K-253 Latent Anti-Semitism (1 of 2) — Art Katz

Precious God, so we bless you, and we sense that we are on, at a threshold, Lord. We've not been this way here too far. There's something that you're wanting to impart, to express, to bring your church to a new sense of awareness, of consciousness, in what is preparation for our ultimate call, to be the saviors of Israel in the last days, so to speak.

And it requires, my God, an extraordinary empathy toward this people, who will not be in their best frame. Everything that would be calculated to rub us raw, and to make us to recoil from them, they themselves will bear in their distress.

So we know, my God, that the issue is not them, it's us. What we will be in that hour, how we will receive them, how we will respond, what they will see in us, will be not only the issue of their survival, but the issue of their salvation.

Israel's Remnant and the Church's Preparation

That among them, there will be a remnant that will return to Zion, with everlasting joy upon their heads, and mourning and sighing, fleeing away. They will say that their whole final exile, being the outcasts of Judah, and the cast away of Israel, was worthwhile.

Like the blind beggar, it was worthwhile they had regained their sight, to follow you. So my God, work with us, work in us, and bring forth, in this precious congregation, what you will. We thank you, Lord, for the privilege of this time.

Again, we confess, we don't know how to proceed. You overrule anything, Lord, that I thought to employ, and have your precious way as the Lord over all. Our ears are tuned to hear, Lord, what you're saying.

Speak for your servants are hearing, and we thank and give you praise again for our privilege, and our call, in Jesus' name, amen. Well, I'm going to read some, Lord willing, something from the messages given at Canada, that began by a statement that after 38 years in the faith, I am persuaded that anti-Jewishness is intrinsic to all Gentiles, that there's a latent anti-Semitism resident in all Gentiles.

It's just the name of the game. It's the very nature of the truth, of what it means to be a Gentile, to have in our midst a people of a kind that chafe us, and are different, and excite every kind of reaction toward them, being different from them, and other.

It's the name of the game. It's intrinsic. It's built into reality itself, and the only thing that can alter that is the grace of God, the Spirit of God, the converting power of God, the sanctifying work of God.

Where that work is yet incomplete, or partial, or has been resisted, even in believers, even in Spirit-filled believers, something of this latent disposition against the Jew remains. And many of us would be shocked to be accused of either being anti-Semitic or even having the potential, because we're not conscious of any rage or inflammatory thing.

We would never say anything that is indecent, but there are other ways in which this disposition is expressed, and until it's met in full, we cannot be to them what we ought, nor can we be a bride to the bridegroom.

The two issues are one, and may the Lord show us that, and that in fact it is even the Jew in God's provision for us to obtain our status as a bride to the bridegroom. I want to flat out say that I'm coming to the conclusion, and I'll probably be sharing it in these days, that the Jew is God's provision for our ultimate sanctification, that there's no way that we could have attained to a bridal nature, adorned for the bridegroom, independent of the work, the sanctifying work that comes to us in that relationship with this most, what's the word, most something people, most fill it in, inflammatory, most provocative, most abusive, most offensive, most arrogant, abrasive, yeah, they are that condition for our sake, they are the enemies of the gospel, Paul says, for your sake.

Have you ever pondered that? Who needs an enemy like that? They are an ultimate enemy, as you can only know when you seek to confront them with the gospel. If you have avoided that mandate, which is a first mandate to the Jew first, and then to the Greek, you don't know the radical character of the gospel itself, until you see men foaming at the mouth with indignation and rage, and your audacity to presume to say to them that they need, quote, to be saved.

Saved from what? They're not even conscious of their sin. They see themselves as exemplary, and by every human measure they are. Didn't they win the B 'nai B 'rith Man of the Year Award? And haven't they contributed philanthropies, not only to Israel, but to Gentile causes?

Didn't the head of a big publishing firm in San Francisco, when I went up to his tower office in the hotel which he owns, want to bribe me and say, what do you want? You know, how can I, do you want a contribution to your ministry?

