‘Krister Stendahl död,’ Sydsvenskan, Malmö, April 16, 2008.
Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director today in advance of our session for May. I’ve been writing these for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them. This month’s is more of a grab bag than usual, including fairly lengthy excerpts from items I’ve posted to Ordinary Time, but the very last item — which otherwise might get skipped over — is worth highlighting.
Antisemitism and unfounded accusations of antisemitism have become a political football in the runup to the Nov. 5 election, and inevitably the issue is being trivialized. One particularly telling exchange came about when the New York Times ran a story May 9 under the headline: “How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel”; and the New York Post fired back May 16 with ” The week in whoppers: WH press sec’y Karine Jean-Pierre fudges on Biden’s inflation lie, NY Times calls GOP the real antisemites and more.” In this climate of opinion I thought it important to go back to Swedish Lutheran theologian Krister Stendahl, dean of Harvard Divinity School, who said Christians in general and Lutherans in particular bear responsibility for 2,000 years of antisemitism that led up to the Holocaust. Stendahl died in 2008, so we don’t know what he would have said about today’s GOP performative anti-antisemitism. But with all the sound and fury, I felt compelled to go back and check out what he did say. I doubt he would be pleased with today’s political antics.
Hi Sister —
Just a brief note to: (a) confirm our Zoom appointment for 6 p.m. Monday; and (b) gather my thoughts for our conversation. I’m sure I’ve shared with you the quote from Flannery O’Connor, “I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.” O’Connor never stipulated who the old lady was, but it rings true to my experience! I haven’t done a lot of writing this month, so I’ll try to keep it short.
On the plus side, I’ve been spending more time playing the harmonica. I started back in Marcy, and I find I’m able to play quite a few of the shape-note folk hymns, ballads and fiddle tunes I did on the dulcimer. (And the harmonica doesn’t slide into my ostomy bag like the dulcimer did.) Now I think it’s a matter of practice, practice, practice to learn the instrument. The rest of the time, I’ve done a lot of — too much — doomscrolling on the internet and worrying about the news. But I do have a couple of blog posts to share.
One is a continuation of my meditation on the quote from Wallace Stevens that I found in a book by biblical scholar Elaine Pagels: “After the final no, there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.” As you’ll be able to see from my title/headline, I’m not done with it yet. At your suggestion, I looked into the poem — and, to my surprise, it took me back to grad student days. There’s more to the poem than I thought! But Pagels’ comments on the poem, especially in the context of her reading of the story of the empty tomb in Mark, spoke to me more directly. So I decided on a two-part series, wrote up the first part and promised a second on Pagels and the gospel of Mark (hence the headline’s implied promise, “1 of 2”).
The other two are concerned with antisemitism. I’ve been disturbed by the war in Gaza ever since Oct. 7 of last year, and, more lately, by the way accusations of antisemitism have been politicized to discredit “pro-Palestinian” student demonstrators — and “woke” university presidents — by lawmakers, many of whom are Republican and some of whom have their own flirtations with antisemitic rhetoric to answer for. The first is from a post on the US House bill redefining antisemitism to include criticism of Israel, a move opposed by Kenneth Stern, who wrote the working definition incorporated into the bill; toward the end, I waxed literary and nostalgic again, and discussed a story I still remember from grad school days. It’s “The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud; the post got pretty long, so if you’re reading it and want to skip down to the subhead that says “It’s complicated” at the end, I’ll forgive you.
The other is an excerpt from a post I titled “How a Swedish Lutheran theologian’s response to the Holocaust guides my attitude to performative ‘anti-antisemitism’ in an election year.” The headline tells you just about everything you need to know about my context. The theologian is Krister Stendahl of Harvard Divinity School, who once said Christians, especially his fellow Lutherans, have 2,000 years of vicious antisemitism, including some of Luther’s writing, to answer for. I worry that with all the politicking, we’re in danger of losing sight of the real tragedy of antisemitism.
I’m not entirely sure where grappling with this issue fits into my spiritual practice, but I think it does. I think it has to.
Unless I hear otherwise, I’ll see you Monday at 6. Looking forward to it.
— Pete
Here are the excerpts. The paragraphs in italics enclosed in brackets are my interpolations in the email. Excerpted material per se is in ordinary Roman type:
1. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/05/02/lit-crit/ ‘After the final no comes a yes’: An English major-y romp through Wallace Stevens and the empty tomb in Mark 16:1-8 (1 of 2), May 2
[I began the post with the necessary background on Elaine Pagels and her book Why Religion? like this:]
Much of Pagels’ book centers on the death of her first husband in a hiking accident. Her quotation from Wallace Stevens comes up in the context of a homily she delivered on the anniversary of her husband’s death, as she was just beginning to resume her scholarly work. In the middle of a discussion of the passage in Mark’s gospel in which the three Marys discover the empty tomb on the first Easter Sunday, Pagels says:
[…] For those who find suffering inevitable — in other words, for any of us who can’t dodge and pretend it’s not there — acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me. How, then, to go on living, without giving in to despair? I recalled lines from Wallace Stevens: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun.” Only when I began to awaken in the morning and see the sunlight, grateful for its warmth, could I dive into the secret gospels again. [The italics are Pagels’.]
