How to Have an Enemy by Melissa Florer-Bixler

Author:Melissa Florer-Bixler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MennoMedia
Published: 2020-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

—eight—

Know Your Enemy

n the Gospels we watch conflict erupt within a different family, the family of Judaism. Unlike the enmity between the Jewish people and the Herods of this world, I find this enmity a source of discomfort and pain. One reason for this is that the Jewish people in my life are a source of hope for our broken world. They are the organizers of Carolina Jews for Justice who show up each time we are called upon as religious communities to organize for social change. Over the years I have been awed by the work of Rabbis for Human Rights, who utilize legal channels to stop the seizure of Palestinian land and to advocate for Palestinian agricultural rights.

Whenever there is mention of Jews in the New Testament my mind turns not to enemies, but to my friends Eric and Jenny Solomon, co-rabbis at our local synagogue. One Saturday they invited me to offer the Shabbat message. I arrived early at Beth Meyer synagogue and waited outside the bulletproof glass windows. A few minutes later, I was greeted by two men who swept the building before it opened for worship. It was then I noticed that the security guards each held long sticks with mirrors attached to the ends. I asked a greeter what the mirrors were for. “During the holidays the guards look under each of the cars in the parking lot,” she said. They were checking for explosives.

A long and horrific pattern of anti-Semitism has led to the need for those mirrors, and this anti-Semitism is rooted in the history of the church. It took shape in pogroms, legal crackdowns, and forced conversions. The church fueled violence against Jewish people through stereotypes of greed and theft, buttressed by the growing power of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe. The historic church has been devastating for Jews, advancing a theology of misappropriated enmity that has resulted in persecution and violence over our two-thousand-year history.1

The church created and exacerbated the lie of Jewish otherness with deadly consequences. The church’s role in the decimation of Jewish people spans the decades—from the Crusades to the Inquisition, from Russian pogroms to the Shoah. Those poison roots stretch into the present. In October 2018, a man broke into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and shouted, “All Jews must die!” before he opened fire. He killed eleven people and injured six more. The man, it was later discovered, was part of the Christian nationalist movement that claims a worldwide Jewish conspiracy is at work to bring an end to Christianity. The church has taken differences and turned them into weapons used to dominate and destroy.

After I offered the Shabbat message, the leaves bright and full in the windows behind me, Rabbi Eric ended the service with the kaddish, the prayer of mourning for the dead. But this week, Rabbi Eric told us, rather than having those who recently lost a loved one recite the kaddish, we would say it together.

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