Is that what you're angling for? I said, no. I only want to tell you that your philanthropy is not going to earn you an eternal place in God. There's everything about them calculated for us, and they don't even know that.

It's like the wife who has to suffer living with a prophetic man who happens also to be Jewish, not realizing that that suffering is intrinsic to the differences between us, and has to be born. Even though being a Gentile, she doesn't understand the prophetic wisdom of it.

You understand what I'm saying? Okay, that's the mystery of Israel and the church. Let me read how difficult the relationship with the Jew is. You can read Michael Brown's book on Their Blood is on Our Hands.

That's a classic survey of all of the miscarriage of justice, of murder, mayhem, bloodshed, forced conversions, of which the church today has little consciousness. And even if Jews do not know the particulars of that history, they know the substance of it, and they still carry it generation by generation.

The cross, the name Christ, the very appearance of a church. I often say a Jew will avoid allowing the shadow of the spire of a church even to fall upon him. You know that there's some Orthodox Jews who will spit when passing a church, because what is represented by that cross is not the statement of atonement, but the statement of mayhem, persecution, and murder.

That's what the Crusaders had on their chest, and the so-called Christians of the pogroms of the Ukraine and Russia, the seasons of persecution have always been identified with that which is called Christian.

In a word, we have every card stacked against us. When we are called to break through into a new quality of relationship with this people, for our sake and for their sake, well, everything is stacked against us.

Historically, and in their understanding, as will be expressed in this quote, of those who want no dealings with Christians at all. And Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz, whose name I know, an outstanding theologian, Jewish theologian, very respected, Orthodox, says, what was started at the Council of Nicaea, that was under Constantine, in which the rudiments of the faith were clarified and elaborated, was duly completed in the concentration camps and crematoria.

At this stage, he said, it would be as immoral as it would be emotionally impossible for a sensitive, historically conscious Jew to have anything to do with Christians at all. All we want of you Christians is that you keep your hands off of us and our children.

If that doesn't let the air out of your balloon, I don't know what will. And the writer says, these words are hard to hear and hard to bear, but hear and bear them we must, for I think for some time to come.

So history has done a number that will be enormously difficult to overcome. Here's another statement by Rabbi Abraham Herschel, whose two volumes on the prophets are classic, and whom I had the privilege to meet years ago when I was being trained in New York City as a missionary to the Jews.

Probably one of the most, if I should say, sympathetic to Christ of any of the significant Jewish voices. He's now passed on. He said, I had rather enter Auschwitz than be an object of conversion. I've heard Jewish mothers say to me, I'd rather see my son go to hell as a drug addict than he should subscribe to your faith.

There's no way to plumb the depth of the animosity against the faith that is dear to us and repulsive to them. It's going to take an extraordinary stroke from God and not just a one-time thing, a remarkable dealing of God with us to fit us somehow, despite all of the historic and present difficulties, to establish even a minimal line of communication.

Maybe we will be helped by the fact that as anti-Semitism becomes increasingly prevalent throughout the world, Jews will be so desperate for any kind of ally that they're willing even to consider us in our friendship.

We'll have to show ourselves friendly and not in any way inadvertently be clumsy and express something that will immediately trigger a reaction against us. So it's a real measure of the grace of God with us and in us.

And for that reason, we're afraid to enter their synagogues. We're afraid to establish contact. We don't know how to speak to them. We're walking on eggshells. And more than a Jew being turned off by anything that issues from Christians, are you saved, brother, they will be more turned off by what is obsequious and condescending toward them.

Excuse my language. That which is stilted and making nice. Oh, I've always loved Jews. And Jews are my, I have a Jew who's my best friend. And that is really icky. It turns them off more than just a blunt anti-Semitic statement.

They would have more ability and patience to hear a man who's true in his prejudice than to hear someone condescending and making nice. Well, Art, then how do we strike the balance? How do we deport ourselves?