Her point is that, like Wallace Stevens, “Mark suggests that what looks like total defeat may end in hope.” Let’s say it reached out and grabbed me.
Without going into too much medical detail, I think I know exactly what that feels like when no gives way to yes. In my case, the “final no” came in the form of a cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy and some troubling CT scans; the yes on which “the future world depends” is an encouraging CT scan in February. What comes next, I don’t know, but it gives me hope.
[I especially liked a reading I found by a law school professor, who said the poem is a reminder “that the world depends upon our affirmation, our will to believe,” but we are also reminded “that the skeptical impulse will always recur.” In the end, I still found Wallace Stevens a bit too intellectual and art-for-art’s-sake-ish for my taste. However, I was intrigued by Pagels’ scholarship — and her take on Mark, especially in light of what she took away from his gospel as she faced personal challenges, i.e. the sudden death of her husband and the struggle to get her scholarly career back on track while raising two small children and dealing with her own grief.
[I’m not done with Pagels, to make a long story short, and I’m not done with Mark. In the meantime, in a half-completed first draft of part 2 of my blog posts on the subject, I wrote (think of it as sort of a preview of coming attractions):]
A footnote (kinda) on Mark. Especially after reading Pagels’ exegesis of the empty tomb story, I’ve been reassessing the gospel of Mark. I’ve read before, I forget exactly where, that he was more of a literary craftsman than I was willing to give him credit for at the time. That not a word was wasted from the first — The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ […] — to the last — So they went out and fled from the tomb, […] for they were afraid. But I figured, well, everybody’s got a right to their own opinion. Now I agree with Pagels that I like Mark’s ending better. Something is calling me to go back and give him a second chance.
So I was struck by an offhand remark of Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s, in an interview in Christian Century. An advocate for peace and gay rights, he was speaking of his spiritual formation when he said:
In my late teens, I heard a few lectures from biblical scholars, one of whom, [Irish Catholic educator] Frances Hogan, focused on the gospels. I loved the way she’d say, “Well, this is the Jesus of Mark we’re talking about here.” I’d never heard anyone say that. Again, I asked, “Can you say that?” I loved that she had read closely enough to say, “Jesus of Mark and Jesus of John are very different characters; my God, I don’t think they would have liked each other at all.” Mark’s Jesus would have told John’s Jesus to shut up.
I like that! Of course we’d miss out on some beautiful, inspiring passages about the immanence of God — “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you”; or “Love one another as I have loved you” — if John’s Jesus took Mark’s Jesus’ advice. But I’ve got to admit I lose patience with some of Jesus’ longwinded theological disquisitions in John, especially when he’s involved in set-piece disputations with “the Jews.”
Mark I can relate to more immediately. “As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him.” That I can relate to across the centuries. It’s direct, it tells a story and it leaves me thinking yea, verily.
2. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/05/03/antisemitism-bill/ ‘When everything is antisemitic, nothing is antisemitic’: Why partisan crackdowns on free speech backfire. (It’s complicated.),” May 3
[The quote in the headline is from Kenneth Stern, who chaired the group that developed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. It includes “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”; Stern’s concern is the IHRA intended it as a discussion item but incorporating it in federal law changes it into a rigid formula meant to silence discussion of Israeli policy. I share that concern — I’ve already seen the IHRA definition used as a “clobber passage” to silence critics.
[While I was writing this, about the same time I was working on the Wallace Stevens post, I remembered “The Jewbird,” the Malamud story I read in grad school. (Flannery O’Connor, I hope, would be proud oof me for thinking of it as I wrote!) And that sent me back down memory lane. At the end of the post, I added:]
In the 1960s and 70s, you couldn’t not read Jewish authors like Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Chaim Potok and Isaac Bashevis Singer. (I was especially the right age for Potok’s stories of young Hasidic Jews grappling with their heritage in a secular world — I blogged about him HERE a few months ago.) In fact we joked that we all got to be a little bit Jewish by osmosis, just from keeping up with the best-seller lists, even though we were going to school 700 miles from New York.
