A digital reprint of a 1996 article by Rabbi Benjamin Blech
THE SECRET OF the POPE and JERUSALEM
By Rabbi Benjamin Blech
VIEWPOINT, SUMMER, 1996:31-32.
I think it's the best kept secret in the world today.
People still think that the peace process is all about politics. The untold truth is that there is something far more significant involved. What's even more amazing is that it is not the confrontation between Arab and Jew that is the most crucial issue. To understand the real meaning of contemporary events is to grasp that what we are witnessing is a theological moment unparalleled in history, pitting the prophetic truths of two major religions against one another. For what is at stake is not simply a claim to territory; it is the claim to eternal truth which hangs in the balance. And with regard to the future of Jerusalem, it is not the Palestinians but rather the Pope who is most concerned.
Perhaps it's about time for us to publicize something the Church would rather not talk about. Surely it is very embarrassing to try to deal with a religious dogma that has been historically refuted. But that is exactly what has taken place in Christian thought. And the aftermath of this shocking truth is what - behind the scenes - is responsible for deliberations and decisions from the Vatican with tremendous import for Israel.
Let me explain by taking you back almost two millennia. It was just about forty years after the death of Jesus that the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. It was a tragedy as seemingly inexplicable in its day as the holocaust in ours. The Sages of the time sought to find some religious justification for the apparent abandonment of the Jewish people by their G-d. Indeed, guided by Divine spirit, they acknowledged that it was a measure of sin that was the cause of their sorrow. The Jews had been guilty of "Sinat Chinam - baseless hatred." Destruction was not caused by the enemy as much as by our own hand. Lack of brotherly love brought about national punishment.
So went the Rabbinic interpretation. The Talmud identified the particular story which most disturbed the Al-Mighty. And we accepted the fact that when we despise each other for no valid reason, G-d may well choose to respond to us in similar manner.
But the early Christians saw something quite different in the events of their day. After all, if the Temple was destroyed in the year 70 of the Common Era could the cause not be attributed to the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah? Coming so soon one after the other, it was quite tempting to connect a catastrophe with a religious conviction; the Jewish people who refused to accept Jesus as Savior were condemned to be defeated and cast into exile.
It was this very line of reasoning which became the basis of the pejorative, "the wandering Jew". Throughout history the phrase carried with it both curse and prediction: it is the fate of the Jew to wander evermore over the face of the earth, without permanent residence or homeland, until such a time that he atones for his crime of faithlessness by embracing the truth of the divinity of Jesus.
Accepted as fundamental Christian doctrine, the idea of the wandering Jew represented a very unique and dangerous kind of prophecy. It is after all possible to predict that something will happen at some point in the future and not be threatened by its failure to come to pass. All one needs to say in response is that it has not yet occurred. A request for patience is as valid as the initial pronouncement.
Precisely this is the way in which Christianity has dealt for almost two thousand years with the fact that Jesus, after his death, did not return for the promised second coming. He didn't, they say, but he will - and there is no possible way to firmly refute their teaching.
But what is so very special about the prediction of the Church involving the Jew is that a doctrine of faith made clear that something - i.e. the return of the Jews to Israel from their decreed lands of dispersion - will never take place unless Jews embrace Jesus. If a religion stakes a claim on credibility by affirming that an event cannot ever happen - and it does - it would appear that the damage is irreparable.
That is indeed what happened to Christian theology in the twentieth century. The birth of modern day Israel may have been threatening to the Arab world as a conflict of homelands. For the Vatican, however, the problem was far more profound: it was a conflict of creeds which clearly crowned one as a victor.