The Gospel to the Jew First

Well, there's no rule. There's no way how to. It's the truth of what you are in Christ that's at stake. For he has made unto us wisdom, sanctification, redemption, and power. And you've never been tested on the truth of that in the ultimate test that the Jew represents.

And that's why we're slack. So I'm encouraging the church to make its contact with the Jews of its own locality who are positioned there for our sake. The Lord has seen to their wide distribution in the judgment that has come to them that has cast them into all nations and will increasingly cast them.

But they're there where we are. And we will be tested to see if we are taking the Lord seriously in the mandate that has come to the church to the Jew first. And also to the Greek. And because we have voided that mandate and have avoided that people knowing that they constitute such an ultimate challenge to us, we have not been to the Greeks what we ought.

Well, had we gone to the Jew first of necessity, we would have had to learn what Paul knew that this gospel is the power of God unto salvation to the Jew first. The message itself does not commend it intellectually.

It is not respectable. It is not rational. It is absurd. Actually, it's a piece of foolishness. And it's a calculated piece of foolishness that God has laid aside his deity, come down to earth as an infant, totally dependent, doing doodoo in his diapers like us to take upon the humiliation of a human form.

And to live 30 years in obscurity and have a shot in the pan, three and a half year public ministry that will end with his excruciating death as a criminal outside of the city in the garbage dump between criminals.

And that's our Messiah, our King. Rightly was he mocked in three languages with the sign over his head, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, ha, ha, ha, and taught it and mocked even in his suffering unto death.

This is so despicable. This is so outlandish. This is so uncommendable. How do you dare have the presumption and the arrogance to come to a Jew with that message whose moral life is more exemplary than your own and whose English and education and erudition is more impressive than your own.

You're going to come to him with your high school dropout English and your inadequate spirituality and bring a message of that kind? It's suicide. It's intimidation. It's mortification. And for that reason, we have resisted it.

But you know what we have signaled to the powers of the air overhead? These people say, Lord, Lord, and their choruses are full of adoring phrases with regard to Jesus and the Lord. But when the rubber hits the road and the Lord gives a mandate to the Jew first, we have not obeyed it.

That's why the powers of the air say, Jesus we know and Paul we know, but who are you? We're not obliged in any way to take you seriously so long as we see that the language of the faith is only a phraseological thing, because when it comes to the issue of actual obedience to the Lord, you have failed and you continue to fail.

And you're not even at all in any way distressed over that failure. So how should we take you seriously? See, there's a great drama, you guys. This is cosmic. And the Jew is at the heart of it. And the Lord in his wisdom has established the whole thing.

Have the faith of the Son of God, for he believes and knows that he will yet prevail, even with a church of the kind that we are. Can you believe? In fact, he must prevail with the kind of church that we are, for that itself is the wisdom of God that is contrary to the wisdom of the powers of the air.

But out of the mouths of babes and sucklings has he perfected praise. It must come out of the makeshift, motley, nothing composition that the church is, that is not prestigious as the Jewish community is, that is not as learned, that is not as powerful, that is not as wealthy, that that the triumph of Christ must come as it was displayed at the cross in foolishness and in weakness.

There's a drama, you guys. I don't have a word for it. A saga. It's an immense, overwhelming thing. And it ends the age when that foolish thing in which God has trusted and given his spirit and his word and his ministers, his prophets and his apostles, his evangelists, pastors and teachers, that they will be brought to the place of an obedience and a fulfillment by which Israel shall be redeemed and the church transfigured and to be raised up in a glorified body to be with its Lord as bride to the bridegroom and everlasting righteousness in a new heaven and a new earth.

Well, to contrast the two Jews that I've just read, where a man would rather go to Auschwitz than to be converted. And imagine I was brought up to meet that man. I don't know that I even said boo. Precious, weighty, prestigious man.

Scholar. You read the prophets and see if you can follow him in Greek and Latin and French and German and all of the quotes that he cites, the breadth of his understanding is astonishing, as well as his insight into prophetic phenomenon itself.

