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Of Passion, Death, and LifeRabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Temple Emanu-El, Tucson, AZSermon Parshat Terumah 5764, February 27, 2004 A funny thing happened to me on the way to a movie the other day...
You have no doubt heard a good deal about the movie over the past few weeks -- after all, it's been on the cover of Time and Newsweek -- not in that order -- and the feature of a full hour of prime time coverage, not to mention stories in the newspapers, radio, and well, everywhere. In fact, you would have a hard time not knowing about the controversial film, and friends and congregants have been emailing me stories and reviews and weblinks about this flick fairly continuously for weeks -- and longer. And we have been covering the story on the Too Jewish radio show since last spring when it first became news. In recent days, it's not only stories about the movie itself that we are treated to: there are stories about Mel Gibson's antisemitic father, who is a virulent denier of the Holocaust, and stories about the religious fervor of those who have been seeing the film, and stories about lightning striking the lead actor while it was being filmed, and stories about the latent antisemitism in the movie -- and, well, stories about everything concerned with this flick are everywhere. And lots of them revolve around Jewish issues, as might seem appropriate for a story populated principally by Jews and set in first century Israel with rather significant historical influence thereafter... So first, for the many of you who haven't seen it, a brief review of the movie. This is quite possibly the most violent film ever made, with the most lush attention given to slow-motion depictions of agony and physical destruction ever on screen. In fact, the Passion film is a non-stop gore-fest with almost no leavening moments of light or joy. If we are supposed to be drawn into some level of understanding of why all this hyper-violence is taking place, or to develop a feeling of empathy with the hero, we simply don't. Torture is the central theme of this movie, and watching it inflicted in a mind-numbing sequence of ways is a grueling experience. That people come to see it and eat popcorn and drink soda is yet another demonstration of the inherent mild absurdity of contemporary life. I can honestly say that if you don't come into the theater imbued with Christian religious convictions about the need to vicariously experience the suffering of a man tortured and brutally executed, you are in line for a truly horrific and depressing two hours. As one reviewer put it, this is the Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade: every gruesomely violent element of this story is rendered in luscious, excruciating detail. Compared to the Passion of the Christ, no garden-variety slasher film is too violent. And at least in horror movies like Halloween or Friday the 13th there is a bit of comedy mixed in, and some suspense. When we enter the theater for this one we are pretty sure how it's going to turn out. I think the R rating for violence is understated: it probably should be an X or NC-17 for extreme and lavish violence. I truly cannot understand how anyone in good conscience would bring a child to see this movie. In effect, the Passion movie puts violence and death at the absolute heart of Christianity. While the story of the "passion" of Jesus -- by the way, the term in Latin means "suffering" -- is a central aspect of Christian denominations, this extreme film makes it the sole and highest expression of the religion, which is both dubious and deeply depressing. But that is really more of a matter for Christians than Jews -- although for all religious people, the notion that an obsession with brutal violence forms a core expression of religious belief should be problematic. Without overdosing on the Mel Gibson angle here -- after all, this is at heart just a movie, and he is just a film director -- it should be noted that Mr. Gibson has long had a silver screen fixation with masochism and self-punishment. The man who had himself disemboweled in Braveheart was regularly beaten and tortured in his Lethal Weapon and Mad Max films, and this movie can be viewed as kind of the apotheosis of that particular mania. As another reviewer said rather brutally, "the main response to Gibson making a Jesus film that celebrates masochistic suffering is 'what took him so long?'" So it's a graphically violent movie without redeeming love, compassion, or light. Not the way I like to spend my Saturday nights... There has also been a great deal of talk about whether this film is antisemitic, and whether Mel Gibson himself is an antisemite, and much of this discussion turns on whether the film is historically accurate. This can be dealt with briefly: this movie is far from history. Much has been made