Sri Lanka and Paris

Passover and Easter are unrelated festivals that derive from different traditions, but that’s not how it seems to many in the Christian world. That most of the world calls Easter by a name related to Pesach (cf. French “Pâques” or Danish “Påske”) is part of it. As surely also is the assumption, widely believed yet almost definitely not historically correct, that the Last Supper described in the Gospels was a Passover seder or some version of a seder. (For an exhaustive consideration of every aspect of that issue, which apparently remains a delicate one even today in some circles, click here.) Even the use of the word “passion” to describe the suffering of Jesus provided some fuel for this particular fire, at least in antiquity, since the Greek word for “to suffer,” pascho, is phonically almost identical to Pascha, the name for Passover in the spoken Aramaic of ancient Jewish times.

Given the proximity of the festivals this year and in light of the above, I would like to write this week specifically about two events that have befallen the Christian world just recently and explain how they appear to someone reading the news through Jewish eyeglasses.

First, Sri Lanka. The numbers keep rising. First, “more than 100” dead, then “more than 200,” now, as I write on Wednesday, a minimal figure of 321—minimal in the sense that many of those hurt in the explosions—more than 500 in their own right—are not expected to survive and only haven’t succumbed to their wounds yet. It’s far away. It’s not a country Americans think of daily. No one on the radio, including the BBC World Service, seems to know whether the first word in the country’s name is pronounced “shree,” or “sree.”  (In all fairness to the Brits, when they seized the place and unilaterally made it part of their empire, they called it Ceylon, which name everybody knew how to pronounce.) And yet…the sense of familiarity and shared humanity that incidents like this bring in their terrible wake seemed to overwhelm the rest of the details. Most Americans, I’m sure, couldn’t even say easily what language they speak in Sri Lanka or what the capital city is, let alone whether a majority of the citizens are Buddhist, Hindu, or something else entirely. Indeed, it felt at first like a terribly bad thing that had happened to other people. But then, just as the extent of the carnage was becoming known came the even more startling detail that the attacks on the three churches and four hotels were apparently planned as a kind of response to the assault on the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the course of which fifty Muslim worshipers were murdered. And with that single detail everything changed.

The single ideational concept that justifies terrorism in the mind of the terrorist is the ultimate fungibility of human life. Since I’ve been dealing in SAT words these last few weeks, I’ll add another: fungibility is the principle according to which things are deemed solely to have ascribed, not intrinsic, value. Paper money is the easiest example to seize: if I lend you five dollars on Monday and you come back on Tuesday to return the five dollars to me, I can’t sue you in court because the five-dollar bill you returned to me is not the same five-dollar bill I lent to you. But this is not so because it would make no sense to borrow money you were not planning to spend. It’s true because money in our culture is deemed fully fungible and, as a result, the paper bills we use as currency are supposed to have as their sole value the sum they represent, the sum ascribed to them by law. As a result every single five-dollar bill is deemed the equivalent of every other one and you can’t complain if you deposit a fiver in the bank one day and then receive a different bill from the bank the next day when you show up to withdraw your money.

This principle also applies to the eggs you borrow from a neighbor or the cup of sugar, but ethical people would never apply it to human life. To justify terror, however, is to do exactly that and willingly to ignore the fact that none of those people in church on Easter morning in Sri Lanka was responsible for the massacre in New Zealand and thus to feel justified in opening fire because you consider Christians to be as fungible as five-dollar bills and the shooter in Christchurch was presumed at least in some sense to have been a Christian. And that underlying notion makes it a humanitarian issue, not a Sri Lankan one or even a Christian one. This perverse line of logic is not unknown to Americans and it is certainly not unknown to Israelis: when someone is irritated by some or another Israeli policy and chooses to express that pique by blowing up a discotheque despite the fact that none of the young people on the dance floor was responsible for the policy in question—that too is an example of treating human life fungibly.