So I was a piece of foolishness against the Jew who represents what Jews themselves celebrate, the wisdom of this world. Here's a statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Everybody know who he is, was who died a week before the end of World War Two, hung by the Nazis.

For his collaboration with a plot to assassinate Hitler, who could have remained in New York. Or in London or other places of safety, but came back to Germany. Because he felt that unless he was with his own nation and church in that nation in the time of ultimate Nazi peril, how can he be to that nation after the war?

What he might, but he never made it. But what he wrote and what he what he learned in those days is one of the great contributions to the church. If you've not read the book Life Together, it's a classic that must be in every believer's library and more on the library right on their nightstand and continually being read and internalized and walked out.

Here's what he wrote when he was in a prison cell in 1943 before his death. My thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like the Hebrew scriptures. And no wonder I have been reading it much more than the new for the last few months.

It is only when one knows the ineffability of the name of God, ineffable means cannot be spoken. That one can utter the name of Jesus Christ, a remarkable statement for a German Christian. So much in keeping with my own painful early time as a newly saved Jewish man in my Pentecostal assembly in California, hearing the name of Jesus on everyone's lips.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Lord. I had not come out of an out of an orthodox background that refuses even to spell the word God, G-O-D, but omits the O and puts a hyphen as a statement of respect for God.

That's why the Orthodox use the word Hashem, the name, because you don't speak the name, you just refer to the name. Only the high priest once in the year on Yom Kippur could speak the name known only to him by mystery and revelation when he made atonement for the sins of Israel.

Otherwise, who knows how to say Yod-Heh-Vov-Heh, the four consonants called the Tetragamaton. It could be pronounced as Yahweh, Jehovah. What is the authentic pronunciation? I don't know. And they don't know.

And in a certain sense, they don't think it's even rightful to know or to probe beyond what God himself would reveal. But we Christians, Jesus, Jesus, Lord, Lord, Yahweh, God, God, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So what is he saying here? He finds himself in his prison cell. I don't think that that should be ignored. There's something about prison cells, waiting execution, that prepares a soul for a depth of understanding of God, of eternity, and of ultimate issues of truth and reality that nothing else will provide.

There's not been a Christian who has ever been put into a cell who has not received the benefit. You have only to read Richard von Braun's testimony that he cherishes his 13 years in solitary confinement.

He would not exchange it for anything. For the revelation that came to him in that place where it's cut off even from daylight and for communion and fellowship with human beings, that he received at that time such a sense of the Lord as the Lord for which there could be no price.

And he, not at all seasoned, does not see himself as a victim, but as a privileged man for that experience. And everything that issued from him after that has continued in Leicester Church. So here's another soon-to-be martyr speaking out of his prison cell in 1943.

My thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like the Hebrew Scriptures. I have been reading it much more than the New for the last few months, and he was a New Testament scholar. It is only when one knows the ineffability of the name of God, when you know that it cannot be uttered.

It's too holy to take to your lips that one can utter the name of Jesus Christ. Don't utter, don't merchandise in that name as if it's a reflex action and you can speak it at will, unless you have first experienced a sense of the ineffability of the name of God.

The one tempers the other. The Old Testament exposure tempers your understanding of the New. But to avoid the Old Testament is to leave yourself crippled in the appreciation of the New. So there's a remarkable, there's something about shooting a cracking gun.

It is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in the resurrection and the new world. That's a remarkable statement. Here's a man imprisoned, facing impending death, when one loves life and the earth.

Have you noticed in the Old Testament and in the Psalms, the remarkable and frequent references to God as creator? I always wondered, why is that always being put before us in the Psalms? We're always being reminded of God as creator, of the heavens and the earth and all that in them is, is part of the great sense of the majesty and the splendor of God that is breathed out of the Old Testament scriptures that does not have as much place in the New because the New serves other purposes.

The New presumes that you are as familiar with the Old and therefore it's not a competition or a rivalry, but there's a certain breadth of the grandeur of God that is given to us in the Psalms and in the prophets and other places, even in the law itself of Moses, that is not to be found in the New.