of the fact that the dialogue is all in Aramaic and Latin with some brief snippets of Hebrew -- usually quotes from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible -- and how fastidious the filmmaker was to try to recreate the first century in Israel. Indeed, there is something remarkable about listening to actors speaking Aramaic, a language that most of us have only heard aloud in occasional prayers like the Kaddish, or in the study of the Talmud. As far as I can tell, they speak pretty fair Aramaic, although with strong American accents... Or Romanian accents, in the case of the Romanian Jewish actress who plays Jesus' mom, and who is undoubtedly the most effective performer in the film. The Latin spoken by the Roman characters is another matter. They speak ringing, comfortable Latin, that sounds rather like contemporary Italian, and they were well taught by their speech coaches. Unfortunately, this is a kind of deliberate and false historicity typical of the movie. For the truth is that no one in the first century in Israel spoke Latin at all -- they spoke Greek, which was the language of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. In other words, Mel Gibson went to great pains and expense to teach his actors a dead language that wasn't used at the time and place of his "historically accurate" film. Why? The answer has to do with the whole motivation behind this movie, and it speaks to the deliberately false efforts at creating a veneer of historical accuracy here. For Gibson himself, like his unfortunate father, is a "traditional Catholic," one who rejects all the reforms of Vatican Two. He seeks to restore the church as it was in the days before it modernized. Among the modernizations that are anathema to him are the rejections of the use of Latin for the mass, and the change in the church doctrine that has removed the 1900 year old charge that we Jews somehow "killed Christ." Using Latin in this odd and ultraviolent film highlights his own essentially medieval view of Christianity. And the way he portrays Jews is equally unenlightened. In the movie, which is based primarily on a combination of the Gospel of John, latest and most anti-semitic of the Gospels, on the writings of two Christian mystics well-known for their anti-semitic views, and on his own fervent and fervid imagination, Gibson's Jewish leadership is portrayed as brutal, manipulative, self-serving, and bloodthirsty. The priests are all corrupt, and some, still wearing the robes used historically only for service at the holy altar, are responsible for brutally beating Jesus in one of the film's various invented scenes. And the devil, Satan, which is not present in the Gospels in anything like the form it takes in this film, invariably is seen among the Jews -- and not the Romans -- in this movie, a not very subtle hint at some baser elements present here. As the Christian Science Monitor's film critic David Sterrit put it, the movie "offers a dubious depiction of the Jewish community's role in Jesus' execution -- not actively supporting antisemitic interpretations, which Gibson has publicly disavowed, but leaving the door open for viewers already tainted with antisemitic bias. Pontius Pilate is shown as a rueful believer in realpoltiik, and, I might add, a philosophical man forced to do evil things by the rude and terrible people he must rule over, the Jews -- "while the Jewish mob is portrayed as yowling for Jesus' death with no hint of reason or rationality." As the review continues, "The film contains little to learn from or be inspired by." I do not share some Jewish observers concerns that this movie will lead to widespread antisemitic attacks. It does have the unfortunate potential to damage the fine work that the Catholic church and many other Christian clergy and leaders have been doing over the last 40 years for the great cause of religious understanding and mutual respect. And because of the inherent power of images, especially cinematic ones, it is also possible that many people -- not the perceptive and thoughtful members of our congregation, of course, but others out there -- will see the events of the first century through these highly unhistorical images rather than through the truer lens of historical accuracy. That would be very sad. Because at heart there is an important message to take out of this movie -- although it is really taken as a kind of message against this movie. You see, one of the central teachings of Judaism, one of our great and most influential revelations, is the lesson that God does not require human sacrifice of us. From the time of the binding of Isaac, the Akeidah we read on Rosh Hashanah, through the creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness of Sinai that is the heart of our Torah portion of Terumah this week, Judaism has repeatedly affirmed that our children are not bred to be sacrificed