[Dialogue] Weeklt Spong

[kroegerd@aol.com]

September 21, 2005
Jewish Fundamentalism 

Religious fundamentalism is built on the assumption that the truth of God has been captured for all time. It comes in many forms including inerrancy for the words of scripture, ex cathedra utterances of a religious leader and the conviction that the ultimate truth of God has been captured in one's developed creeds. Fundamentalism is found in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, in Islam and in Judaism. When any religious system believes it speaks with the 'Voice of God' it inevitably turns demonic. Fundamentalism has supported slavery, condemned homosexuals and killed those it defined as 'God's enemies.' Recently, in a full- page ad in the New York Times, Jewish fundamentalism overtly entered the public arena. 
This advertisement was in the form of an open letter to President Bush urging him to stop the planned exodus of Jewish settlers from Gaza. The letter opened with a text from the Book of Genesis (12:3) that contained nothing less than a veiled threat. In this verse, God was quoted as having said to Abraham, "And I will bless those who bless you and he that curses you will I curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." The authors of this open letter seem to believe that quoting the Bible is all one must do to convince others to endorse their cause, suggesting rather pointedly that if they do not, God will curse them. 
Fundamentalism was apparent in the body of the letter where its authors asserted "that God" had dictated "to Moses 3317 years ago," that sovereignty over this land was given "to the people of Israel" in perpetuity. "The Word of God," they contended, "can not be contested." 
This advertisement appeared just as the world saw heart-rending pictures of the Israeli army evicting Jewish residents from Gaza. That action represented a huge gamble on the part of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. By sacrificing this tangential and hard to defend parcel of land conquered during the Six Days War in 1967, Sharon hopes to justify the West Bank settlements that he is not about to surrender. Dislocating the Gaza citizens was a price he felt able to pay without alienating his own right wing constituency led by his political rival Bebe Netanyahu. 
The verses referred to in this letter are found in Genesis (12:1-4 and 15:18) describing God's call to Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees to form a new people. Reading these texts, however, one discovers that the land God was said to have promised Abraham's descendants was to stretch from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in what is now Iraq, including both the Sinai Peninsula and most of present day Syria, dimensions for Israel beyond any reasonable political expectations. The authors of this letter, however, were only concerned to demonstrate that the eviction of Jews from Gaza violated the stated purposes of God. It was neither the first nor will it be the last time that a quotation from the Bible has been twisted to fit the issue. 
The use of these literal texts displayed no recognition of the history of that region and ignored some two hundred years of biblical scholarship. This area, now occupied by both Israelis and Palestinians, has never really been uncontested or the sole possession of any ethnic group. As the land bridge linking Africa to both Asia and Europe, it has always been a major thoroughfare for both trade and advancing armies. Seldom has it been free. 
When Joshua led the Jewish people in their biblical conquest of what was then called Canaan, they justified their aggression with the same mythology reflected in this open letter. God had promised this land to the descendants of Abraham. However Abraham, if he was in fact a person of history, lived about 1850 B.C.E. His 'great grandson' Joseph was said to have led a Jewish migration from that "promised land" into Egypt to avoid a famine. There the descendents of both Abraham and Joseph lived for some 400 years, first as an underclass and finally as a slave people. It was therefore 16 generations later when they were claiming that their conquest of Canaan, a land populated by other Semitic people, was justified on the basis of God's ancient promise to Abraham. This strange claim then became the basis of the Jewish "theology of land ownership." After Joshua secured militarily a Jewish presence in Canaan, Semitic Jews and Semitic Canaanites actually lived side by side as neighbors until the arrival of some Greek settlers called the Philistines or the Palesti (hence the name Palestine), on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. These Philistines created a threat so deep that it drove the Jews and the Canaanites into an alliance at the time of King David. The combined reigns of David and his son Solomon, lasting about 80 years, represented the only time in this region's long and troubled history that it might be fair to say that the Jews actually ruled the land they now claim, and even then they did it in alliance with the Canaanites. During the rest of their history both the Jews and their Canaanite neighbors were vassals of the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians and the Romans. Later, in the second century (132-135 C.E.), a Jewish rebellion under Simon Bar Kokhba resulted in the Romans expelling all Jews from Jerusalem to Galilee while repopulating Judah with Gentiles, even erecting a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Temple of Solomon. When Christianity became the dominant religion of the Western World in the fourth century, Christians began to move into Palestine to claim the holy sites of their faith story. The Muslims in turn displaced the Christians in the 7th century, ruling that region until the Crusaders banished them only to see the land reconquered by the Muslims when crusading fervor began to fade away in the 13th century. 
Most Jews, largely exiled from this land from the 6th century BCE on, became a dispersed minority living far from the homeland they claimed. A persecuted religious and ethnic group; they were banished from or ghettoized in the nations of Christian Europe. The Holocaust in 20th century Germany brought the plight of these Jews to the consciences of the West and served to feed the long-held Jewish dream of being restored to their homeland in fulfillment of what they claimed was God's eternal promise. That restoration took place in 1948 under the terms of the Balfour Declaration from 1918. Since Palestinian people populated this land, they had to be evicted from their homes to accomplish this resettlement, a task achieved only by military might and western dollars. That action led directly to the killing bitterness that marks this land today. 
Many people thus claim citizenship in that part of the world. The Jews are but one of the claimants. Others are the descendants of the Canaanites, the Samaritans, the Philistines, the Edomites, the Moabites and many others. Few people, other than Christian fundamentalists, salute the Jewish claim that they alone have exclusive, God-given rights to this land. That claim is not dissimilar from the same tribal mentality that marked United States history under the slogan "Manifest Destiny." Not only did Europeans displace the well-established indigenous population in this new world, but they also kept expanding their claims until the limits of the Pacific Ocean were reached. The Louisiana Territory was bought from France and later Alaska was purchased from Russia, both under threat of our arms. We defeated Mexico in a war of aggression in order to solidify our claim to Texas and to annex New Mexico, Arizona and California. Our expanding nation then threatened the British with war until the Northwest border, dividing Canada from the United States was established on a specific parallel to complete the sweep "from sea to shining sea." In our history books, we justified each conquest and acquisition with noble sounding rationales just like militarily dominant people have always done the world over. National boundaries have shifted from time immemorial as conquerors dictated terms to the conquered. Poland has come in and out of the maps of Europe. Finland has had its boundaries drawn and redrawn. So have Germany, Sweden, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and the nations of Eastern Europe. People may not like it, it is neither pretty nor moral, but that is human history. The suggestion that quoting from an ancient and sacred text could or should win approval for a national agenda represents an ancient tactic to which no one has ever paid serious attention. They will not on this occasion either. 
People have moved through history from clan to tribe to city-states to nation states. Tribal identity is deep in the human psyche but it ultimately and always leads to the conflict of rival claims. If tribal thinking is followed consistently the only and inevitable outcome is a war that leads to mutual annihilation. That was the governing principle in the rise and fall of empire after empire in world history. That is what we see in microcosm in the Middle East today. The time has surely come for human beings to move beyond this primitive tribal mentality into a world consciousness and to begin at long last the task of recognizing that a single humanity must be accommodated in a shrinking planet. To accomplish this, the fundamentalist idolatry that claims scriptural authority for acts of violence must be challenged wherever it appears. It matters little whether that fundamentalism is Christian, Muslim or Jewish. 
Gaza will now become Palestinian. The tinderbox that insensitive world leaders created in the Middle East after both World Wars I and II will continue to express itself in the tensions that always arise when claim meets counter claim. Invoking God to make the aggression of each group appear to be both righteous and holy will only heighten feelings. Perhaps the only positive thing that can be gained from this strange religious mentality is that when people are repulsed by this expression of Jewish fundamentalism they just might be lead to be equally aware of and thus equally repulsed by the counter claims of Islamic fundamentalism and begin to see that the claims made by Christian fundamentalists about our nation and its role in the world are also repulsive. This developing new world consciousness may be the only path that leads to world peace. 
? John Shelby Spong 
  