It was my revered teacher, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, ZT"L, who oft pointed out that after 1948 Christian scholars were frantically trying to come to terms with a political reality they had for so long deemed a religious impossibility. In the privacy of scholarly conclaves and in carefully guarded gatherings of theologians, it was decided that aside from the Church not granting recognition to Israel's existence - perhaps if you say it isn't really there you can make it go away - the solution to the "refutation of the prediction" was that Israel without Jerusalem did not really represent a return of the holy land to the Jewish people. Without the sanctity of the holiest city, there is no sanctity to the rest of events of 1967. When Israel won the Six Day War, military strategists were dumfounded - but Christian leaders were devastated. How could they explain now a miracle that wasn't suppose to happen? And how deal with a state that even proclaimed its holiest city once more its capital?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Pope Encounters of the First Kind
I was expecting Tom Hanks to walk into our synagogue any moment, maybe even get an aliyah. You see the guest speaker at our synagogue this weekend was best-selling author, professor and unofficial Jewish liaison to the Vatican, Rabbi Benjamin Blech. He co-authored a book on Michelangelo's hidden messages in his Sistine Chapel fresco (see previous blog post for details), but that's only a small part of the rabbi's Vatican adventures. He's been part of the Jewish delegation to - (and here I must use some very diplomatic language considering the delicate nature of the group's ongoing discussions / negotiations) - reconnect - discover the hidden Jewish treasures that are stored 14 floors down in the bowels of the Vatican. Along the way, he blessed the late Pope John Paul ll, (at the Pope's request), met with the Vatican's innermost circle and dare I say, witnessed nothing less than a miracle. (Next post). It was heartening to hear Rabbi Blech praise Pope John ll in the highest terms: How committed he was to bridging the gulf between Judaism and the Vatican and in seeking forgiveness for all of the past wrongs committed by the church against the Jews over history. Since it was shabbat when he spoke, I couldn't take notes and his stories were so full of intrigue and packed with Da Vinci Code-like characters, I wouldn't quote myself in the New York Times, but I can give you an idea of the kind of stories we heard. One day the rabbi gets a call from the Vatican emissary who gives the American president's private tours of the Sistine Chapel, "What's your calendar like? The Pope would like to see you?" and this is where the next part of the adventure begins...
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Michelangelo Embedded Hidden Messages in the Sistine's Frescoes
This shabbat Rabbi Blech spoke to us about his adventures at the Vatican. A real life Da Vinci's Code and it gets even better. Will blog about it all week...
Was the Sistine Ceiling a Papal Insult?
New Book Asks If Michelangelo Embedded Hidden Messages in the Sistine's Frescoes
According to Doliner and Blech, Kabbalah is the key to cracking the code of many of Michelangelo's hidden messages. But their first clue didn't come from a Jewish scholar. Rather, it came from a tourist from Indiana who looked up at the famous panel of The Creation at the figure of God.
"In the late 1970's, a surgeon went into the Sistine Chapel, took a look at this [fresco]. He said to himself, wait, this is Anatomy 101 … this is actually a cross-section of the brain, the right hand side of the brain," Blech said.
If you look at the shape that frames God, and the flowing fabric that falls down from it — do you actually see a spinal cord?
"Now, what's interesting is in Kabbalah we have different kinds of wisdom," said Doliner. "The right side of the human brain in Kabbalah means wisdom — chokhma." And God is appearing from the right side of the brain in that fresco.
How about the fresco of Adam, Eve and the serpent in the garden? Most depictions of the Garden of Eden show an apple tree, but not on the Sistine ceiling. As in an ancient Jewish tradition, the tree is a fig tree.
Blech finds it another hidden message. "I think this is one of these powerful proofs, that not only did Michelangelo know Jewish texts, but he felt it important to incorporate the ideas of these texts into some of these frescoes."
Vatican Curator Nesselrath dismisses the Kabbalah references. "Well, we have all to remember that this is the palace chapel, the main chapel of the Vatican palace, and whatever Michelangelo is painting here had to be discussed with the Pope and his advisors."
And about that Pope — the authors of "The Sistine Secrets" claim that Michelangelo was furious at Julius II, who commissioned the work. Michelangelo was a sculptor, not a painter, and was angry to put his sculpture career on hold to paint frescoes. They say that anger caused the artist to paint hidden references on the ceiling to the corruption of the papacy of his time.