God forbid that you should have neglected that and come to the New as if the original is passé and you can get everything that you need out of the New exclusively. It's one unbroken continuum and it needs to be understood and that's what he's seeing in the prison cell.

It's the sense of God as creator, the whole majesty of the earth and the significance of life, the sacrament of life, the wholeness of life that I can believe in resurrection and a new world. Did he not believe it before?

Being a New Testament scholar and a pastor and of course he believed it, but the depth of that belief has been enhanced by his prison experience in which he finds that there's a solace and a comfort and an impartation of a certain kind that is coming to him now increasingly out of the Old Testament.

So here it is side by side in the same book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer saying that and the Jewish commentator saying quite the opposite and somehow we are suspended betwixt and between. Well let me try to summarize what the Lord gave me to begin in Canada.

Jewish Community, Synagogue Life, and Christian Community

The third message that concluded that was so controversial, I'll save for the end, but let me give it to you as it began. Remembering that the Lord had given me the experience of visiting a synagogue in Spokane and what an experience that was.

I don't know that I can call it holy, but it was a sense of Jewish life, Jewish community, Jewish respect, Jewish feast days, something that we lack in our own experience and I coveted. That we would have photographs on our hallway walls that show the unbroken continuum of our faith and our relationships of people who have stayed together and that their children are not only bar mitzvahed there, they're subsequently married there.

If it goes on long enough, they'll yet be buried. There's, you need to go to Brooklyn and visit the Hasidim, the Lubavitcher Hasidim, the ultra-Orthodox who have moved out from their Long Island dwellings and other places of luxury and comfort to move into a black ghetto.

Why? Because that's where their synagogue is and you can only walk to the synagogue on the Shabbat, you cannot drive. To drive would be to work and in fact, if even the walk is too long, you have somehow violated the Shabbat.

I'm not saying that to endorse such views, I'm saying that to show the mentality of this people who are willing to sacrifice a life of comfort and seclusion in the suburbs to come into a ghetto. Why? Because there are available the brownstone houses and dilapidated tenement buildings that are cheap and can be bought.

Because for them, the issue of proximity to each other and the place of worship is more important than suburban comfort. That puts us to shame. It's like my sharing about community and the privilege of morning prayer times, which for me are more dear than I can say that if I travel, the thing that I miss most are the morning prayer times.

No two have ever been alike, always choice, always something from the Lord, always precious. And a brother would come up to me after and say, Art, I really delight. I would love to enjoy what you're describing, but I live so far out that there's no way that I could meet with believers with whom I'm joined on Sunday for a morning prayer time.

What do you recommend, Art? Move. Give up your little nest. What's the more important value? Your suburban lifestyle or proximity to the saints that you can be in the place of prayer daily. These Jews put us to shame in that kind of zeal that accounts for their sacrifice.

Something to pray about, the Lord has given me a 30-year relationship and a history. I've been in that community in and out. In fact, I had a previous invitation to spend three months with them that never materialized, but it's still a live option.

So pray for that as they're in Brooklyn also that the Lord will call for that. Okay, now I'm coming from this. The Lord's stirring my heart about the synagogue, the Jewish life, what is represented there, and it's isolation from the church and from Christians.

And my first statement that I make to this conference in Canada is anti-Jewishness is intrinsic to all Gentiles by the very nature of things. You need to recognize that in your deeps, unless the sanctifying work of God and the cross has met it, it's latent and there.

In fact, by the end, what was latent surfaced. So this is a kind of lecture, which of which I was accused of lacking anointing and the deepest circumcision of the heart, because I'm giving reasons why it is that it's in the nature of all things that Gentiles would harbor, have as intrinsic and anti-Jewishness.

Because Jews themselves are exclusive and we are always offended by those who are separate from ourselves and want to maintain that separation. It makes you question about yourself. What do they find offensive in us?

