Posted on by rjonakait

Bach, the Antisemite

I picked up a program on my way to find an empty seat. As usual for the “Bach at One” series at Trinity Church, the left side of the page contained the libretto in the original German and the right the English translation. However, this program for a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion also contained an Explanatory Note, which informed me that portions of the libretto “continually harp on the responsibility of ‘the Jews’ and Judaism for the crucifixion of Jesus.” It continued. “There is, unfortunately, no escaping Luther’s embrace of John’s view of Jewish culpability for Jesus’s death. . . . To avoid giving unnecessary offense . . . we have eliminated references to ‘the Jews’ even in passages where such wording could reasonably be taken to be neutral or positive, given the sensitivity of the topic today.” It noted that changes were indicated by underlining, but my program did not have this.

This Note later sent me scurrying to my favorite Bible, the one given to me on my tenth birthday when I attended Sunday School, to read again John’s version of the Easter story. And yes, it contains references to “the Jews,” but I had not thought that this meant that the Jews as an ethnic group or a religion were responsible for the death of Jesus. The Gospel also refers separately to “Caiaphas the high priest” and “the chief priests.” Thus, when John refers to the Jews, I believed he was referring to those chief priests who were advocating for Jesus’ death: “When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no crime in him.’ The Jews answered, ‘We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself Son of God.’” The Jews being referred to, I had thought, were the chief priests and officers, not all Jews everywhere.

This limitation made sense to me. The powerful and the rich did not condone Jesus’ preaching because His teachings often undercut the rich, the powerful, and the self-righteous. Thus, the whole eye-of-the-needle thing; the moneychangers-in-the-temple thing; the cast-the-first-stone thing. In short, the rich, the powerful, the chief priests and officers were threatened by Jesus. He upended the religious status quo. He also criticized Jewish dietary restrictions. As recorded in Mark 7, Jesus averred that food did not make a person unholy. (“Thus he declared all foods clean.”) Instead, people were defiled by their evil thoughts and actions. Jesus was undermining the religion espoused by religious leaders, and they did not like that. And, thus, when Pilate asked, “‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’” And Jesus’ fate was sealed not by Jews generally, but by those threatened chief priests.

The Gospel according to John says that Pilate placed a title on the cross that proclaimed Jesus as King of the Jews. According to John, “[M]any of the Jews read this title,” but then John becomes more specific and writes, “The chief priests of the Jews” asked Pilate to amend this to read, “’This man said, I am the King of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ’What I have written I have written.’”

However, the libretto at the performance I attended had altered “King of the Jews” to “King of the nation” (des Landes König). This bothered me for it changed the theology of the gospel, or at least the theology I wanted from John. The title “King of the Jews” perhaps mocked Jesus, but it also mocked the chief priests and other high officials. In my mind, the Jewish elite did not want any suggestion that theirs was not the final word about God and religion. They could not admit that there might be a revelation that superseded their own teaching. Even the hint that Jesus was King of the Jews threatened their powerful positions, which they wanted to remain inviolate.

The libretto’s change also undercuts the meaning of an interchange between Pilate and Jesus. Pilate had asked him whether he was King of the Jews, and according to John, Jesus answered, “’My kingship is not of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world.’” “King of the nation,” as the new libretto had it, would seem to indicate that Jesus was claiming dominion over land, which might have been threatening to the Romans, but not necessarily to the Jews. “King of the Jews,” however, is more ambiguous. It may indicate dominion over a people, but it can also indicate a leader of a religion that emphasizes how to worship and live. “King of the Jews” did not threaten the Romans, but it did threaten the high priests.

But there is still another reason not to sanitize John’s Gospel. We should remember that many have used the Easter story to justify antisemitism. Of course, others have read John differently from the way I have. I wanted Jesus and Christianity to stand for love, the Golden Rule, and the Beatitudes. Perhaps sometimes it is about those things, but others have fastened on John to justify discrimination and persecution of Jews. The sad truth is that religion, including Christianity, often has been as much about hate as love. To combat that hate we have to be aware of it and its supposed justifications. We may want religion to be about charity, goodwill, altruism, and benevolence, but if we ignore the prejudice religion has fostered, evil too often takes over.

