5 Minutes on the Passion

Rabbi Melanie Aron

April 5, 2004

What can I say in 5 minutes about the Passion? I’m glad that at the end of the month we will have time for an in depth exploration of all the related issues when Michael Cook will be our scholar in residence. Rabbi Cook who teaches New Testament to rabbinic students, was one of a group of 7 scholars assembled by the Catholic Secretariat of Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs to look at the script several months ago.

I have 5 minutes – and I’ll try and make 5 points.

First, one has to note what a phenomena this has been. It has been on the front page of every newspaper, magazine and journal, everybody who’s anybody has written a review or a comment or an op ed. Even in the Jewish community, this is a big issue. On the day after the Passion opened the Reform movement organized a telephone teaching session and 450 rabbis were on the line, more than were present for such calls after the beginning of the intifada or following 9-11. This is something we can’t ignore – do need to consider how to address.

Second, there can be a tremendous gap between what we see as Jews and what our Christian friends and neighbors see, and we need to be careful when we speak. A member of the congregation asked me on email what I thought about the movie and I wrote her a response. When she shared that email with a Christian friend, it was not well received. When talking to Christians one needs to be open to their experience of the film. Jews are particularly interested in the portrayal of Jews, and that’s primarily what we see. For some Christians the movie is a different kind of experience, and at least consciously they may not be that aware of the portrayal of the Jews.

Third, movies are wrap-around experiences particularly in the theater. They affect us not just intellectually but also emotionally, and the residue they leave can sometimes be unconscious. For me this subliminal message is a particularly worrisome aspect of the film. Considering that the movie is likely to be distributed world wide, in place where there are few Jews, or where there is already a high level of anti-Semitism, these meta messages – subtle and less subtle visual and aural cues --are perhaps the most important aspect of the film.

Fourth, Gibson has presented his movie as history, and even if he hadn’t boasted about that explicitly, the movie itself would have left that impression (think of people who accept The Ten Commandments as the way it was). The most distressing thing I heard in this whole business was a woman walking out of the theater and saying: “I’m so glad I came, I didn’t know a quarter of this before.” And given the diminishing Biblical literacy of the general community , this is real worry. The less people know, the more dependent they will be on Gibson’s presentation. The Red Tent, a book some of you may have read, a midrash on the Genesis narrative of Dinah, deviated from the Biblical text considerably. Some people liked and some didn’t like it, but it didn’t present itself as authoritative history. Gibson has presented his film in this way, though Rabbi Cook and other have pointed out 34 places where it deviates from any of the Gospels, and follows instead the narrative of a 19th century American nun whose visions of Jesus’s passion were the source of Gibson’s Drash.

Finally, the greatest irony is that discussion about the poor quality of the film, its unrelenting violence and plodding style, and its deviations from the Gospel, have obscured the more basic issues that this film raises:

Putting aside Gibson’s embellishments, significant and one sided though they are, we need to ask, what has been the contribution of the Gospels themselves to anti-Semitism and how should that be approached ?

Its time to take a look at the limitations of the Vatican II proclamation concerning the Jews. We think of it as releasing Jews from responsibility for Jesus’ death. For Jews that would mean placing responsibility on the Romans who were the rulers at the time, for whom crucifixion was a normative way of punishing political prisoners, (we know of over 4, 000 crucifixions by the Romans in the time period), and who were the ones who had appointed the High Priest Caiaphus as a Roman puppet. But that is not what this Vatican document says. Instead it merely states: “True the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ, still, what happened in His Passion cannot be charged against all Jews without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

All of these concerns remind us of the importance of continuing study and dialogue with the Christian community.