[Aside from the metaphor of a “bridge” between Judaism and Christianity (Jesus – the Bridge between Judeo-Christian Values), Rabbi Schmuley Boteach awakens us to the symbolism of a “hyphen” that has for so long been used in the phrase “Judeo-Christian” as though the two different major religions could actually attach to one another. For sure, it is only Christians who would coin that phrase, since founders of Christianity connected their New Testament with an “Old”, borrowing the Hebrew Scriptures and calling it and considering it “foundational”, like a ‘prequel’. Anti-missionary Jewish websites deplore this “connection” and hardly see the “New Testament” as the continuation of their Torah faith, so it is truly surprising to read Rabbi Boteach’s conciliatory approach to a disconnect that has existed for 2 millennia now. That is what makes this book interesting reading so, again, please include in your MUST READ, if not MUST OWN list; KOSHER JESUS is downloadable on the kindle app as an ebook from amazon.com. These are merely excerpts from the final chapter (40) of the book. Note: The US elections referred to in this discussion is 2010, and yet the issues are relevant and the same as in the recently concluded US presidential elections and in fact, were resolved by majority vote.]
Religious people are now grappling with an alarming state of affairs: Americans are losing faith in the relevance of Judeo-Christian values.
Judaism is in danger. Fifty percent of Jewish young people choose to marry outside the faith, assimilating and putting the future survival of our nation in doubt. Israel is being delegitimized by hateful enemies the world over and is besieged by enraged enemies. Jews would do well to capitalize on Christian overtures of goodwill so as to remain strong in the face of adversity.
Christianity, too, seems to be on the ropes in many parts of the world. But even in the United States, there are serious challenges to Christian faith. American Christians are a good and Godly people — of this I have no doubt. However, the religion’s moral authority has diminished in recent years. Over time, Christianity has lost some of its heart, emphasizing an austere morality that narrowly defines religious ethics and family values as opposition to homosexuality and abortion. The narrowness of the American Christian approach to values and its near obsession with these twin issues —especially gay marriage — is allowing for moral decay in America, seeing it highlights these peripheral issues to the exclusion of nearly everything else. The noble goals of Christianity are undermined every time Christian thinkers, politicians, and public figures sound in any way bigoted or come across as hypocritical.
The powerful Christian community in America finds itself at a crossroads. The 80 million born-again Christians who had such a pronounced role in President George W. Bush’s two electoral victories lost their political muscle in the 2008 presidential election. Bill Maher and a host of other opponents of organized religion have made a financial killing by portraying religious people as self-satisfied oafs who swallow faith uncritically and send their money to charlatan televangelists flying around in gas-guzzling G5s.
What were the buzzwords of the 2010 election? Spending, deficits, and earmarks — all worthy subjects of discussion, but what happened to values? The sad truth is that Evangelical Christians have become politically marginalized by clinging to homosexuality as their bogeyman. Rather than focusing on the divorce rate, the sexualization of younger and younger teens, or the ongoing collapse of the American family, it seems Evangelical Christian pundits and politicians would prefer to have us talking about banning gays from serving in the military, and obsessing over their right to marriage and adoption. Are Evangelical Christians really ready to lay all of our society’s ills at the feet of gays?
America has serious social problems. Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. Forty million American marriages are platonic. One out of three American women is on antidepressants. Innumerable American men are addicted to pornography. Our teenagers have unacceptably high rates of pregnancy and alcoholism. However, I cannot name a single initiative that appeared on a ballot to combat any of these problems, save for Proposition 8 in California that sought to ban gay marriage. Let me ask my Evangelical brothers and sisters: Do gays pose the biggest challenge to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage? Or do straight people and the 50% divorce rate constitute a much more significant threat?
During the Obama/McCain presidential campaign, I tried hard to make the possible tax-deductivity of marital counseling a campaign issue. Studies show that when couples get proper counseling, the vast majority of these troubled marriages survive. If counseling were declared tax-deductible, couples would have access to the crucial support they may otherwise find unaffordable. But it’s impossible to talk seriously about the real causes of marital breakdown, or their solutions, due to the ongoing gay marriage obsession.
The argument that stopping gay marriage is the key to saving the institution of marriage in general, and the American family in particular, is spurious. Would anyone seriously suggest that if there were no gays in America there would no longer be a 50 percent heterosexual divorce rate? Are we really looking to scapegoat gays for the fact that straight people can’t seem to remain in love and married? Truth to be told, we heterosexuals need no assistance from gays in destroying the institution of marriage, having done a fine job of it ourselves, thank you very much. indeed, the only men who seem to still want to marry in America are gay! They’re the ones who are petitioning the Untied States Supreme Court for the right to marry, while straight men break out in a rash whenever their girlfriends bring up the word marriage.
The opponents of gay marriage have been saying that their opposition is all about protecting the family and the institution of marriage. But gays marrying has nothing to do with heterosexuals divorcing, and the real crisis in the American marriage is not that people of the same sex want to get hitched but that people of the opposite sex don’t want to stay together.
