Recently. I have noticed a stronger,more militant attitude towards Christianity coming from our Rabbis in Jerusalem. Much more than before they are arguing that Christianity is a false and deceitful religion which must be rejected.
This post describes part of my own bumpy journey through what I call the wastelands of the Christianities.
Like many - but not all - Noahides I came from a background in which Christianity was present but not very significant. At school and beyond I had problems with alcohol and drugs and when I stopped abusing at age 28 I had come to the conclusion that I was an evil person whom G-d hated and was punishing. You might have seen me, wretch that I was, on my own at the back of Catholic churches, kneeling on the hard stone floor and striking my breast in penance before going into the little box to confess or the priest. Fortunately for me things changed. At Marian Vespers one evening the members of the sodality paraded a life-sized doll of the MoG around the church while lustily singing her praises: Tower of Ivory and so on. It was then I suddenly realised how ridiculous it all was: the men had been drinking beforehand and slurred their words while the MoG was visibly wobbling about on its fancy bier. Worse, the performance was in direct opposition to the commandments: Thou shalt have no other gods before me, and Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. I stood up and left. A few days later I collected my rosaries, prayer cards, novenas and other Catholic junk, went back to that church and left them on a table near the entrance. I didn't destroy them as I should have done, as I couldn't be sure I was right. I still had a way to go.
There followed a period of cynicism which I will spare the reader, but the one thing that should be clear is that I was not an evangelical and had no interest in bible-bashing, preaching on street corners, holy rolling or dancing with snakes, and I'm so glad it never occurred to me to infect Jews with my particular strain of spiritual confusion - I mean to convert Jews to any kind of Christianity. Rabbi Tovia Singer has shown on his YouTube channel films of evangelicals in Jerusalem screaming, shouting, gesticulating at Jews in the street trying to convince them to convert. It's horrible to see and even more so as Israel is at war and the population is under enormous pressure in any case. It's the bad old joke: the internet goes down, blame the jews! the economy is failing, blame the Jews! the weather is lousy, blame the Jews! Messiah is late, blame the Jews! Whatever goes wrong, blame the Jews!
My final attempt at Christianity was with the Anglican church, or Episcopalian church as it is known outside England. By this time I had little interest in what the clergy had to say which was great as the CofE clergy never say anything of interest, but I was deeply moved by the beautiful choral music that was performed. This is some of the finest music ever written, from the Roman and Byzantine periods through to today, and whatever the composers were like as people, surely their inspiration was pure and sincere? I won't dwell on Mozart's scatological motets, which sound as beautiful as any of his other choral works, unless you speak German.
What finally pushed me out of churches for ever was reflecting on the Holocaust. Here was the most evil event in anything like recent history and any religion with a spark of godliness would have denounced it and the underlying anti-semitism from its very beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet all the Churches went along with it: the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Evangelicals, Calvinists and so on. Individual Christians stood out against the atrocities, and suffered. They must be respected for their courage, but as institutions, the churches mainly collaborated. True, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and his episcopal colleagues were vocal in their opposition to Nazism, but on two narrow complaints: that the Nazi regime's anti-clericalism was trying to destroy "Christ's mystical union" with the German nation, in other words the Regime was bad for business, and secondly that the forced euthanasia campaign, or Aktion T4, was plain murder of innocent German citizens. As to the plain murders of innocent European Jews, little was ever said, and nothing done. As it happens, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, made a speech in the British House of Lords in March 1943 concerning events in Germany. In the course of this speech he said: "The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days ...", which was one of the first public acknowledgements anywhere of the Holocaust and its implementation, and for which Temple deserves credit. But this was already 1943, millions of Jews had died by now, and as Archbishop of Canterbury, Temple was high-priest of the British state religion and well protected by the Britain's increasingly powerful and competent armed forces: for the British state, out of self-interest, was at war with Germany. It remains generally true of the Protestant Churches in Europe that their hierarchies did not speak out against the Nazi regime and that their congregations carried out without protest the orders to murder. There isn't space here to list the complicity of all the "Christianities" in the Holocaust, and I can only repeat with exasperation that any religion with a spark of holiness would never have collaborated with Hitler.
Sometimes it's the little things that finally do it. In about 2009 or 2010, as I walked by Parliament Square one afternoon a lady gave me a leaflet concerning an Israeli soldier who had been taken hostage by Hamas - yes, they were doing it way back then. We spoke briefly and I gathered he had been in captivity since about 2006. He was Gilad Shalit, a sergeant in the army. Now, when I think of a "sergeant" I picture a broad chested, muscular man with a definite air of toughness or even a touch of the thug or night club bouncer. Gilad - he's alive and well, thanks be to HaShem - didn't look anything like that. He was 20 years old when taken hostage, but looked in his most recent army photo more like a skinny schoolboy of 12 , and may I say it, a bit goofy. I instantly felt sympathy for him and the thought of his being held in some foul hole in Gaza by who knows what sadists made me fear the worst for him. I took the leaflet to the church I attended and gave it to one of the clergy, a young man not much older than Gilad, who was officiating that day. Prayers were usually said during the service for hostages of any nation, often recounting how many days they had been held by their captors. I asked him to mention Gilad in these petitions and he seemed to agree. Well, Gilad was not mentioned at all. At the end of evensong I spoke again to the priest and asked why Gilad had been left out. He turned his head so that he was whispering into my ear and said: "Israeli soldier", like it was an obscenity, and bustled off.
Happily Gilad was released after a lengthy campaign. This priest is prospering too, and I notice has had a series of promotions - or preferments, as they are called. He is now a canon of Westminster and I last saw him (on TV!) sitting in the sanctuary near the throne at King Charles' coronation, where the anthem is Handel's setting of the text "Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet annointed Solomon king". How Jewish is that! May I be forgiven for saying I despise this priest for his lack of humanity? His attitude then is exactly the same as the all the bishops, popes, cardinals, ministers of the 1940s, and of all the people today who ignore the hostages still rotting in Gaza since October 7.
Is it a Jewish saying that he who saves one person saves the world?
