This paper examines the meaning behind a particular Christian ritual, and also explores potential parallels in form

and content within Jewish tradition. The ritual in question accompanies the reading of the Passion of Jesus on Good Friday in Christians liturgical preparation for Easter. During the reading, congregants are invited to place themselves in the role of the throng that condemned Jesus to the cross, shouting like those in the original Passion story: Crucify him! This identification with Jesus executioners has the potential to be extremely evocative and moving. Before we can fully appreciate the power of this ritual and analyze its meaning, we must first, however, establish a common understanding of the way in which religions relate to their sacred stories. Effective religion transports its adherents through time. Participants in a given ritual and faith system must identify pivotal moments from the history of their people and its relationship to God. They must then relate to these moments as meta-events, seeing them as archetypal episodes that shape their worldview. They must return to them through religious imagination and ritual reenactment, and allow them to form a narrative framework for their ethical conduct. The explicit reenactment that occurs during a specific ritual or liturgical moment is what we may call religious poetry. This poetry moves the religious participants, sensitizing them in a way that will impact their living out the religious prose of everyday interactions and simply being in the world. Being spiritually present at these crucial moments unites certain members of that religious community with all others throughout time, and transmits the meaning of that moment to the forefront of consciousness in all members lives. Such a moment then helps define the essential message of that religious community. In anthropological terms, these events comprise what is known as myth. Every religion has its myths, and this has nothing to do with the historical veracity of a given event. Literal truth is irrelevant to the religious impact of myths, or sacred stories. The questions are not,

2 Did this really happen? or How exactly did it happen? Rather, we ask, What is the theological significance of our claiming and believing that this happened? What role does this sacred story play in the shaping of our religious consciousness? The crucifixion of Jesus is a quintessential sacred story. Gustav Niebuhr concisely explains the role this story plays in the faith of Christians, and the problems it can yield. Theologically, the concern is, what does his crucifixion mean and where does it lead? Yet Christian history has shown it is easy for some to get caught up in a more mundane and potentially dangerous question: Whos to blame?1 This latter question is usually a pretext for scapegoating for sociopolitical ends. If phrased in a less loaded fashion, however, it can aid in discovering real, enduring theological meaning for Christians within their sacred story. This paper seeks to explore the theological significance of identifying Jesus executioners, with a recognition that a historical answer is not necessarily a theological goal. It further examines the way in which Christians ritually reenact this central story and internalize it into the core of their religious consciousness. It probes all these questions in light of central Jewish stories and rituals that may provide parallels either in form or content to the role the crucifixion plays for Christians. It is noteworthy that during this reenactment, those Christians performing the ritual seek not to identify with Jesus or his sympathizers, but with his enemies. This leads us towards a framework for all Christian ethical behavior. The enduring message that Christians articulate here through the poetry of ritual and internalize as prose for their daily living is the following core religious concept: in short, not only did Christ die for our sins, but it was we who killed him. By placing themselves into the story, Christians open a door to an exploration that has nothing to do with who actually uttered the words of condemnation in history, but rather with who utters them now. Who is stuck with this refrain as part of their nature in the life that goes out beyond this one specific historical event? The answer, Christians are saying, is that we are.
1

New York Times, April 29, 2001. Week in Review, p. 5.

3 Many Christians, such as Sebastian Moore, take this concept even further: Not only do we carry the burden of this one historical sin, but we continue to commit it daily. We are crucifying Jesus all the time, whenever we remain fallibly human and fail to transcend our nature in pursuit of the new humanity that Jesus life represents. Rather, in our humanity, we seek to destroy this potential within us that can achieve something new and more holy.2 What better sin is there to symbolize the totality of human sinfulness than the killing of God? If the message of Christianity is to understand this fundamental sinfulness and then appreciate being redeemed from it, believers must find themselves in the role of executioner. They must recognize the blood on their hands. They must return to the scene where Jesus fate is sealed, seeing themselves as participants in that drama. Moore goes even one more step, claiming that we must also see ourselves on the cross: We are the crucified Jesus, suffering from the stifling of our own humanity. Yet we also die a potentially salvational death through the divine act of forgiveness, as we allow our oppressive egos to dissolve. Christians thus contemplate their sinful human nature and identify what within them wishes to destroy God and all that He stands for. The emergence of these theological questions tells us much about the Christian understanding of the relationship between humanity and God, and the role that ritual plays in reinforcing that understanding. We shall return later to these concepts. Does any Jewish phenomenon parallel this ritual or the concepts that inform it? Judaism calls its followers to defining moments of magnitude similar to that of Jesus condemnation to the cross. Jews ritual reenactment of key events in their collective consciousness may be similar in form to the kind of reenactment that goes on before Easter; it will be more diffi-

Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 1994). Although I sometimes note it directly in the paper, most references here to specific aspects of Christian theology are based on Moores thesis. I do not make any direct citations. Of course, the corollary to Moores indictment of humanity for destroying its own potential through crucifying Jesus is that Jesus acceptance of this fate is what actually redeems humanity.
2

4 cult, however, to establish a parallel in the content of each ritual. This latter element is another that we shall discuss later in this paper. Three events from Torah are potentially comparable to the crucifixion in their power to define the community and its relationship to God. They are the Creation of the world, the Exodus from Egypt, and the Revelation at Mt. Sinai. Whereas Christians come to know Jesus as the Savior through his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, Jews come to know God as Creator, Redeemer, and Revealer through these three seminal events. In what ways do Jews return to these moments? The essential revisiting of Creation occurs once a week, every Shabbat. The sacred task of the observant Jew is to cease from all industrious work as a means of mirroring Gods rest in completing the world. When Jews take a day simply to be instead of to do, they perceive a glimmer of God-consciousness, stepping out of time and its demands to a plane of sacred admiration of the world. Jews thus continually reenact the story of Gods creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh, by engaging in this same ordering of time. Again, what matters is not the historicity of the original event, but the fact that Jews have identified their own actions as Godly. Shabbat is also considered to be a sign that celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. The weekly freedom from work is a reminder of the archetypal liberation from bondage. Thus, whereas Jews mirror God in upholding the Creation motif, they mirror their ancestors in reenacting the Exodus. They also do this more explicitly at the festival of Pesach, most significantly through the seder, the elaborate meal in which the story of liberation is told and discussed. While eating foods associated with the experience of Israelite slavery and freedom, Jews explicitly declare that they see themselves as having participated in that transformative drama. Finally, the Revelation, the giving of Torah at Mt. Sinai, is the theme of the festival of Shavuot. This holiday is practically devoid of any unique ritual, except for the custom (not

5 considered an obligatory mitzvah) of staying up all night studying Torah on the evening of Shavuot, and the reading of the account of the giving of the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20 on the morning of Shavuot. The latter of these two contains an element of reenactment, wherein at the reading of the Torah, the worshipers rise and wait for the utterance of the first commandment as if they were the Israelites standing at the foot of the mountain, ready to hear Gods word for the first time. Jews thus return to these three episodes in their history through ritual reenactment. It is clear that something very significant is missing from all these examples: None of them forces Jews to embrace the role of their historical enemy or to look into their essence and confront sinfulness. Does this, perhaps, touch upon the fundamental distinction between these two great religious worldviews? We shall return to this question later. These three defining moments are also played out in the life of Jews in a more conceptual fashion one that corresponds more to the prose of everyday living. There are two components here the notion of ongoing experience of the phenomenon and the idea of being Gods partner. These two components are most closely linked when it comes to the act of Creation. Jews do not claim to have historical memory of the beginnings of Creation. However, by seeing themselves as Gods partner, Jews invest their understanding of their role on earth as influential in completing the Creation that God began. They see themselves (indeed, all humanity) as created in Gods image, and thus serving as stewards of the earth, working to improve living conditions throughout the world, and adding holiness to it. Thus, through active participation in the world, Jews engage in a perpetuation of the original holy act in their own time. The world is continually being created, and Jews act as Gods partner in that process. Jews also see themselves charged with the responsibility of waging the fight for freedom, both for themselves and for all humanity. By engaging in the pursuit of social justice, Jews perpetuate the Exodus from Egypt. As long as injustice reigns anywhere in the world, for