My parents divorced when I was eight. There were no gays around to blame. It was mid-1970s America, and gays scarcely came out of the closet, let alone married. The very thought was inconceivable. My parents did not argue because they saw two gay women holding hands at an airport. They did not bicker because a rainbow flag hung outside a bar in our neighborhood. They did not decide to end their marriage because they could not agree on how the institution of marriage should be defined. Rather, their marriage ended because it ran out of love.
Their split scarred me for life, just as it does many other children of divorce, as a famous study published in American Sociological Review demonstrates. The study found little or no impact on children prior to divorce but significant decreases in performance in math and social skills at the time of and following the divorce, which gives the lie to the belief that children are worse off seeing parents fight than seeing them divorce. And no, I do not believe that parents should stay together for the sake of their children. children should not be jailers. But less so do I believe we should fool ourselves about the effects of divorce on children.
My parents love me and did not want me to suffer. But they could not, or chose not to, get along. I have since devoted much of my life to keeping families together and regularly counsel marriages in crisis. In the 22 years I have done so, no straight couple has ever told me that their problems stem from gays wanting to marry. In most cases their marital unhappiness resulted from falling out of love or losing attraction, or one of the partners had been unfaithful. Money problems may have eaten away at the fabric of the relationship. Parents or other family members might have intervened and caused friction. Or the pressures of life made it impossible for the couple to spend quality time together. But none of the problems I have counseled could be traced back to gay marriage.
The truth is that the thirty-year fight over gay marriage, largely conducted by our Evangelical brothers, has been a massive distraction for America that has prevented us from focusing on skyrocketing divorce, the growing culture of male womanizing, women feeling unreasonably old, fat, and unattractive, the fixation of husbands and wives on celebrity relationships that deprives their own marriages of oxygen, and the dumbing down of America through moronic reality TV. My God, we can’t even talk about runaway materialism in our culture.
The Hyphen that Unites Us
For some, Christianity seems to flourish by identifying godless enemies. God battles Lucifer. Jesus vies against the anti-Christ. Red-state Christians contend with hedonistic blue-state liberals, the godless barbarians at the gate. The forces of light always fight with the forces of darkness. It is a vision that has inspired many over the years, but in the process, Christians have inadvertently made Jesus — and by extension Christianity itself — very divisive.
To salve this contentious embattled worldview, Christians would do well to pay renewed attention to Jesus, his humanity, and the values he held dear. Embracing his proven Jewish characteristics, allying with a willing Jewish community, and adopting his passionate patriotism, respect for tradition, and vision of a redeemed world could prove to be American Christianity’s best hope.
The Christian worldview must return to the Judeo-Christian values on which our civilization was founded. Judeo-Christian is a strange word — a hyphenated term that unites two very different religions and ways of looking at the world.
Hyphens, though unassuming, can be frightening things. They draw together unrelated concepts to bring new, unforseen chimeras into the world. Americans have only gradually come to terms with hyphenated Americans: African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans. A hundred years ago Woodrow Wilson typified this line of thinking by saying “Any man who carries a hyphen with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic whenever he gets ready.”
Of course we are all Americans, equal and unhyphenated. And the hyphen between Judaism and Christianity is no dagger and doesn’t have to be a barrier either. It is a bridge that spans a divide — a divide that, admittedly, has been widened by millennia of mutual distrust and rampant anti-Semitism. But for the first time in history, that divide is getting smaller.
If I can leave my readers with one ringing message after the mountain of scriptural and historical information you’ve read in this book, it is this: The hyphen between Jewish and Christian values is Jesus himself. Both religions share him, looking to him from opposite sides of a chasm. He can bring us closer to one another, if only we are brave enough to allow for understanding him in a new light.
At a time when the world flails in search of values, strangled by materialism, divisiveness, instability, doubt, and unrest, we must return to the basic ideals we share in common. All of these are to be found in the life and lessons of Jesus of Nazareth, lover of Israel, rebel against Rome, Jewish hero, and the inspiration for innumerable acts of Christian charity.
In our hyphenated world, the Jewish Jesus has the power to bring disparate peoples together. Our civilization will be all the stronger if Jews and Christians alike accept Jesus for who he really was: a driving force for liberty, democracy, and Jewish identity in a world ruled by the tyranny and brutality of Rome. In his time, as in our time —as in Judeo-Christian civilization in years to come —the fight for redemption and independence continues.
Now, Jews and Christians can answer the clarion call for liberty and a renewal of values together, even as we remain distinct and separate faiths. We can, for the first time, set the stage for Jews and Christians to come together to achieve Godly goals and virtuous ends through the personality of Jesus himself, even as we both understand him in completely different ways.
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Finally, and most importantly,
to God Almighty, Master of heaven and earth,
He Who fills the infinite expanse of space and is the source of all blessing and life,
thank you, Lord, for loving me, nurturing me, guiding me, and preserving me.
I could do nothing without You, Lord.
I only hope and wish that my life’s efforts accrue to Your glory.
May the righteous and true Messiah of Israel arrive soon
and usher in an era of eternal peace, blessing, and kinship among all of God’s children.
And while I do not believe it is Jesus,
I look forward to sharing a more perfect world
with my Christian brothers and sisters
in a world suffused with love and Joy.
—- Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Autumn 2011 Englewood, NJ