiates his ministry in a synagogue, on the Sabbath, in Nazareth, and what happens to him? He unrolls the scroll of Isaiah. Jesus was always quoting Scripture. And he announces that the message of his ministry and the message for humankind has to be about social justice. That was the whole theme of his ministry for those three years, until that last week in Jerusalem.
What happens to him? His fellow Jews in the synagogue basically decided that he has to die—and they try to kill him and throw him off a cliff. For what? Not for quoting Isaiah. Isaiah was read in the synagogue on a regular basis. It was because he broke the rules and committed the unpardonable sin of talking about prophets and people in Syria and in Lebanon—outside the boundaries of Palestine, outside of the boundaries of us. Jesus spent his whole ministry dealing with that.
He talks to the woman in at the well, and she says, “Why are you talking to me? I’m a Samaritan.” And he says, “You worship on one mountain, we worship one another.” But remember that he says “The time will come, woman, when we will not worship on any one mountain. But we will worship in the Spirit.
And then later, he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, where he asks and answers the question, “Who is my neighbor?” This is the whole story.
And the Jews went off, again because of history, and went back to their own insularity. And the rabbis and rabbinical Judaism, without the temple, also established something a lot better. But it was still insular, and it was still us-and-them.
And Paul and his crew tried to do something different. And again, fast-forward a couple of centuries. The church has thrown in with the empire and turned its back on the essence of the Gospels and of Jesus himself, and said, “We're in charge, we're better, we're exceptional,” and threw the Jews under the bus (and in due time, the Muslims, too, but especially the Jews).
AN OBSCENE REVERSAL OF JESUS IN JOHN 14
And they said the only way to God is ME, in an obscene reversal of what Jesus was saying in John chapter 14.
And again, fast-forward to 1945, when western Christendom, European Christianity stood in front of the ovens of Auschwitz and said, “What have we done?” And that was an opportunity to take a look at ourselves. Western civilization was saying, “We did this—this anti-Semitism that created this horror. This genocide was because we saw ourselves as special.
But you blew it. Instead, what you did was say, “Well, we have to wash our hands of the shame, of this guilt. We're going to give specialness back to the Jews. We're going to honor the land grant that was in that original covenant.” Even though Jesus said, “We're done with that.” And political Zionism was endorsed by Christianity. Not just by heretical, unbiblical, fundamentalist Christianity that said in end times, when the last non-Jew leaves Jerusalem, Jesus will come back the next day. No, I'm talking about mainline, mainstream, liberal Christianity, which says, “We are so ashamed of what we did that we are going to give you this land back and say that the original covenant is in place, even though it turns its back on the essence of our faith and of Jesus said in the New Testament.
In terms of the church and of Christians—and Mercy Aiken, who's sitting in Bethlehem today, is an embodiment of that mission—If we are really going to honor and have mutuality and peacemaking with the world, particularly with our Jewish colleagues, we have to say, “You are sinning. I love you. Stop what you are doing. I understand the basis and motivation for Zionism, that need for safety. But it’s not the answer to antisemitism.”
And I understand as a Jew where that comes from. But the answer is not to seek safety by doing to them what was done to us. Let's go back and honor that best Jew, that greatest Jewish prophet. What would Jesus say today or what is Jesus going to do when he comes back? I know what he's going to do. He’s going to stand on the Mount of Olives, and he's going to shed a few tears for Jerusalem today and what's happening there. But he's not going to stand there crying for very long. He's going to continue walking down that hill, west into West Jerusalem. He's going to stand in front of the Knesset, and he’s going to say, “Destroy this temple. Destroy all those temples—of greed and exceptionalism and us and them.” Embrace that message of that prophet (and there are other prophets as well, who we've blessed today). Embrace that prophetic message and say, “Let that temple be replaced with (in Jesus’ terms) my body, the body of Christ, one humanity united in a brotherhood and a sisterhood of compassion and love.
THE CRUCIBLE OF PALESTINE TODAY
So when we look at Jewish-Christian relations today and the crucible of what's happening in Palestine today between Christians and Muslims and Jews, this is the message we must bring. And the work in Palestine must be replicated throughout the world, between black and white and north and south. That's my prayer and that's my message.
Often when they get into preaching like this and quoting from Scripture (and I'm never preaching from the Old Testament, only from the New Testament), people ask, “When did you convert?” And I wouldn't know how to answer that question in the beginning, although I understood where it was coming from.” And I’d say, “You know, I'm not quite sure what that would mean, but I wish that things had gone differently in the 1st century so that I wouldn’t have to be answering that question.