6 Jews this means mythically that someone is still in Egypt. While God performed miracles and wonders to redeem the Israelites from slavery, it is we as Gods partner who must work today to continue rescuing those who remain in suffering or privation. Thus, through ongoing involvement in redeeming the oppressed, Jews create a refrain of the original freedom story, rewriting it with todays humanity in the role of liberator. Redemption from Egypt also occurs continually in an existential or psychological way. It can be said that anyones personal darkness separation from wholeness or spiritual health is a form of Egypt. Through our own soul-work the refining of our spiritual faculties, the awakening to Gods presence in our lives we continue to take ourselves and our loved ones out of Egypt. Anything that limits our human potential is seen as enslaving. Whenever we succeed in transcending the pettiness that suppresses our complete flourishing, we are departing from Egypt. This exodus can occur at any moment in the prose of our lives. This personal redemption is similar to that which Christians desire to achieve from their trials in life through the drama of the cross. By condemning Jesus to his fate or, as Moore puts it, placing ourselves on the cross we enable ourselves to escape from the life that enslaves us. These two reflections on redemption in our day ask Jews to examine their own complicity in supporting social injustice or spiritual oppression. How are we like Pharaoh? they ask. What must we do to stop being like the Egyptians in the Torah? Again, however, there is no ritual reenactment that concretizes this identification with the perpetrators of evil. There is, on the other hand, a sublimated reenactment of the violent, sacrificial act that enabled the Israelite redemption the affixing of the mezuzah to the doorpost. This paper concludes with an analysis of that symbol. First, we must explore the evolution of other central themes and symbols in order to complete the connection. The most essential theme in post-rabbinic Judaism emerges from the third archetypal event for Jews, and is understood as ongoing revelation. While this is a concrete ideology

7 for certain liberal camps within the Jewish world, the concept appears in more Orthodox-leaning communities with slightly different language. For all, the notion is essentially an embrace of the Midrashic concept that all Jewish souls stood at Mt. Sinai.3 Fundamentalists may read this as metaphysically true, while more liberal interpretation will see it as symbolically significant. The common ground is the idea that we share a collective memory of the event. As we saw with both the Exodus and the crucifixion as it plays out for Christians, a collective memory is only as powerful as the way in which it resonates dynamically in the lives of contemporary members of that collective. Thus, the question is, how do Jews today relate to the experience of witnessing and receiving Gods revelation? In the liberal camp, some Jews argue that the standing at Mt. Sinai was never an actual event in history, and exists only mythically. Other liberals maintain that a distinct, historical event in time did occur, but that this is not the extent of the revelatory process. Regardless, the liberal branches tend to agree that Gods revelation of Torah continues throughout history into the present, most particularly each time one encounters a sacred text, studies it, interprets it, and takes ownership of it. Thus, that we stood together at Mt. Sinai as a people is meaningful only inasmuch as we continue to have revelatory experiences in our encounter with texts today. The ongoing witnessing of revelation empowers us to affirm the Midrash. As Arthur Green, a contemporary liberal Jewish theologian, puts it, all of us Jews, in all generations, as the story says, are there with Moses [on Mt. Sinai] . . . . Each of us, as we lay claim to our spiritual heritage, may return to intimate communion with that ever-resounding event at Sinai, formative of the Jewish spirit for all generations.4 More fundamentalist Jewish thinkers claim only the one revelation as described in Torah, and understand all Oral Law as explicated in later generations to be the result of that one, total communication of divine instruction. However, through another Midrash, even most
Midrash Tanhuma, Chapter 3. Rabbi Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1992), p. 119.
3 4