Right away, your furrow is up. Jewish exclusiveness, of course, came out of being separate and come out from the Canaanite culture, civilization and religion and keep kosher, keep a sanctity to be separate.

What God wanted to maintain and the integrity of Israel hardened into a kind of system officiated over by rabbis and elaborated in a rabbinical way to become an isolation from the Gentile world rather than a witness.

So much so that Peter himself would never have responded to the invitation from that Roman Cornelius, except he first had a vision. He had to have a, what was it? It was more than a dream. It was a trance in which he saw a sheep coming down with unclean animals and God saying, Peter, take and eat.

But Lord, you know that I've never eaten anything unclean. The problem for those who wanted to hasten the execution of Jesus was the requirement to come into the court of Gentiles where Pontius Pilate presided and not be themselves, desecrate themselves before the holiday of the Passover.

He meant they were fastidious to keep themselves inviolate from coming into the presence of a Gentile in order to affect Jesus's death, but did not think that the death itself was a violation. So much for pharisaical, not just pharisaical Judaism, but pharisaical religion.

So Jewish exclusiveness, Gentile envy, imagined or real, the social, cultural and economic superiority of Jews that is visible, works as a factor to inculcate a kind of antipathy toward Jews. Who of us can sit in a classroom with some Jewish students who get straight A's without a beat of sweat and we're breaking our heads to pass?

What is it? What do they have? If you can bless them in their success, you're a superb saint. Otherwise you'll resent their success. And whether you're conscious of that or not, there's something that has taken place in the course of time that works to give us a disposition against them.

We need to recognize these things. And that's why the Lord had me to state them. They represent or depict the imagined wrathful God of the Old Testament as a God of judgment to be feared and Israel as the rod of God unto annihilation of the Canaanites.

I don't know if you've ever thought that. This has been an offense to even German theologians and who's the one German philosopher, I think he died as a suicide, who was anti-Jewish, somebody help me, Nietzsche, Nietzsche hated the Old Testament, did this like Paul and he thought that even Christianity was too Judaic because it entreated believers to the walk of humility rather than an assertion of our manhood in a heroic way.

His model was Greek, not Hebraic, and was offended even by a Christianity that seemed to suggest a Hebrew influence. But these men in reading the Old Testament, reading how God used Israel out of slavery and out of its 40 years of wilderness to excise out these Canaanite civilizations and leave not a man, woman, or child and to actually extinguish these corrupt civilizations strikes a note of fear that these Jews are still with us and have the same enmity now for us as they had once carried against the Gentiles of Canaan.

They may seem to be acting civilly, that's only because they're weak and because they're in the minority, but given the opportunity they would say to us off with their heads. Now that may be more real than imagined, but at any rate it's a fear and a negative note that keeps Gentiles looking at Jews with a degree of suspicion, apprehension, and fear just from the Old Testament text.

Even though the present day Jewhood has no correspondence to that at all, it's a factor that needs to be recognized. The Jewish superiority over the Gentile, the word goyim, which means g-o-y-i-m, literally the Hebrew for nations, any nation other than Israel are the nations of the goyim, but when it's spoken by a Jew there's a little tincture, if not little, of contempt and disdain.

There's a sense of Jewish superiority that we have exhibited that rubs the Gentile the wrong way. Their rejection of Christ, 2 ,000 years later still rejecting Christ, and Christianity raises the question of whether or not they are right in that rejection, and maybe we are wrong.

Their continued resistance to the truth of our faith raises questions as to the absoluteness of that faith. Can we have that confidence? How is it that they have been able to live that long and survive, yet being in unbelief and in Christ rejection?

And prospering. Doesn't that raise the question that maybe we got it wrong? And I want to tell you that from my experience at a Lutheran seminary, this is now being openly expressed that the Jews may have it right, and we need to consider whether in fact Christ really is the Messiah, because as they say, if he came, where's the world peace that Messiah should have brought?