One story that has stayed with me over the years is “The Jewbird” by Malamud. It’s ambiguous, and my reaction was complicated. […] A shabby-looking blackbird flies in Harry Cohen’s window on the lower East Side at suppertime. Cohen swats at the bird, and the bird exclaims, “Gevalt, a pogrom!” The bird, whose name is Schwarz, takes up residence. He tutors Cohen’s son Maurie, “a nice kid though not overly bright,” and wife Edie takes a liking to him. But Cohen can’t stand him, and eventually throws him out on the street.
[And I concluded with this, at the very end:]
[…] In my eyes, the bird is a mensch. His behavior matches the values of the characters I was reading about in Potok and Philip Roth (this was before Portnoy’s Complaint). The Jewbird’s values were the values I aspired to.
And for being a mensch, he gets thrown out into the street?
My upbringing was high-church Episcopalian, but Malmud’s Jewbird raised questions I was struggling with. How much of my own heritage was worth hanging onto? The bird is bedraggled and smelly, and, as Cohen points out, he’s a bit of a freeloader. “If you haven’t got matjes, I’ll take schmaltz,” he tells Edie. But he’s got Cohen’s number. “What can you say to a grubber yung?” he asks himself. A young lout, that is [in Yiddish]. And I got a hint, reading this along with the bit about dovening and phylacteries, he speaks for the wisdom of the ages.
So I identified with Schwarz the Jewbird. I identified with the kid who had a hard time memorizing the multiplication tables. (Boy, did I ever!) I identified with Edie, who would sneak tidbits to the bird when her husband wasn’t looking. I even identified with Cohen. It’s complicated. Life is complicated.
Most of all, I’d like to think I was learning, as Kenneth Stern might say, the emotional empathy required to imagine myself in the shoes of people (and a fictional blackbird) who aren’t like me.
3. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/05/14/antisemitism-weaponized/ How a Swedish Lutheran theologian’s response to the Holocaust guides my attitude to performative ‘anti-antisemitism’ in an election year, May 14
[Again, while I was blogging about current events my thoughts turned to my own formation. And again, as I started writing I got to thinking about what I was writing. And — Flannery O’Connor was right! — it took me in unanticipated directions. I started out copying parts of three stories in the Yahoo! News directory under the headline “How Weaponizing Antisemitism Puts Jews at Risk.” Yahoo! does this a lot — they’ll add related stories to the one in the directory — and I wanted to save the information in all three on my blog where I can access it with a keyword search.
And that led me, as Flannery O’Connor might have expected if she’d known me, to my own attitudes on the subject. I wrote:]
I’m not Jewish, but I’ve taken to heart Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl’s warning that Christians, especially Lutherans, bear responsibility for 2,000 years of antisemitism and hatred in Western culture. A Swede who came of age during the Holocaust and World War II and served at various times as Bishop of Stockholm in the Lutheran state Church of Sweden and as dean of Harvard Divinity School, Stendahl was very clear about it.
“Defining that responsibility has been a driving force for Professor Stendahl from his student days in Sweden,” once said a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. “As a Lutheran, he was painfully aware of how Martin Luther’s tract on ‘The Jews and their Lies’ was dredged up the Nazis to rationalize extermination of Jews in World War II.”
In 1981 when the reporter, Richard M. Hartley, caught up with him at a reception in Boston, a leading evangelical pastor had recently been caught saying “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” adding to concerns that antisemitism was on the rise. Stendahl told Hartley:
Most acts of anti-semitism have indeed been isolated acts. […] But the question we need to ask is: To what extent are these acts occurring in a Christian culture that pictures Jews as despicable? Now when there is psychological need for scapegoats, you can never say that anti-Semitic acts are Christian acts. But they are not disconnected. Christians have a responsibility.
That hit me where I live. (I’ve blogged about it, HERE and HERE). Stendahl met that responsibility by working tirelessly for dialog between Christians and Jewish, indeed between people of all faith traditions. He stood up for marginalized people of all sorts and conditions.
As dean of Harvard Divinity in the 1970s, he stood up for the first generation of women to study there; they called him “Sister Krister,” and it was a mark of affection and solidarity. Later he taught at Boston’s majority-Jewish Brandeis University and served as co-director of the Osher Center for Tolerance and Pluralism at the Shalom-Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is remembered at Harvard as a giant “among those on the forefront of Christianity’s grappling with its legacy of antisemitism after the Holocaust.”
Why can’t we all be more like Krister Stendahl?
A related question, closer to home: Why can’t I be more like Krister Stendahl?
Photo in header: ‘Krister Stendahl död,’ Sydsvenskan, Malmö, Sweden, April 16, 2008 https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2008-04-16/krister-stendahl-dod
[Uplinked May 19, 2024]
Ordinary Time 