8 Orthodox-leaning thinkers would agree that the act of Torah study today is at least a symbolic recreation of the event at Mt. Sinai. This one states, Every day that you study Torah, say, It is as if I received it this very day from Sinai.5 This captures the belief of most committed Jews across the ideological spectrum, that the engagement with sacred text represents in some way a revisiting of the Sinai experience. Jews remain continually open to hearing the voice of God as it speaks through the texts of the tradition. The emphasis on the centrality of text to the Jewish religious pursuit may come in part from early Israelite religion. It is also largely, however, the result of one of the most catastrophic events in Jewish history, the Destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.* After the Destruction, it was clear more than ever before that the Jews were the people of a book. The essential Jewish pursuit would be the reading, exegesis, and interpretation of texts. In short, hermeneutics would save the Jewish people. This shift in the Jewish worldview is essential for constructing our comparison with Christianity, especially since we are discussing the same time period in which the latter religion emerged. It is, indeed, quite important to remember the historical record that many early Christians attributed the Destruction to the Jews rejection of Jesus. When the Temple stood, it was understood to be the site of the Shechinah, the indwelling presence of God. Since such presence was accepted as real, so too was communication with God. Sacrificial offerings were no abstract exercise; they offered real interaction with Divinity. The Divine presence also could be invoked for the atonement of sins. Priestly ritual within the Temple would absolve the priests, their families, and all Israel from their transgressions. With the fall of the Temple, this entire system of Divine communication collapsed. Jews were left needing a new model for bringing Gods presence into their lives.
Midrash Tanhuma, Chapter 7. Quoted in Daniel C. Matt, God & The Big Bang: Discovering Harmony Between Science & Spirituality (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1996), p. 107. * In the ensuing discussion, I refer to the Destruction of the Temple with a capital D, distinguishing that event from other destructions to which I compare it.
5

9 The end of the old model had another dimension: The Temple was the corporeal representation of holiness on earth, the vessel that contained Gods presence. Christians later appropriated this idea by viewing the Church as the Body of Christ. This served to replace the Jewish cult that existed within the Temple. That earlier edifice represented a macrocosm of the human body (or the latter was a microcosm of the former; it is not important to establish which took priority). The human form, created in the image of God, is a vessel of holiness. It therefore must be treated with the utmost reverence and honor, kept clean and pure. An awareness of Gods presence within ones body would yield a consciousness of personal behavior always befitting the proper conduct within a temple. The Destruction of the Temple was thus a bodily destruction. The space that once contained the Divine, now sullied, is empty of that spiritual presence. The Rabbis imagined God fleeing from the site, much like the way a dying body expunges the soul that once breathed within it. The Temple becomes a corpse purely physical remains, devoid of any spirit. For Christians, of course, Jesus is the perfect vessel of God on earth, complete Divine manifestation in one corporeal being. In this sense his body is like the Jews Temple. He is also, as Moore argues, the perfect human being. He offers the example of what humanity can be if it truly embraces its Godly potential for goodness. He is thus purity in the flesh, an amplified representative of the traditional Jewish notions of the body that Christians were by and large to reject in favor of a neo-Platonic understanding of corporeality and materiality as sinful. Only Jesus body (and Marys) was free of sin. In this encapsulation of the goodness and holy potential of the human body Jesus also mirrors the Jews Temple. Thus, the crucifixion is, like the Destruction of the Temple, a destruction of Gods vessel. However, this time, the destruction is of a real body. The corporeal death that the Temples Destruction symbolizes is paralleled in the Christian story without metaphor. The slaying of God is a literal one. Furthermore, the Destruction of the Temple results in a prolonged es-

10 trangement between God and Israel, with Jews praying for the restoration of the body in the form of a future, rebuilt Temple. Christians, on the other hand, celebrate the relatively immediate resurrection of Jesus body. Nothing can keep it down, for it is the perfected human form. Even its very real sacrifice does not yield a permanent bodily destruction. This resiliency of the Body of Christ is what then animates the Church. The Church contains the Holy Spirit, which is only now manifest on earth after the sacrifice of the body. Yet Christians continue to revere the Divinity within the unique, perfected human form of Jesus the man, the body that breathed as we do for a brief time but whose connection to the Father and the Holy Spirit is eternally inseparable. The Rabbis version of the Holy Spirit, on the other hand the Shechinah has fled from Israel, disappearing with the Destruction. For the time being, until the Rabbis can develop a new system, the body has lost its life-force. Before we discuss the restoration of spirit to a reconstituted body within Jewish consciousness, we must examine the ways that Christians and Jews understood the destructions that befell their respective communities in the first century.* The death of Jesus at the hands of the Romans occurred amidst tremendous strife within the Jewish community. Both it and the Destruction of the Temple would beg the question introduced in the early part of this paper Whos to blame? A comparison of the ways in which each group responded to its own archetypal cataclysm reveals some important differences between the two religions in the first century. Early Christian polemics blamed the Jews for Jesus death, and attributed the Destruction of the Temple to this sin. The Jews response to their own tragedy, on the other hand, did not yield a new cycle of blame. Rather than postulating the punishment that might later befall
The ensuing discussion will at times appear to suggest a reversal of chronology, interpreting the crucifixion in light of the Destruction. It is my contention that the early Christians undertook this same reading-back to their archetypal event after the latter tragedy. Even if this is not historically accurate, I hope it can be a valuable heuristic device for exploring the ways in which religious traditions evolve over time, incorporating reactions to various events into their larger worldview.
*