We know that those questions can be answered, but they are troubling questions, and for those that are weak in their faith, or only nominal Christians, it can rattle their cage and make them resistant and hostile toward Jews who seem to live quite successfully without our Christ.

It raises the question of the truth of the absoluteness of our faith, and for those that are weak in their faith or nominal in their faith, as I'm saying, it could be a point of antagonism. This was Luther's concern, and incited Luther to his ultimate powerful anti-Semitism, that the Jews and the Talmud contained references to Jesus of a kind that were not only uncomplimentary but blasphemous.

They have since been removed. But at that time, no Jew ever thought that a Gentile would be looking into their Talmud. But what happened in the Age of Enlightenment, about the time of Luther, was that many men were now studying Hebrew, and were able themselves to read directly into the Jewish sources and see these anti-Christ references that have since been expunged.

For example, how could Jesus be born with an immaculate conception to a virgin? That's patent foolishness. Nothing in life or nature or reality can in any way sustain that. So the only way that reasonable men can explain such a birth and conception is that it must be illegitimate.

And so the name Jesus was not used in the Talmud, but a name that the rabbis coined, and another name for Miriam as the one who bore him, making clear allusion that they understood that birth to be a piece of illegitimacy.

And that the Christians had been duped to believe that that was some kind of hokey, no-hands miracle of a, what's the word that was just used? Immaculate conception. Not knowing their own scripture, that unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

That's the conclusion to which rational men will come when they themselves do not see the evidence in the Gentiles around them of the reality as to the truth of that birth. So Luther saw the Jewish community as a dangerous threat to the Reformation.

For even in their silence, they were making a testimony that they did not subscribe to the truth of the virgin birth of Jesus, and that the only alternative to that would be then to believe that he was illegitimate.

Can you see the tension? That's why Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He knew that when we missed the day of our visitation and our peace, that this would necessarily follow. The destruction of our temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the casting out into the nations of this Jewish people who would always be an awkward, untoward presence in their Gentile midst, and would always excite envy, resentment, bitterness, suspicion, and bring upon their heads periodically, particularly in the Easter season, when the cry of Christ's killer would come, Jewish death.

You know, in the Middle Ages, Jews were compelled to attend debates between the local priest and the rabbi over the issue of the truth of Christ. And if they dared fall asleep, they were poked with long poles to keep awake, that in the hearing of this debate, it would be straightened out for them.

You need to understand the, what's the word, invidious, unhappy position that they occupied, which was part of the judgment of the rejection of Christ himself, but nevertheless had to be born without explanation.

You know about the crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, exploiting and pillaging every Jewish community and group in order to provide through terror and intimidation the finances by which their expedition could be made.

In the town that I loved in Germany more than any other, Esslingen, that looks like it goes back to the Middle Ages to this day, and it's never been touched by either world war, cobblestone streets, the old Rathaus, the city hall.

The church in Esslingen was originally Catholic and is now Protestant, but it stands on the very place where the synagogue had stood that was burned to the ground. And in one of the episodes of the crusaders passing through, where the Jews for safety locked themselves in their synagogue and seeing that the crusaders brought the whole community to its death in flames.

So the fires of the Holocaust had an earlier inception in the Middle Ages, and Jews remember that. When you go to Esslingen now, and there's the literature of the tourist agency, of the bureaus, there's not a word about the history of Jews that goes back into the 12th century.

I only found it by accident that as a student after coming out of the army, there's a reference to Esslingen and what had taken place during the time of the crusades. And often the threat was convert or die.

What we're going to convert to this, this mock thing, this travesty, this sacrilege, this paganism that celebrates a woman and her child, which goes back to the pagan myths of earliest history, never.

We prefer death. How is that death affected? By the husband and father killing his own children, cutting the throat of his wife, and then taking his own life. That when the doors burst open and the raging Gentile Christian community came in, the whole Jewish community lay before them as dead.

This is the history. You don't sweep that under the carpet. It's alive in Jewish memory. And so how is God going to bridge that in the last days and bring some kind of communication between communities that have such a history of separation?