Going back to talking about evangelicals, it’s a weird term because it’s really broad. You have so many different kinds of people. When I first started working in this area, working with Christians and working with churches, I found that in some ways, I had a lot more access and a lot more openness, and a lot more ability to share with the Evangelicals I met, rather than the tall-steeple Protestants in the United States. That’s because the ones I met, I met through a network called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, who, because they were involved in mission work and were getting around and seeing the rest of the world, were outside of the usual bubble in the United States. That’s what's wrong. We haven't been outside of our bubble, and so we don't understand what humanity is really about, and didn’t understand other perspectives. But the Christians that I met who had been to Palestine or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Colombia understood what the gospel is really about. It wasn’t about saving souls and bringing them into the one truth faith. It means something completely different—it’s about making the connection with all it means to be human.
When you are a Christian raised on “the Bible,” and the covenants and Genesis 12 and “the Promised Land,” you have a very distorted picture of the Holy Land and the role of the land in what it means to be a faithful person. And you have this idea that the Jews were God’s chosen. This is true Christian Zionism, which is colonialism, which is heresy, which is crap.
When African Americans, for example, visit the holy world, or white Christians who have been raised in this kind of theology and hermeneutic, they go and see that what they learned was upside down. The Jews are not the victims, the Jews are not the heroes of the story today. The victims, the poor, the oppressed, and the captives who need to be set free are the Palestinians who are being victimized, ironically and tragically, by the Jewish people. This is upside down.
I've spoken with black South Africans who, when they go to visit Israel, say, “Oh my God, this is apartheid. It is worse than the apartheid we experienced. And we have to reread our Bible,” because they were raised on the same Zionist hermeneutic. And they say, “We have to reread our Bible because it’s Palestinians who are on the cross today, not the Jewish people who were victimized throughout history.” So it opens you up, and it means you have to go back and question what you had been taught and you had to reread your Bible and understand more what it means.
INTERFAITH CONVERSATION HIJACKED
One thing that’s happened with the “interfaith conversation” between Jews and Christians is that it has been hijacked by Zionism and it has been in the service of Christians’ (understandably) misguided attempt to reconcile with the Jewish people—who do exactly the wrong thing, which is to invest them with the exceptionalism the Christians want to hold on to. It is to say, “Yes, you are special.”
Nobody is special. Nobody's chosen. All are special. And what we need to understand is that the Old Testament was the basis and the springboard for the original covenant and the original promise, and it did transform itself into something new. But under the current interfaith rules, you're not supposed to say that because that’s replacement theology, that's supersessionism, and that leads to antisemitism. And yes, supersession is bad. It’s not biblical. Nobody came to replace anybody else. Jesus came to fulfill what was already there and what the prophets were already saying, but he took it one step further, and it needed that extra step. But that bothers people wanting to stay with the old deal, which is that we are special. That’s always the struggle.
We've got one Bible, one set of scriptures, which includes the Qu’ran, which is a continuation. We absolutely have to see it that way, and frankly, that doesn't seem to be human nature. So we need to struggle to get out of our bubble. That’s the best thing to do. So I would say to Evangelical Christians, don't bother going to the prayer breakfast anymore. God to “Christ at the Checkpoint.” Get out of your prayer-for-breakfast bubble and go out into the world to meet Palestinian Christians. They will introduce you to the rest of humanity.
Two things that I want to bring up quickly for consideration. First, I have a reaction to the term Abrahamic. If we think about the three traditions it represents, there are some other folks in the world who would not identify as such, and we would not identify as such. I wish we could find another term because it’s exclusivistic.
And again, take my context into consideration in terms of what happened to Christian-Jewish relations after World War II. But I also have a bit of a knee-jerk response to the word “interfaith,” because interfaith conversation in my context was always about Christians coming in humility to kiss the Jews’ ring and to say, “What can we do to make this up to you?” and it’s not going in the right direction in my opinion.
These are my people, and I feel so much sadness and compassion for them. To me, they are the prisoners of that wall, not the Palestinians. The wall is meant to steal land from the Palestinians, but it has not stolen from the Palestinians their souls or their sense of who they are. The Jews in Israel who live behind that wall—it’s pretty horrible what has happened to them. The idea of reaching out and making those ties with people who know we’re trying to save their country. But so many are leaving because they don’t want to bring up their kids in an apartheid state. To me, what will be the salvation of my people is to change our narrative. We need to understand that our story today is not what happened to us, but what we are now doing to other people.
And that’s a human condition. If the Palestinians were in power, just like when the Christians were in power in Rome, might turn around and do the same things that are being done to them. It’s a human story.