"All these things upset Michelangelo very much. My own personal feeling is that Michelangelo had to get this off his chest," Blech explained.
For the whole article:
Friday, October 29, 2010
Bedtime Adventures
I go to bed with my iPad every night, and often make it a threesome with my iPod Touch. Can't make it through the night without at least one of them. Like the iPad for browsing and reading, have practically cut out all TV watching despite getting 500 or so channels recording my faves on my TIVO. Have got a backlog of Bob Newhart shows (both series), Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, not to mention Entourage and SNL which I always watch. (Only way to watch SNL is to record it so you can skip the ads, much of the music and all the lame skits. That said, the present cast is my favorite since the great year they had Billy Crystal and Martin Short and the Mike Meyers era). Then there's the Book Channel with plenty of great content and the NFL. Have practically cut out movies, cannot stay awake to watch one in its entirety, even my favorites from the 70's. But my iPad beats them all in bed, especially considering that I often fall asleep before 9pm and wake up two or three times during the night. Despite the fact that I'm on the computer most of the day, I rarely surf, just use it for work. The iPad gives me a chance to (comfortably) check out sites I might otherwise miss. For example, I've been checking out Joyce Maynard's site these days, unable to shake the idea of taking her summer writing workshop which seems like a week of heaven. Read a couple of blogs (including The Rent Collector) and that led me to the wonderful CBC literary site where I spent some more time and stumbled upon the accomplished writer, Stephen Henighan, a blast from my past. Years ago, I took an amazing writing workshop with him at Concordia and it brought back many fond memories, like the launching of his first book, Other Americas. I see he went on to do a Phd, write a bunch of books, travel more and is now a prof at Guelph. Ended up reconnecting with him by e-mails. The point is, the iPad can take me on a little adventure every night in bed, get me back to sleep when I wake up at 3am in a cold sweat or read without waking up my wife. Time to get back to sleep now...it's 4.49am, and hoping that a few pages of Franzen (who was actually a college classmate of Stephen Henighan) will do the trick...
Thursday, October 28, 2010
The Gardner and the Leaves
A few days ago I get a warning in the mail from the city about the pile of leaves that my gardner dumped on the street. Included in this warning was a pic of my house with the pile of leaves on the road. It mentions that the private contractor is supposed to bag the leaves, not just plough them on the street. Okay, makes sense. So yesterday I see my gardner after he has blown all the leaves off my lawn and again, he has left little banks of leaves in the street.I ask him whether he intends to bag the leaves, explain why and show him the warning. He tells me that it's okay and kind of mumbles on with a yeah-yeah-type of attitude. He asks me if I have clear plastic leaf bags, which I don't (he just finished bagging leaves on the house he was working on). Later in the afternoon I see that he has left and not disposed of the leaves. While driving through the neighborhood, I see him working on another lawn. I stop my car and tell him that he hasn't cleaned up the leaves. Here's how he answers me: It's ok, everybody does it. (Not true, I reply. Just saw a gardner shoveling leaves into his pick up yesterday). Then he tells me again, it's okay, nothing will happen. (Then why did I get a warning?) You're not doing your job, if you just leave the leaves in the street, I tell him. It's your responsibility to comply with city laws. It must be a new law, he replies...more bullshit. When I insist he must clear those leaves off the street, he tells it takes too long and besides, I owe him money from an increase he put into his rates 8 months ago....but errr...had never told me about. Great to time to ask a client for a rate increase, like what a complete jerk. I've actually wanted to fire him for years, never could stand the guy and his sub-par services. Anyhow, the job still needed to be done, the jerk wasn't going to do it and I did not want to get a hefty $250 fine. The upshot to all this was that I rolled up my sleeves and shoveled those leaves and disposed of them properly like the jerk should have done in the first place. I snapped a few pics of it, in case I get fined and have to contest it in court. Still, what an aggravation, cannot get over the turkey's response. Talk about customer service, the guy has been my gardner for more than 15 years now. Can't wait to fire his ass...
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