11 Rome for their heinous act i.e. viewing the destruction as a cause for yet another calamity the Jews chose to focus on the destruction as an effect. Of course, they did not hold the Christian polemical perspective that related their tragedy directly to the death of Jesus. Rather, they undertook what has now become, more or less as this paper exemplifies the consummate Christian act: They placed the blame on themselves. Within Jewish tradition, the proverbial finger points not to the evil Romans, but to the perpetrators of causeless hatred within the Jewish community itself as the cause for the vanquishing of Jerusalem. The same infighting that led to such debacles as the crucifixion of Jesus is what ultimately tore the Jews apart nationally, leaving them defenseless against the enemy that preyed on their weakness. Thus, the Jewish leadership after the Destruction essentially agreed with their Christian accusers that they themselves were responsible for their fate; instead of encapsulating all that blame into the archetypal sin of killing Jesus, however, the early Rabbis looked at the big picture of how Jews were treating other Jews. There was no one example of such mistreatment to herald above all others as a sign of this sinfulness to agree with the Christians on this would undermine the Jews entire claim to remaining non-Christian. Yet the bottom line theologically was that the Jews had, in many ways, brought this devastation upon themselves. The sacking and burning of the Temple only made evident the spiritual decay that was already infecting the Jews from within. The ritual act of Christians shouting Crucify him! before Easter reflects a different strand of Christian thought than the approach that scapegoats the Jews. It posits that the responsibility for the destruction of the embodied God lies within ourselves, the Christian community. Had this notion prevailed immediately in Christian history, the last two thousand years might have been spared much bloodshed. Christians would have internalized that they already had blood on their hands, the blood of their own God. Although it is mere historical speculation, it is compelling to wonder if the hallmark Christian ideology of internalizing sin actually

12 grew out of Jewish thinking from the very same time period. Whereas the more common trend early in the history of Christianity was to blame the Jews for killing Jesus, Christian ideologues were obviously unable to escape their own doctrine that Christ had died for their sins. To paraphrase Moore, the mystery of Jesus function on earth lies in his exposing the consummate sin that begged for humanitys redemption his own execution by a guilty humanity. Jews return to their refrain of self-incrimination each year on the Ninth of Av, the day that commemorates the Destruction of both Temples as well as other major calamities. While part of the mood of the day is a somber reflection on the history of Jewish victimhood, the other prominent idea is that we must look deep into ourselves, primarily through fasting and abstaining from other worldly pleasures, to ascertain what we have done to injure our communities. When have we been guilty of causeless hatred? How can we commit ourselves to a life of honesty and righteousness so that we do not leave ourselves vulnerable to the same kind of self-destruction? This experience of self-blame, self-punishment, and petition for forgiveness is one of two moments in the Jewish calendar that lead Jews towards assuming the role of the sinner. The other moment when Jews confront their sinfulness and strive for personal redemption is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The post-Destruction enactment of this day is quite different than what the Torah describes or what happened in the Temple. When the sacrificial system existed, atonement was effected solely through sacrificial ritual. After the Temple fell, the Rabbis needed to reconstruct the role of the laity in achieving atonement, for the priests were now rendered powerless. Thus arose the emphasis on repentance, prayer, and charity. These personal acts of goodness would effect atonement in the new order. The Yom Kippur liturgy includes a reenactment of the priestly atonement procedures. Jews view this service as a relic of that bygone day when atonement, if achieved, was certain, and depended only on the proper actions of the high priest. Jews imagine themselves back in

