Jews risk their credibility by carping criticism of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Israel

Does this sound like an enemy?

A Muslim cleric unleashes a streak of violent hatred against Israel in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI — and the Pope walks out. Yet, Hillary Clinton, who does not receive carping criticism from the Jewish community, didn’t do that when Suha Arafat did the same.

Benedict XVI visits Israel after four years in office.Yet, it took his precedessor, with whom he is often unfavorably compared by Jews, 22 years to do that.

Benedict XVI is given no credit for affirming the Vatican’s relationship with Israel on a personal pace far faster than his predecessor’s.

In Israel, Benedict XVI states publicly: “Sadly, anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head in many parts of the world. This is totally unacceptable.” No such statement by a Pope 50 years ago would have been conceivable.

At Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Benedict XVI, said: “I am deeply grateful to G-d and to you for the opportunity to stand herein silence; a silence to remember, a silence to pray, a silence to hope.” The cry of those killed “echoes in our hearts. It is a cry raised against every act of injustice and violence. It is a perpetual reproach against the spilling of innocent blood.”

“Perpetual reproach” means “Never again.” Is this not precisely what any Pope (and anyone else) should say at Yad Vashem?

Yet, in these words of Benedict XVI, the former chief rabbi of Israel and current chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, Yisrael Lau, and other Israeli leaders, found a wrong tone. “I personally missed hearing a tone of sharing the grief,” Lau aid. “I missed hearing ’I’m sorry, I apologize’.”

In this one little phrase, “wrong tone,” is encapsulated all that has gone wrong with Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Reaching all the way up to chief rabbis, the persistent subtext is: a Pope must behave the way a Jew would behave.  At Yad Vashem, a Pope must transmute himself into a Jew and feel the way a Jew would feel. This expectation is the long arm, the logical consequence, of a distortion in interfaith relations reaching back to the first moment of healing between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. At those beginning moments, Jews demanded of the Church that the Church accommodate itself to Jewish beliefs, affirming the Jewish covenant. The unrealistic expectations of Benedict XVI, and the carping criticism of his performance in Israel, stem from that.

However, the job of Jews is not to ask Christianity not to be Christianity, and not to ask Christian leaders to acquire a Jewish neshamah. Our job, our sole right, is to demand of Christians not to preach and not to implement hatred and violence against Jews. Period. Nothing else needs to be on the agenda. On this score, Pope Benedict XVI’s statements and actions in Israel were exemplary. The wrong tone? What does the chief rabbi expect — the Pope to chant the E-l Male Rachamim?

Pope John Paul II (like his long forgotten precedessor John Paul I, who served a few months) was a different personality from Benedict XVI, more effusive, more outreaching, more sympathetic. But the substance is the same. That — and not some unrealistic and, dare we say, sacreligious desire to share in some deep spiritual-emotional communication — is all that Jews need to, and can, expect from the head of a major religious body that is not Jewish. We rightly expect the Pope to be horrified by the Holocaust. We cannot rightly expect him to mourn in the same way we do. If Pope John II seemed to come closer to that Jewish sensibility, credit it as a bonus. Stop criticizing other Popes for not being Jewish enough.

How right and how wise the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik was when he said: On matters of the body, interfaith cooperation is positive. On matters of the soul, interfaith silence is the only option. No two different faith communities will communicate on matters of the soul other than by compromising their own faith commitment. There is no way to translate one’s faith for an adherent of another religion without diluting, attenuating or oversimplifying it. And so, Benedict XVI did not, and could not, sound the right “tone,” any more than any rabbi could do at high mass or some other emotionally charged Catholic event.

Benedict XVI has made mistakes. Absent open, exculpatory evidence, his (and his predecessor’s) plan to beatify the Holocaust Pope is a disfigurement.

Benedict’s readmission to the church of a Holocaust- denying priest is worse. Benedict’s  own church, and the chancellor of Germany, cried out against this even more than many Jewish communal leaders. This was correct. This touches the only real purpose of interfaith relations: the agreement not to kill those of another religion. To err on the facts of the Holocaust, and thus to hint that it’s OK for Jews again be subject to persecution at the hands of the church, justifies pressure on a Pope. Benedict XVI recanted his readmission of the Holocaust denier. This works. This is right. This is not asking the Pope to change his religion or engage in some deep interfaith, theological and emotional rapport with Jews.

It was rather touching and undeniably stunning on an emotional level when John Paul II called the Jewish people his elder brothers in faith. But it also had a price. It fooled some Jewish leaders into thinking that our primary status is that of elder brothers of the Catholic Church. Not so. Our status is the chosen people of G-d to carry the truth, the eternal truth, the covenant and the only covenant, of the Creator of the universe. No Christian need accept this, just as no Jew need accept any tenet of Christianity, for each of our people not to engage in violence against each other. For affirming this, Benedict XVI deserves our thanks. Nothing more, but also, nothing less.

Read the related news coverage and Rocky Mountain Jew blog entry, “Navigating a minefield.”