Posted on by rjonakait

Seeking a Song’s Meaning (continued)

In retirement I started going to Trinity’s weekday music. However, I went more often to St. Paul’s, a chapel of Trinity located four or five blocks north of the church. St. Paul’s, too, is a historic building. Its cornerstone was laid in 1764, and it is the oldest church building in New York City. The AIA Guide to New York City says it “is as close to the original as any building requiring maintenance over 200 years could be.” The WPA Guide’s description is still accurate: “The light, spacious interior is handsomely decorated with a barrel vault carried on slender columns, and a gallery on each side.” St. Paul’s looks and feels much different from the neo-gothic mother church. (A painting marks George Washington’s pew. Immediately after his inauguration Washington and Congress went to a St. Paul’s service. The first president did not go to Trinity Church because no church building then stood on the Trinity site. The original building had been destroyed by the fire of 1776. By the time the second building was constructed, the federal government no longer met in New York.)

At first I resisted the signs that told me there were regular concerts at St. Paul’s titled “Bach at One.” I have infrequently attended classical concerts and have found my attention almost always wanders at some point. And while Mozart, Brahms, or Mahler might conceivably have had some appeal, Bach did not sing out to me. On the other hand, as I learned that these choral concerts were only an hour long and free (which always appeals) I urged myself to try at least one, especially since they were easy to get to, and I almost never had any plans in my retired life at 1 PM on a winter Monday or Wednesday. When I finally went, I found that the sixteen-person professional Trinity choir performed two Bach cantatas accompanied by the professional Trinity Baroque Orchestra playing period instruments. The more I went the more I enjoyed. I did not always revel in the solos, but I loved the choral music. I became something of a regular.

This made me even more interested in Trinity’s music, and I logged into their website frequently and signed up for their emails. I learned much about the church from this, including that they held retreats out of the city a half dozen times a year. Most held little interest for me, but then I showed the spouse the notice for one that was to be a weekend-long study of the Song of Songs and how that love poem had influenced poets through the centuries. It was to be led by a Canadian graduate student who was about to get his Ph.D. with a dissertation about John Donne.

This did not look like a devotional retreat as much as a literary one. Poetry and I have seldom seen eye to eye, but I thought that forty-eight hours might put us on a more equal footing. And a winter weekend in the countryside seemed as if it could be nice. The spouse and I decided that we could at least tolerate it and perhaps we might even find it interesting. Hell, oops, heck, it might even be fun. We decided to go.

With only a bit of bickering about the route, we crossed the covered bridge, turned right, and entered the 55-acre Trinity Retreat Center at 4PM on a January Friday. We entered a deceptively modest looking building, which was in fact the equivalent of a 25-room hotel. (Hotel-like but without a bar or a minibar.) Our room with a king size bed was spacious and modern and overlooked the Housatonic River (no TV, of course). The public areas were furnished as I thought a country retreat should be: comfortable sofas with mis-matched chairs, window seats, tables with worn finishes, patterned but slightly worn rugs that would have looked right in a child’s playroom, and fireplaces with seasoned-wood blazes so good they looked as if they might be fake (they weren’t). Everything appeared to have been recently updated with fresh paint, gleaming floors, state-of-the-art fire alarms, new plantings. Wrap-around porches faced the river, but it was too cold on this January weekend to use them.

Meals were eaten at a collection of communal tables, one of which was set aside for non-talkers who wanted a hint of a silent retreat. The food was prepared by in-house cooks with fresh ingredients. In summer their own gardens provide a farm-to-table menu. The food was healthy and delicious. Its bounty was its only flaw; I overate at every meal.

I was in the second week of a three-week cold and did not feel strong enough to hike the grounds. I did not even walk the prayer labyrinth, but I did make it to the barn, which housed six rescue donkeys. We got in the pen with them, and they seemed to enjoy being petted and scratched for a while, and then they seemed to indicate either satisfaction or boredom and started drifting away. (I now own a Trinity Retreat Center t-shirt with cartoon depictions of these gentle creatures.)

(continued January 27)