13 the Temple, waiting with bated breath for the high priest to emerge safely from the Holy of Holies, thus signaling his ritual success. This reenactment is not, however, central to the days experience. It is quite significant that Yom Kippur is not rooted in a historical recollection, let alone a reenactment. Although it turns reverently towards the tradition, it is very focused on the present, explicitly prodding Jews to examine their own lives here and now. With the Ninth of Av and Yom Kippur, we have moments of critical self-reflection and contemplation of sin. In the former, however, there is no major ritual reenactment, except for the ongoing experience of deprivation that the fasting induces. There is certainly no concrete embrace of the role of destroyer. Classical Rabbinic theology leaves that role to the Romans, only it makes them tools of God for punishing the unrighteousness Jews. Contemporary Jews are left on their own to evaluate their participation in causeless hatred. No explicit ritual forces this upon them the way that Christians experience being Jesus condemners. In the second of these solemn days on the Jewish calendar, Jews look back nostalgically at Temple times, but remain focused on the present rather than on historical experience. Thus, in neither case do we see historical emphasis wedded to reenactment, as we did with the experiences of Creation, Redemption, and Revelation; and those phenomena, as we saw earlier, offered no ritual space for identifying with the sinner. We thus find no Jewish moment that parallels the Christians condemnation of Jesus in both ritual and theme together. This may highlight a fundamental distinction between the two religions. Having potentially reached the above conclusion, we are still left with some striking similarities. First, the reenactment theme remains central to both traditions. As Moore puts it, Christians are killing Jesus all the time. Whenever we limit our human potential or fail to see the image of God in another human being, we are destroying the God that yearns to emanate from within us. We diminish our own divinity, thus creating a distance between God and humanity. Yet, the salvational sacrifice of Jesus dying for us grants us eternal life.

14 For Jews, the central religious act, as suggested above, is hermeneutical. The Rabbis developed language that suggested that the act of studying Torah would invite the Shechina to dwell among Jews. The engagement with text was a return to Mt. Sinai. We are receiving Torah all the time, the Rabbis were telling the Jews. Can this compare in any way to the Christian act of killing Jesus all the time? We return now to the symbol of body. From a Christian perspective, the crucifixion a microcosmic bodily destruction foreshadowed the devastation of the national body only forty years later. While Jews would look to the Romans Destruction of the Temple as the greatest calamity to befall the Jewish people, the emerging Christian identity would turn to the crucifixion as the climax of the human drama on earth. The disappearance of the Temple and its cult left unresolved the question of sin and atonement for the Jews necessitating the creation of new modes of religious practice, such as occurred with the observance of Yom Kippur. However, for Christians, the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross represented the potential for complete salvation from sin for all humanity. The Jews were thus left without a body on the national level to order their universe, while the Christians had discovered a new body to order theirs that of a dying Jesus on the cross. The earlier, Jewish model of a macrocosmic body, the Temple, was no longer necessary; now, Christians had the microcosm of Gods presence, not only potentially in their own bodies, but actually in the naked, bleeding corporeal manifestation of God. Christians thus had a new body, and it represented Gods eternal love for humanity. For this is how God loved the world: He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16). The manifestation of God in human form was the Word become Flesh. In the first centuries following the Destruction of the Second Temple, it grew increasingly clear to the Rabbinic leadership that simply relying on the construction of another temple

15 was not going to sustain the Jewish community. Jews needed the salvation (although they refrained from using this terminology) of text. The Word became Torah. Hence the ascendance of hermeneutics. This ongoing act of interpretation returned Jews to the Revelation at Sinai, allowing for a reenactment in the prose of daily life of that archetypal event. Yet hermeneutics goes further than mere reenactment. There is, in any act of interpretation, a necessary act of destruction. The contemporary reader must attack the text in some way in order to claim it as ones own. One must break it down, tear it apart, deconstruct it. The Rabbinic emphasis on study and not just memorization of the Written Torah, but an exploration into the continually unfolding Oral Torah requires a deconstruction and then reconstruction of the written text as it has been received. It can thus be received anew. Redemption for Christians required a destruction of the bodily representation of Gods love, so that such love could become even more manifest through a bodily resurrection. So too, redemption for Jews would emerge from a receiving of the textual body that represented Gods love and a subsequent destruction of that body through exegesis, followed by the textual resurrection that makes Torah new for each recipient. This too makes Gods love more manifest. With a clearer understanding of the parallels in bodily destruction that manifest Divine love, we return to the ancient Jewish talisman of the mezuzah. As the cross has become for many Christians, this amulet has been seen by many as a charm to ward off evil. It likely originated as such an object from pre-Israelite pagan rite. However, in becoming a Jewish symbol, the mezuzah took on two major functions which, together, wed the experience of redemption and revelation. Mezuzah literally means doorpost, understood to be the vertical structure that intersects with a lintel above it, forming a doorway. It thus creates a perpendicular shape that is not so different from that of a cross. It was on such posts that the Israelite slaves were commanded to spread the blood of the sacrificial lamb in order to save themselves from the tenth plague that

