Please don't wish me Happy Easter

But Easter and Holy Week are different. I have very mixed feelings about this collection of holidays for historical reasons many American non-Jews are totally unaware of. For my European ancestors, and all Jews who lived in the Christian world before World War II, Holy Week and Easter meant murder, mayhem, rape, and destruction of property -- all sponsored and sanctioned by Church and State

This is the time of year when Christians are reminded that The Jews, meaning all Jews for all time, are personally responsible for murdering the Lord. So it was OK to leave Church angry at people you already hated anyway, get drunk, and do whatever you wanted to the Jews.. Hitler did not invent Jew-hatred. It was part of European religious teaching for 1,000 years before he came along.

The reason most American Christians don’t know about this is that Christian leaders stopped teaching that interpretation of the New Testament. Pope John Paul II actually apologized to the Jews for all the mayhem that old teaching caused through the centuries. Most contemporary Christians are taught that, since Jesus died for everybody’s sins, everybody bears some responsibility for his death.

There are four accounts of Jesus’ death in the Bible, and only one of them blames the Jews for the whole thing. King Herod, the corrupt collaborator with the Roman Empire, shares blame in some interpretations. The corrupt hereditary priesthood gets some blame. The Roman Empire itself gets a lot of blame

One totally upside down, inaccurate version blames “the Pharisees,” or lumps them together with the priests.The Pharisees were political opponents of the puppet King and the corrupt priests.  The led a rebellion against Rome that took seven years and three of their legions to suppress.

 Jesus probably was a Pharisee before he started his personal ministry at age 30. He lived in the Galilee, the north of Israel, where most of the Pharisees lived and had their academies. They tended to scoop up brilliant, spiritually promising teen-agers and educate them in their schools.

The Pharisees were the founders of modern Judaism from 200 B.C. to about 600 A.D. They were an aristocracy of merit, unlike the hereditary aristocrats of the priesthood. The Pharisees were the most learned, wise interpreters of Jewish law. They applied the 713 commandments in the Five Books of Moses (the Torah which God gave Moses on Mount Sinai) to their modern times. Those Biblical commandments were written for shepherds, and subsistence farmers in rural areas. The Pharisees’ world was urban, based on commerce and trade, and Jews had flourishing communities in Egypt, Rome, Greece, Iraq (Babylonia) and Iran (Persia), as well as the Holy Land.

Jews from the ends of the known world could not make pilgrimages to Jerusalem three times a year, and sacrifice the best of their animals and produce on the Holy Temple’s alter, as required by the Torah. The whole thing was outmoded, including the hereditary priesthood itself.

The Pharisees had to create a Judaism people could practice in their world. You could not change the Biblical commandments in any way. You had to interpret and apply them in a way that guaranteed that a modern Jew would not break those commandments accidentally or on purpose, but would have enough freedom to live a modern life. They got extremely creative, and the body of law they created is called The Talmud. It’s not a rulebook; it’s a casebook of rabbinic discussions, disputes, dissenting opinions, and consensus decisions on 800 years of cases. All the arguments and opinions are shown on the pages, and it takes a scholar a day to study one page of the Talmud, which fills a bookshelf.

The Talmud is still the basis of Judaism. Among orthodox scholars, the lawmaking process continues to deal with issues previous generations never thought of: organ transplants, removing someone from life supports , in vitro fertilization, integrating women more fully into the ritual practices. As desirable as that is, it’s actually hard to do without breaking or changing the old commandments. These are problems for the orthodox. Liberal Jews don’t follow these laws literally.

Many years ago, the religion writer for the Concord Monitor wrote the standard Passover story, talking to the rabbi and a couple of local Jewish families. Then she got creative and found some Christians who also celebrate Passover. Jesus’ last supper with his disciples was a Passover Seder after all. The first Christians were all good, observant Jews. The naïve reporter intended to show how alike Jews and Christians are, that Passover is as much for Christians as for Jews.

Rabbi Bernard Taylor, Concord’s rabbi at the time, went to the Monitor and told the reporter that Jews are aware of the connections between Passover and Easter, but the connections are very painful for us.  Not long ago, this was the most dangerous season of the year for European Jews.

The reporter didn’t know any of this history. It’s nice to forget this nasty stuff, but enough people have to remember to keep history from repeating itself.

This kind of Jewish history is the reason some Jews seem clannish, ethnocentric, and fixated on anti-Semitism, and the state of Israel. Israel is the ultimate insurance that protects Jews from outbreaks of anti-Semitism around the world. As my grandfather used to say, “Jews who have this problem can do there. They’ll still have problems, but not that problem.”