LETTERS FROM REPRESENTATIVE JEWS
[Omissions from letters indicated by ellipses have been made necessary because of lack of space. In another form, at no distant date, it is the expectation that these and similar letters will be published in full. No letter from a Jew who is known to be a Christian convert is here given; hence those portions of letters that discuss the divinity of Christ have generally been omitted.]
From KAUFMANN KOHLER Ph.D., Rabbi of Temple Beth-El, New York:
The true history of Jesus is so wrapped up in myth, the story of his life told in the gospels so replete with contradictions, that it is rather difficult for the unbiased reader to arrive at the true historical facts. Still the beautiful tales about the things that happened around the lake of Galilee show that there was a spiritual daybreak in that dark corner of Judea of which official Judaism had failed to take sufficient cognizance. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” of a new world.
It is assumed by entire Christendom that the Jews in rejecting Jesus Christ brought upon themselves everlasting doom, the inexorable fate of exile, persecution, and hatred. This view is based upon the crucifixion story in the gospel records, which, while shielding the Romans, maligns the Jews, and is incompatible with the simple facts of the Jewish law, the older Christian tradition, with common sense, and with the established character of Pontius Pilate, a very tiger in human shape. Surely the records of the trial demand a revision.
“Did the Jews Reject Christ?” Most assuredly the weird and visionary figure of the dead and rerisen Christ, the crucified Messiah lifted up to the clouds there to become a partaker of God’s nature—a metaphysical or mythological principle of the cosmos—the Jews did reject. They would not, let it cost what it may, surrender the doctrine of the unity and spirituality of God. Jesus, the living man, the teacher and practiser of the tenderest love for God and man, the paragon of piety, humility, and self-surrender, whose very failings were born of overflowing goodness and sympathy with the afflicted, the Jews had no cause to reject. He was one of the best and truest sons of the synagog. Did he not say, “I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it”? What reason had the Jews for hating and persecuting him who had nothing of the rigidity of the schoolman, none of the pride of the philosopher and recluse, nor even the implacable zeal of the ancient prophet to excite the popular wrath; who came only to weep with the sorrowing, to lift up the downtrodden, to save and to heal? He was a man of the people; why should the people have raised the cry, “Crucify him!” against him whose only object in life was to bring home the message of God’s love to the humblest of his children? Nor, in fact, was he the only one among the popular preachers of the time who in unsparing language and scathing satire exposed and castigated the abuses of the ruling priesthood, the worldly Sadducees, as well as the hypocrisy and false piety of some of the Pharisean doctors of the law. His whole manner of teaching, the so-called Lord’s Prayer, the Golden Rule, the code of ethics expounded for the elect ones in the Sermon on the Mount, no less than his miraculous cures, show him to have been one of the Essenes, a popular saint.
But he was more than an ordinary teacher and healer of men. He went to the very core of religion and laid bare the depths of the human soul. As a veritable prophet, Jesus, in such striking manner, disclaimed allegiance to any of the Pharisean schools and asked for no authority but that of the living voice within, while passing judgment on the law, in order to raise life to a higher standard. He was a bold religious and social reformer, eager to regenerate Judaism. True, a large number of sayings were attributed to the dead master by his disciples which had been current in the schools. Still, the charm of true originality is felt in these utterances of his when the great realities of life, when the idea of Sabbath, the principle of purity, the value of a human soul, of woman, even of the abject sinner, are touched upon. None can read these parables and verdicts of the Nazarene and not be thrilled with the joy of a truth unspelled before. There is wonderful music in the voice which stays an angry crowd, saying, “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone!” that speaks the words, “Be like children, and you are not far from the kingdom of God!”
“Did the Jews Reject Christ?” Jesus anticipated a reign of perfect love, but centuries of hatred came. Could the Jews, victims of Christian intolerance, look with calmness and admiration upon Jesus, in whose name all the atrocities were perpetrated? Still, the leading thinkers of Judaism willingly recognized that the founder of the Christian Church, as well as that of Islamism, was sent by divine Providence to prepare the pagan world for the Messianic kingdom of truth and righteousness.
The Jew of to-day beholds in Jesus an inspiring ideal of matchless beauty. While he lacks the element of stern justice expressed so forcibly in the law and in the Old-Testament characters, the firmness of self-assertion so necessary to the full development of manhood, all those social qualities which build up the home and society, industry and worldly progress, he is the unique exponent of the principle of redeeming love. His name as helper of the poor, as sympathizing friend of the fallen, as brother of every fellow sufferer, as lover of man and redeemer of woman, has become the inspiration, the symbol, and the watchword for the world’s greatest achievements in the field of benevolence. While continuing the work of the synagog, the Christian Church with the larger means at her disposal created those institutions of charity and redeeming love that accomplished wondrous things. The very sign of the cross has lent a new meaning, a holier pathos to suffering, sickness, and sin, so as to offer new practical solutions for the great problems of evil which fill the human heart with new joys of self-sacrificing love.
All this modern Judaism gladly acknowledges, reclaiming Jesus as one of its greatest sons. But it denies that one single man, or one church, however broad, holds the key to many-sided truth. It waits for the time when all life’s deepest mysteries will have been spelled, and to the ideals of sage and saint that of the seeker of all that is good, beautiful, and true will have been joined; when Jew and Gentile, synagog and church, will merge into the Church universal, into the great city of humanity whose name is “God is there.”