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
John Martin from Birmingham, Alabama, writes: 
I attended all of your lectures when you were here in Birmingham back in March of 2004. I've also read all of your books. In your lectures and your books, you state how important daily Bible study is to you. In one of your lectures you stated that you begin the day with Bible readings/study and have set "course" to read the entire Bible with the Apocrypha over a fixed period of time, somewhere in the 12-18 month range, if I remember correctly. What I wonder is have you ever considered writing a Bible study book for liberal/progressive Christians so we could accomplish the same? I'm thinking of something much deeper than a daily outline. Something that would include notes and musings from you on the history behind the day's passages, translation issues, questions to ponder/answer, etc. The goal here is for you to provide a format that liberal/progressive Christians could read the entire Bible with the Apocrypha in a fixed period and really study what we're reading along the way. This would be quite a daunting task but many would welcome such a volume. 
Dear John, 
Thank you for your letter and for your confidence in my abilities. The work you describe may be of value but I do not believe it is a task that I should or would undertake. Bible study is in some ways like modern medicine. No one can be an expert on all of it. Just as you have a cardiologist to deal with heart issues, urologists to deal with the waterworks of the human body and gastroenterologists to deal with the entire digestive system, so in Biblical studies you have Torah scholars, scholars on the prophets, synoptic (Mark, Matthew and Luke) scholars, Johanine scholars, Pauline scholars, and early Christian history scholars, just to name a few. These are people who invest a lifetime in one part of the whole of biblical literature. That is why there is no such thing as a competent one-volume biblical commentary. We do have resources like the Rev. Henry Cook who has done a CD on the assigned Bible gospel readings for the year in the common liturgical calendar and offers a very exciting, insightful, well-informed and scholarly commentary on them week by week. If you would be interested in that it can be obtained by writing: Church Publishing Co., 445 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Their website is www.churchpublishing.org. I do know that Harry is highly competent and it is a start in the direction you are seeking. 
My best, 
John Shelby Spong 
 
Dick Kroeger
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