So again, coming back to Jesus, he said, “You have to love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” I had an experience. My son is a Buddhist, and we went to Nepal to visit a teacher. It was the whole deal: he was sitting there, cross-legged in a white robe. And you get to ask one question. And I said, “Help me. I feel such sadness for my people because they are sinning very badly. What should I do?” And he said, “Pray for them.” Out of the words of this Buddhist teacher, Jesus was speaking very clearly. And the prophet, peace be upon him, would say the same thing.
BRAVERMAN ON "THE WAY" OF JOHN 14
On the reversal of Jesus’ teaching in John 14, read Brian McLaren. He was the one who rocked my world on that. Brian talks about the various moves in the conversation with Peter.
Basically, it’s so clear that I don't know what the question could be. Jesus was not saying that you have to “Believe in me as God or the Saviour or all of that false Christology. What he was saying was, “Understand, if you want to come to the Father, look at me, be like me, follow my example, do what I've done. That's all there is to it. In the last chapter of Luke, when Jesus comes back and reappears to his disciples, who still didn’t understand what his ministry was about or what the resurrection was about, and they still didn’t recognize him. He said, “If you want to see who I really am, look at these wounds. Look at how I suffered. I represent humanity. And by the way, I'm hungry. Can you give me something to eat? Okay, do you get it now?”
That's how we need to understand, And of course, it was completely distorted to fit the purposes of the church. “We’re in charge, we want to have control over all of you. Don't read the Bible, don't translate it into the vernacular. Do not read the Bible, we’ll tell you what it says, we'll tell you what it means.” That’s the problem of John 14.
ON CONVERSION
As far as converting is concerned, the answer I came up with, and I don't know how else to say it: there was a parting of the ways between the Jews who followed Jesus, and he was basically expressing what the Torah was really about. But in order to do that, he had to confront the powers and principality, which included the Jews who had thrown in with Rome—the king, the priests, the Pharisees—all those people who were not representing Judaism or what the Torah was really about. But it was bold because that was the institution, that was the church of his day; they got to stay. So that split had to occur, and the Jewish followers of Jesus had to go off and say, “We have to try something new.”
That was Paul. And especially Stephen. God back to Acts to Stephen's speech. Remember what happened to Stephen was what they wanted to do to Jesus. They killed him for what he said in that speech. He was saying, you have to basically move on from the message of the Old Testament, which was (and you're not supposed to say this) tribal, exclusivistic, rule-bound. And that's what the prophets were trying to say, but they never went far enough. They never said, “If we're really going to follow God, we've got to move on from this temple business.” And that will get you killed.
So we ALL have to convert. I had to convert from the Jewish exclusivism that I was brought up in: “You know, we are better because we suffered, we have to protect ourselves because all of you out there want to kill us.” I understand, that a tragedy of history, but it is not the Way. The Way has to be the Way, not the Christian way, not the Muslim way, not the Buddhist way, not the Jewish way. The Way is the Way.
So the whole idea of conversion? Believe me, growing up, I couldn't even step into a church. I had to cross the street and not walk on the same side of the street as the church, because church meant death, destruction, and even worse, conversion. I couldn't go in there because they might try to convert me or kill me. It was clear that it was worse to be converted. So that whole concept of conversion was tainted for me—the worst thing in the world. And again, that's history.
ON REPENTANCE & ESAU, MY ENEMY-BROTHER
But I think the whole idea of conversion, also. Go back to the Gospels where John says, “Repent.” It's a bad translation. the Greek is metanoia—change yourself, change your mind, meditate, become mindful—and that’s the way. So conversion is kind of destructive and beautiful to me for that reason.
My own struggle is that I get angry, and I know that my anger is an expression of my own hurt and my own shame—my own self-loathing for having once been there myself. So, I have baggage that I need to deal with. And then I have to thank God for the grace that God would allow me to step out of that—but the only way out was that grace would bring me to Palestine to meet my “enemy.”
My favorite text for that is in Genesis 32-33, where Jacob goes to meet his brother Esau. And he thinks he knows his enemy—he's afraid because of what he’s done. He is told Esau coming to meet him with an army of 400. Do you remember what happened? That night, the night before he met Esau, he struggles with God—with the Angel—and is given his name: Israel—which means “he struggles with God.” So he has this intense dark night of the soul before meeting Esau. And when he meets him, Esau rushes up to him and embraces him as his brother. And he says to Esau, “I looked at you, and I saw the face of God.”
That was what happened to me when I crossed into the West Bank and crossed over that wall, and when I met the Palestinians who were supposedly my enemies. I had been taught that they were my enemies, but I met them, and I was redeemed. I mean, I was saved, in a way. That was great… that was great.
Comments