The Rejection of Rejection
For one reason more than any other, Jewish-Christian relations have been scarred by tragedy: the doctrine known as Supersessionist or Replacement theology, which maintains that Christianity represents God’s rejection of the Jewish people, the “old Israel.”
It says that God once had a covenant with the people of Israel, but no longer. Hence the Christian name for the Hebrew Bible: “The Old Testament.” “Old” here means the testament or covenant once in force but no more. On this view, God no longer wants us to serve Him the Jewish way, through the 613 commandments, but a new way, through a New Testament. His old chosen people were the physical descendants of Abraham. His new chosen people are the spiritual descendants of Abraham, that is, not Jews but Christians.
The results of this doctrine were devastating. They were chronicled after the Holocaust by the French historian and Holocaust survivor Jules Isaac. Subsequently they were set out in works like Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide, and James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword.1Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
The story they tell is of a doctrine that led to centuries of persecution and to Jews being treated as a pariah people. Reading Jules Isaac’s work led to a profound metanoia or change of heart on the part of Pope John XXIII, which led ultimately to the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the declaration Nostra Aetate, which transformed relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews.
I tell the story only because, as we will see, it has been transformed in our time into a narrative of hope. It belongs here because one of the key sources of the untenability of the doctrine appears in this parasha, in perhaps the darkest passage of the entire Torah, the curses of Parashat Beḥukkotai. Here in the starkest possible terms are set out the consequences of the choices the people Israel must make throughout history. If they stay faithful to God they will be blessed. But if they are faithless the result will be defeat, devastation, destruction, and despair. The rhetoric is relentless, the warning unmistakable, the vision terrifying. Yet at the end come these utterly unexpected lines:
Yes in spite of this, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break My covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God. But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the heathen, that I might be their God: I am the Lord. (Lev. 26:44–45)
This is an absolutely fundamental statement. It is the foundation on which Judaism rests. It says that though the people may be faithless to God, God will never be faithless to the people. He may punish them but He will not abandon them. He may judge them harshly but He will not forget their ancestors who followed Him, nor will He break the covenant He made with our ancestors. God does not break His promises even if we break ours. “I the Lord do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed” (Mal. 3:6).
There were moments of crisis when Jews feared that all was lost. The Talmud describes a conversation between the Jewish exiles in Babylon and a prophet:
Samuel said: Ten men came and sat down before the prophet. He told them, “Return and repent.” They replied, “If a master sells his slave, or a husband divorces his wife, has one a claim upon the other?” Then the Holy One, Blessed Be He, said to the prophet, “Go and say to them: Thus says the Lord, ‘Where is your mother’s certificate of divorce with which I sent her away? Or to which of My creditors did I sell you? Because of your sins you were sold; because of your transgressions your mother was sent away.’”2Isaiah 50:1; Sanhedrin 105a.
The Talmud places in the mouths of the exiles an argument that would later be repeated by Spinoza,3Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, part I, chap. 3. that the very fact of exile terminated the covenant between God and the Jewish people. God had rescued them from Egypt and thereby become their only sovereign, their king. But now, having allowed them to suffer exile, He had abandoned them. The result was that they were under the rule of another king, the ruler of Babylon. It was as if He had sold them to another master, or as if Israel were a wife God had divorced. Having sold or divorced them, God could have no further claim on them.
It is precisely this that the verse in Isaiah – “Where is your mother’s certificate of divorce with which I sent her away? Or to which of My creditors did I sell you?” – denies. God has not divorced, sold, or abandoned His people. That too is the meaning of the great prophecy in Jeremiah:
This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar – the Lord Almighty is His name: “Only if these decrees vanish from My sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease to be a nation before Me.” This is what the Lord says: “Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done,” declares the Lord. (Jer. 31:34–36)
Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s prophecies are in turn based on the promise at the end of the curses of Parashat Beḥukkotai: “Yet in spite of this, when they be in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away…nor break My covenant with them: for I am the Lord their God.” God may send His people into exile but they remain His people, and He will bring them back.
This is not an isolated verse. A careful examination of the Torah as a whole reveals an underlying principle, namely the rejection of rejection. At first, God rejects humanity, saving only Noah, when He sees the world full of violence. Yet after the Flood He vows: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done” (Gen. 8:21). That is the first rejection of rejection.
Then come a series of sibling rivalries. The covenant passes through Isaac not Ishmael, Jacob not Esau. But God sees Hagar and Ishmael’s tears. Evidently He hears Esau’s also, for He later commands, “Do not despise an Edomite [i.e., a descendant of Esau] because he is your brother” (Deut. 23:8). Finally God brings it about that Levi, one of the children Jacob curses on his deathbed – “Cursed be their anger, so fierce, and their fury, so cruel” (Gen. 49:6) – becomes the father of Israel’s spiritual leaders, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. From now on, all Israel are chosen. That is the second rejection of rejection.
Even when Israel suffer exile and find themselves “in the land of their enemies,” they will remain the children of God’s covenant, which He will not break because God does not abandon His people. They may be faithless to Him. He will not be faithless to them. That is the third rejection of rejection, stated in this parasha, reiterated by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The God of Abraham keeps His promises.
Thus the claim on which Replacement or Supersessionist theology is based – that God rejects His people because they rejected Him – is unthinkable in terms of Abrahamic monotheism. God keeps His word even if others break theirs. God does not, will not, abandon His people. The covenant with Abraham, given content at Mount Sinai, and renewed at every critical juncture in Israel’s history since, is still in force, undiminished, unqualified, unbreakable.
I have told this story because of what has happened to the Catholic Church after Pope John XIII met Jules Isaac and realised the historic depth and tragic consequences of the Adversus Judaeos (“Against the Jews”) tradition within the early church. Having set in motion the historic change in the Church’s relationship with the Jews, codified in the Nostra Aetate declaration (1965), his precedent was followed by Pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI. On September 12, 2013, Pope Francis took the reconsideration further still. In an open letter to the editor of an Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, he wrote: “God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed, and…through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God. And for this we shall never be sufficiently grateful to them as a Church but also as humanity.”
In November 2013, in the course of the declaration Evangelii Gaudium, he wrote that “the friendship that has grown” between Jews and Christians “makes us bitterly and sincerely regret the terrible persecutions which they have endured and continue to endure, especially those that have involved Christians.” The Catholic Church, he added, holds “the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked.”
That truth, denied by many within the Church over the course of centuries, has now been firmly acknowledged by Pope Francis in one of the great transformations in religious history. God’s promise through Moses and the prophets that His covenant with the Jewish people would never be revoked remains true and is now seen to be so not only by Jews but also by the head of the Catholic Church. The Old Testament is not old. God’s relationship with the Jewish people is still alive, still strong. Acknowledgement of this fact has changed the relationship between Christians and Jews and helped begin to wipe away many centuries of tears.