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Columns: March 2004

Responding to "The Passion"

By Rabbi Daniel Pressman

How should we respond to Mel Gibson’s The Passion? As I write, Jews have been handicapped by the exclusion of Jewish scholars and religious figures from early screenings, though Abe Foxman, director of the ADL, and Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, ADL interfaith consultant, did sneak in and came out with a critical report.

The film is still in flux. A recent news report said that Gibson had removed the scene where the high priest states, “His blood be on us and on our children.” That’s good, because that verse from Matthew was understood for a long time as cursing all Jews for all time.

So I can’t comment on the movie, but I can share some thoughts on the Passion story and its impact on anti-Semitism. It is this history that worries knowledgeable Jews. For centuries, Passion plays were an important way that a largely illiterate populace learned the story of Jesus’ last days. Usually the Jews were portrayed in a highly negative way, and riots against the Jews often resulted.

The most famous Passion play is that of Oberammergau in Germany, which was first performed in 1634. It was full of negative portrayals of Jews. As recently as 1980, the “his blood be upon us” line was repeated four times. When Hitler saw the play, he called it “a convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry.” Since then, the play has been changed significantly, to remove its hateful portrayal of Jews.

So this story has great potential to be misused, to portray the Jews as deicides. Obviously, the Passion story is central to Christianity, and it would be wrong for Jews to expect otherwise. But it’s all in the telling.
As Susan Paley, and Adrian Gibbons Koesters write in A Viewer’s Guide to Contemporary Passion Plays, “All of the Gospels were written well after Jesus died; none of the Gospels as we have them today were written by eyewitnesses to the events as they happened. Therefore, no Passion Play or film of the Passion can be accepted as anything like a ‘documentary’ of what happened to Jesus: each is a religiously interpreted account of the meaning of his death and resurrection.”

The Catholic Church has acknowledged this in many ways. It teaches that Jesus died because of the sins of all humanity, therefore “any presentations that explicitly or implicitly seek to shift responsibility from human sin onto this or that historical group, such as the Jews, can only be said to obscure a core Gospel truth. It has rightly been said that ‘correctly viewed, the disappearance of the charge of collective guilt of Jews pertains as much to the purity of the Catholic faith as it does to the defense of Judaism.’” (Statement of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, November 20, 1975).

Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of Vatican II (1965), states clearly, “Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ, neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion.”

In other words, not only is it historically false to blame the Jews for Jesus’ death — crucifixion was a Roman punishment repugnant to Jews; the Jews who were involved were, in effect, a puppet leadership who owed their positions to the Roman authorities — but it is bad Christian doctrine, as well.

Many other Christian denominations and thinkers have done similar soul-searching and changed the way they teach the Passion story, as in the aftermath of WWII as it became clear that the “teaching of contempt” against the Jews in Christian Europe laid the foundation for the Holocaust.

So our worry about Mr. Gibson’s film is that it will ignore recent Christian teaching about the anti-Jewish potential of the story, ignore the fact that every dramatization of the story makes choices about which Gospel account to include, and ignore the lethal impact that Passion plays have had on the Jews.

By the time you read this, the movie will be out, and we will know what choices Mr. Gibson made. I am not worried that the film will stir up pogroms in this country. I trust that most ministers and priests will preach about the film, and if it stigmatizes Jews, will make sure that their flocks don’t draw hateful conclusions. I am less optimistic about other parts of the world, where the legacy of anti-Semitism is not far below the surface.

Our response must be measured, but firm if we feel that the powerful images of the film demonize Jews. We must count on the alliances we have made with Christians of many denominations, and trust in the deep roots of religious tolerance in America. And we must continue to work with our Christian neighbors in supporting the beliefs and values that we share.

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