As a result, attempting to wave away events like this weekend’s horror in Sri Lanka as nothing more than the violent crime of an insane person is to miss the point: if the government is right to consider credible the statement by the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency tying the Sri Lankan bombings to the shooting in Christchurch, then the principled effort to eradicate terrorist groups and to banish their nation-state sponsors from the forum of nations is not only a practical response, but a deeply moral one. There are, of course, crazy people in the world who do crazy things. We Americans have had lots of examples of that in these last several decades! But terror is not craziness at all: by resting on the ideational foundation that considers all human life truly to be fungible and thus devoid of intrinsic value, terrorism comes to represent the ultimate devaluation of God’s greatest gift. As we approach the end of Passover and prepare to commemorate the destruction of Pharaoh’s armies in the sea, we should all take a moment to reflect on a deep, if unsettling, scriptural truth: violence undertaken to dominate or to oppress is wrong and fully sinful, but acting forcefully to combat evil is both ethically justifiable and, speaking morally, wholly right. Americans know this. Israelis certainly know it and so do New Zealanders. And now Sri Lankans have had the same lesson brutally brought to their own doorstep.

I brought a whole different set of emotions to my contemplation of the fire that destroyed such a significant part of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. It is, arguably, one of the most stunning pieces of Gothic architecture in the world and is surely one of the world’s truly great cathedrals. It took a hundred years to build. (Work was undertaken in 1160, but the project only drew to its conclusion a full century later in 1260.) There’s no reason for that specific detail to confound—work on St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue began in 1892 and the project still isn’t anywhere near finished—yet it somehow feels challenging nevertheless to think of a project spanning that much time and involving that many people. And all of it happening so long ago, and in an age without power tools, bulldozers, or electricity! For Jewish onlookers, on the other hand, the cathedral shimmers in a slightly different light.

For the Jews of France, the twelfth century was a terrible time. When work on the cathedral was still in its third decade, King Philip II expelled the Jews of France from his territory, apparently without the slightest interest in knowing or caring where they went once they left. When work on the cathedral was about halfway done, a council convened by Pope Innocent III—called the Third Lateran Council because it met at Rome’s Lateran Palace—disqualified Jews across Europe from holding public office, required Jews (and Muslims too) to wear distinctive dress so that they could not be mistaken in the street for Christians, and banned Jews from almost every profitable profession except pawnbroking and the sale of old clothes. But it wasn’t solely their economic lives that were under attack, but their intellectual lives as well: on March 3, 1240, when Notre Dame was a mere twenty years away from completion, church officials burst into synagogues across France—March 3 was a Shabbat in 1240—and carted off entire Jewish libraries. Eventually the king of France, Louis IX—who is recognized as a saint both in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and who is the St. Louis after whom the city in Missouri is named—insisted that the Talmud itself be put on trial. The ancient work was defended by a quartet of able rabbis, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion and then, on a day that lives on in infamy as one of the pre-Shoah world’s most outrageous acts of violent anti-Semitism, twenty-four cartloads of books—some 10,000 volumes, including irreplaceable works that would be considered of inestimable value today—all twenty-four cartloads of books were burnt in public on the Place de Grève, now called the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, just across the river from…Notre Dame de Paris.

Notre Dame itself features one of the most hateful of all anti-Semitic symbols on its front façade, where are depicted Synagoga and Ecclesia (“Church”) as a pair of very different women, the one (Synagoga, of course) dressed in rags, a snake covering her eyes, a broken scepter in her hand, and the tablets of the law slipping from her grasp, and the other, Ecclesia, depicted as a proud, attractive woman standing fully erect while carrying a wine chalice in one hand and a staff with a cross at its top in the other. The insult couldn’t be more clearly put. Nor has it lost its punch over the centuries: even though the statues were destroyed during the Revolution, they were both were restored and replaced during the nineteenth century. They’re still there too, inviting any eagle-eyed visitor to learn the lesson they were set in place to teach: that Judaism is defunct, dead, and disgraced, whereas Christianity is triumphantly and gloriously dominant.

So when I look at Notre Dame and feel the same pang of regret all civilized people surely do when a world-class work of architecture is damaged, I also recall the world that gave birth to Notre Dame and its harshness, its cruelty, its violence and its deeply engrained prejudice against Jews and against Judaism. And I think of poor Synagoga as well, and wonder what she would have to say if she were somehow able to shove the serpent aside and open her stony eyes onto the world. Would the fact that she’s still on display all these centuries later surprise her? And what would she have to say to the thirteen million visitors who walk by her on their way into France’s most famous cathedral? Would the resurgence of anti-Semitism in France surprise her? Would the existence of an independent Israel? Would anything? Those are the questions that the fire at Notre Dame prompts me to ponder on these coming final days of Pesach.