16 befell Egypt, the slaughtering of the first-born males. Before they could be freed, they were required to commit an act of violence. They needed to kill a small animal. They then needed to get this blood on their hands (more specifically, on hyssop branches, but surely their hands did not remain clean), and spread it on an intersection of posts. They were putting the blood there, and this act of violence would save them from a more destructive act that was still to come. It would then redeem them from their oppression. The slaughtering of all first-born males that followed this preparation parallels Gods relinquishing of His first-born male to the cross. In Egypt, the Israelites needed to commit violence upon a literal scapegoat to save themselves from further violence. For Christians, Jesus became the scapegoat to save humanity from sin. His death, however, was the slaughtering of the first-born. The Son of God was presumably preventing further violence by accepting it all upon Himself. We needed to put him there to save ourselves, Christian theology tells us. Thus, in both traditions, violence is a necessary prerequisite for redemption. In both cases, it is committed by those in need of redemption and it is inflicted on a passive, innocent creature, leaving blood on the hands of the people who need to be saved. In both cases, the first born is taken. The only major difference is that in the Christian drama, Jesus becomes the recipient of all the violence. Christians thus turn to the symbol of the cross as the reminder not only of their redemption, but of the violence they needed to inflict in order to receive that redemption. It reminds them that they have blood on their hands, and that for this they have been saved. Where do Jews turn for a symbol of their redemption? The mezuzah, now understood to be verses from Torah that declare Gods unity and that are affixed to the doorpost, is a reminder of the ritual that enabled them to be freed from Egypt. Why is text used to represent the sacrificial blood that the Israelites used in Egypt? As we have seen, text is the new body for Jews. Torah is the symbol of Gods love. Yes, Jews say, we must remember that we commited acts of violence in

17 order to be redeemed. But we have no real body to which we can inflict that violence. Moses broke the first set of tablets and the Israelites continued to carry those pieces with them. All generations of Jews continue to attack text with their own hermeneutical weapons, yielding a new revelation of Gods love and thus a kind of redemption. Symbolizing that ongoing tradition of textual violence, Jews nail words of Torah to their doorposts. Again, Jews are not reminded directly of their grand complicity in a drama of sin. Yet, as the symbolic pieces come together, they cannot forget that they descend from a people that committed violence and once had blood on their hands. The Prophets condemned the Israelites for valuing the odor of sacrificial fire more than kindness to ones neighbor and to the downtrodden. This neglect of human needs led to the Destruction of both Temples, according to Prophetic and Rabbinic theology. This critique serves as a reminder of the sinfulness of sacrificial violence when coupled with the violence of oppression (be it physical, emotional, economic, etc.). Jews thus do harbor a memory of their blame. However, the memory of blame is not at the forefront of Jewish theology on a daily basis the way it may be for Christians when they look to the cross. Rather, the daily passage through doorways, a quintessential prosaic event on its surface, is supposed to remind Jews more of the salvational role of text in their lives of the presence of Torah as a bodily manifestation of Gods love. On a doorway in a Jewish home that does not have a mezuzah, the Jew is obligated to affix one. Jews must continue to nail the textual embodiment of Gods love to the posts that support their home. This is a very physical act, but a sublimation of violence removed even further from suffering than as it exists for a slaughtered lamb or a crucified man. Yet, as Jews continue to relate to sacred text, they remember their obligation to attack it, to interpret it. This is what will elevate them from the sinfulness that is part of their being. Torah will pave their road to salvation, but they must walk that road themselves, seeing each step in their engagement with Torah as a return to the archetypal event at Sinai, when the Word be-

18 came Text. Christians have retained the more concrete image of violence inflicted on a human being, and they see this as necessary for redemption from their own sinful nature. Christ paves their road for salvation, but they see each step they take in their engagement with His body as a return to the moment when they crucified Him, thus effecting their own salvation.