to an angry or vengeful God. Certainly this would include God's own son -- as we are all, in Jewish tradition, equally children of God. Instead, sacrifice is ritualized, and used to supplant the dangerous pagan tendency to sacrifice human beings. As described in loving detail in this week's sedrah, at the heart of Biblical Judaism is the altar for the sacrifice of small animals, cakes of grain, and incense, rather than the human sacrifice; or even, as other religions might have it, the surrogate sacrifice of a single human being. This may seem obvious, but I think for most of us today it is not. You see, the mizbei'ach in the mishkan, the altar of sacrifice of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness was a means to an end. It served as a way for our Israelite ancestors to sublimate the apparent human need for ritual and rite, and gave them an understanding of the value of human life. Our High Priests, indeed all the kohanim, were taught to be ohev shalom v'rodef shalom, lovers and pursuers of peace. Unlike the cartoonishly evil priests in this film, they did not engage in beating human beings, or even participate in warfare or policing. They were trained solely in ritual, including ritual sacrifice. Perhaps in our post-modern eyes the sacrifice of an animal seems barbaric -- and to the vegetarians among us perhaps it should. But Biblically it was used to demonstrate to our people that God loved and valued human life in this world, and did not desire its destruction. The mitzvot, the commandments, are ordained for the purpose of life -- v'chai bahem, we are commanded, live by them, not die for them. Human sacrifice was ubiquitous in the ancient world. One can make the case that Christianity was a way of reaffirming that ancient practice, of ritualizing in a highly graphic and disturbing way human sacrifice; and, ultimately, of asserting the primacy of the world to come over life in this world. But, while giving full respect to the profound ethical basis of Christianity and its sincerity of belief, Judaism has continued down a different path that insists that the giving of human life is no great metziah, no desirable end. While we mourn and remember our many martyrs, we celebrate their lives and their courage, not the brutal way they ended. You see, for Jews, the true passion is for life, not death. The purpose of religious expression, of Avodah, of worship, is to reach towards that passion, to affirm God's connection to us in a direct and holy way. The
jewels so radiant, they dazzled the people. Of
the lamb and bull The
dove and the little cakes To
the shepherds and farmers Who
brought the sacrifices These
were the means of life. Thus
they proclaimed their willingness To
give life itself to their God. In
all ages, at all times, People have traded value for value... But
for those who love God the only sufficient gift Is
the symbol of life. Teach
us, God, the spirit of sacrifice; Will
You accept as sufficient Our
prayers and our attempts to pray As
You once accepted the lambs and grain Of
our ancestors? Will
You accept our struggling efforts To
return love for hostility And
justice for partiality? Will
You find our study acceptable? Teach
us God the spirit of sacrifice: How
to devote out lives to our highest ideals. Ritual sacrifice, as you have heard in our excellent drash tonight, has been replaced by prayer and tzedakah. It is not blood that God seeks, now, but our own passionate devotion: to holiness, to personal and professional morality, to social action; and to the good that we can bring in this world. Our portion of Terumah says that the sanctuary of the Tabernacle was built so that God could dwell in our midst, asu li mikdash v'shachanti b'tocham. Our own prayers and devotions in this, our own sanctuary, however phrased or sung or meditated upon, are our Jewish form of religious passion. They can, and will bring us to see God's presence in our midst, if we enter into them with the full effort of our hearts and minds and spirits. And if we do this, if we pray in this way, we will find personal energy and religious fervor in an open, caring way. The great poet Abba Kovner wrote on this very subject of spiritual replenishment, in a poem called Lord of Dreams: We're not silent! You alone are silent. Give proper repose To the outcry and the hope. For look, We've not many choices Save this one chance To reach out, When all is said and done, To the beautiful To fill a sacred cup Wherewith the spirit is refreshed And fortified to go Back Directly To the world. May we find, in this week of passion, that our own religious direction, our prayer and our actions and our spirits are nurtured by our connection with Jewish holiness and blessing. And then, at a time when death seems to be the focus of social interest, we will affirm life, as Judaism and our God require. Ken Yehi Ratson, may this be God's will -- and ours. |
