The Jew is The Beloved. This is why he is hated...by the Unloved. The Beloved is envied and despised by the Unloved: Abel by Cain, Joseph by his brothers, David by Saul, Jesus by Jewish leadership.
God's love is preferential, specific, gratuitous, almost random. Of all ethnicities, he chose one as The Beloved: the Hebrews, the Israelites, the Jews. "How odd of God to chose the Jews." (Chesterton) The Joshua Project identified 17,500 distinct ethnic groups. Why choose the Jews? We will never know.
Love is mysterious. Why do I love my wife? Why did I fall in love with her? I could immediately give you 25 good reasons to love her, but that list would not get to the heart of the matter. Something deep and interior in me delighted in her very self, her deepest self and everything that flows from that including her smile and laughter, intelligence, body, style, faith and on and on and on. This love cannot be defined or explained. And so it is with God's love for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and seed.
But how to understand this troubling surge of antisemitism from the right and the left, especially from the young?
Antisemitism: Overdetermined
There are many factors that contribute to this hatred.
- Sympathy for the suffering Palestinians and aversion to the Gaza war, particularly the denial of food/medicine to civilians as well as the history of aggression by rightwing Israeli settlers.
- Configuration by the left of Israel as "oppressor" in the standard paradigm and therefore conflated with tyranny, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, imperialism, yada yada yada.
- Muslim resentment and envy.
- The perennial scapegoating of the Jew by Christendom as the outlier, the strange one, the suspect.
- Anti-Judaism in strong form as accusation of "deicide" (murder of Christ) or more moderately in perception of legalism, formalism, lack of charity.
- Suspicion of the Jew as rich capitalist, powerful and conspiratorial.
- Religious distrust of the Jew as cultural or political revolutionary: communist, sexual libertarian, pornographer, enemy of the family and perverter of children.
- Local resentment by neighbors of Orthodox communities as self-serving, aggressive, inbred, and indifferent to the needs and sufferings of others.
Yet, all these historical, sociological factors seem insufficient to account for the persistence, the depth, the ferocity of the hatred of the Jew. Note the contradictions above: the Jew is revolutionary undermining the moral order and at the same time the one in control of that order as banker and power broker. Both sides share a view of the Jew as powerful and hostile in a drama of victimization. On the Left and Right we have politics of envy, victimization, alleged powerlessness and exaggerated power.
We need to go deeper ontologically and spiritually to get to the profundity of this hatred.
Hatred of the Beloved by the Unloved
Monsignor John Oesterreicher, anti-Nazi convert from Judaism to Catholicism and architect of Nostrae Aetate, Vatican II document on the Jews, saw that Nazi antisemitism, far from coming from Christian animus against the Jew, was more deeply a hatred for this "people of the Book" in their identity with the moral law and the Creator God. Subliminally, disgust for the Jew is hatred for the God of creation, of goodness.
Developing this insight, we see that the "unloved" looking at the "beloved" surges with envy, resentment, and the compulsion to murder this occasion of misery.
This is the envy of Lucifer when he learned a human, a woman at that, was destined to be Queen of Angels and Saints.
To the extent that one is unloved, he can only despise the beloved.
Deep down, this hatred is bipartisan: the Right hates the Jew as revolutionary, as enemy of religion, family, innocence. The Left hates him as rich, powerful, oppressor of the poor. In both: Envy reigns.
Lucifer's Preferences
In his perverse imitation of God, Lucifer, the Prince of Envy, has his own preferential hatreds. He hates all, but hates some especially. Predictably, he hates most those whom God most loves. Particularly three. Above all, he despises Mary our Mother, over whom he has zero influence. She is entirely triumphant over him. He and his minions must flee before her. He takes his revenge on other women: nothing pleases him more than the degradation of women as in rape, domination, pornography or the sophisticated faux feminism of abortion and consumerism. Secondly, Lucifer despises the Jews, the very people of Mary and Jesus. Hitler was his cherished protege. Thirdly, he despises the Catholic Church, especially in the religious life and priesthood, especially confession and Eucharist.
Love of the Beloved
On the other hand, we have those who love the Beloved. Ruben and Judah both intervened to save their younger brother: Ruben advocated throwing him into a pit as he intended to return to rescue him. Judah then suggested selling him into slavery rather than letting him die in the pit. Jonathan, son of Saul, was a loyal friend to David. And of course we have all the Jews that loved Jesus: apostles and disciples, Mary and Joseph, even Pharisees Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Gamaliel.
And so, the drama of life: in encountering the Beloved, we envy and hate him; or we love him, and receive his love, and become possessed by that very love.
The Catholic Loves the Jew
We might define the Catholic: one who loves the Jew. Jesus, the quintessential Jew, the very epitome of Judaism. Mary: the crown of her people.
We do not distinguish good from bad Jew, but we love them all. We love the Woody-Allen-libertarian-pornography Jew; the nationalistic, warrior Jew; the wealthy, powerful Jew; the aggressive, legalistic, unfriendly Orthodox Jew; the Neoconservative Zionist; and the Freudian-Marxist revolutionary. We love Bernie Madoff, Allen Ginsburg, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dutch Schultz, Herbert Marcuse, Meyer Lansky, Leon Trotsky, the Rothschilds, Ben Netanyahu. Yes, these are sinners: we hate the sin, love the sinner. These are, of course, our enemies in the Culture War. But we esteem them in their giftedness; we learn from them; we thrive in combat with such worthy adversaries!
The Catholic esteems the religion of Judaism: but with criticisms. Historic Rabbinic Judaism, which survives today in various forms (reform, conservative, orthodox and entirely secularized) historically is rooted in the rejection by leadership of the messianic claims of Jesus. They are prone to a wide variety of errors: political, moral, theological, and other. But they are still The Beloved.
The Catholic is not theologically or ideologically Zionist in the way of some Evangelicals, awaiting the second coming out of the founding of the state of Israel. The Catholic is free to criticize the actions of the government there. But because this state is protective of the Jewish people, there has to be strong support for it, along with disagreement.
Jesus, the quintessential Jew, is Beloved of the Father. As we come under his influence, we fall in love, we fall into his love, we love him and his. We love all he loves. We loves his people: the Jew and today the Church. We overcome our own envy, insecurity, and resentment as we are filled with the Holy Spirit of love from the Trinity.
May God bring peace to Jerusalem, to Israel, to Iran, to Gaza, to Palestine and the Middle East!
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