Why Is Easter a Good Time to Think about the Jews?

Jesus is who Easter is about. Not rabbits, chicks, and eggs.

Jesus was a Jew. And Easter is when Christians think about Jesus even more than they remember him at Christmas.

Jesus is who Passover is about, but you have to read both the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Bible to know why.

The nation of Jews, the race and the religious people known as Israel, whose heritage traced back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, rejected Jesus as their Messiah (Savior) during the time when Jesus came in person to offer himself as atonement for the entire world’s sin. Which incidentally, was during Passover.

To this day, most Jews ignore the New Testament, which proves unfortunate. The New Testament explains who Jesus is and why he came first to the Jews and then following his death and resurrection to the rest of the world.

His Mission: to save as many who would receive him as who the Bible says He is. God’s Son. LORD. Savior. Who Jesus said he is, Deity, revealing God in the flesh.

For now, I’m worrying about the salvation of Jews.

I’ve sat with this question about the Jews and salvation as I understand the words for weeks now, thinking to post during the week leading up to Easter Sunday.

Resurrection Day.

Resurrection means to stand up again.

My question about the Jews goes back to the year I lived in Beverly Hills, California, the only Gentile (goy) in my 8th grade graduating class of 119 students.

All the rest were Jews.

There, my questions became personal.

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

Monty Python

Jews is a noun and Jewish is an adjective that describes something related to the Jews.

In a previous post about Nora Ephron, I referred to her book I Remember Nothing. In it, she wrote about meeting someone who asked her what kind of Jew she was.

“I had never heard of the concept of what kind of Jew you were. Jane was a German Jew, which was not to say she was from Germany but that her grandparents had been. She was extremely displeased about it. I had no idea it mattered.”

Nora Ephron

Nora said she herself was a Russian Jew.

Reading Nora’s thoughts on this subject reminded me of my year of living dangerously in Beverly Hills and of my friend Maggie. Maggie had told me she was a German Jew (because her mother was German) and that the popular kids in our 8th grade class disliked her for that reason.

I liked Maggie, and since I was neither a Jew or popular, this distinction did not affect our friendship.

I had yet to form any theological questions about discrimination. “When I was a child, I thought as a child, I behaved as a child.”

That childhood conversation, however, showed me that discrimination existed even in this tiny pool of human beings, one where I regarded my classmates and teachers in essence like me. Body and bone, teeth and hair, heart and blood, and as human beings sensitive to pain, both emotional and physical.

I assumed each person had a soul and a conscience too because I was aware of my own.

” . . . the world is public; its issues are moral and historical . . . you’ve been put down in a world that’s already under way.”^⁠

Annie Dillard

The biggest difference noted at the time was the observance of lots of Jewish holidays. Added days off from school. Yay!

A dream within a dream . . .

While I could have left this question about the Jews on the playground of El Rodeo, grades 1 through 8, a few years ago I had a vivid dream about one of my teachers.

Mrs. Bergman was my Science teacher. She was not my favorite teacher. I was far from being one of her favorite students.

Mrs. Bergman was the most demanding teacher I had had to that point. In her classroom domain, laboratory on one end and a wall of chalkboard at the other, a bank of windows along the side opposite the hall and 2 doors, Mrs. Bergman moved like a splendid queen whose subjects would never dare to challenge her leadership. I was a serf.

Because I had moved from a school in Las Vegas, Nevada where I made straight-A’s, I had been placed in the highest cohort of students at El Rodeo School in the 8th grade. There, amidst the brilliant high achievers, I struggled to keep my eyes open, my mouth closed, and my head from sinking, for in most of my classes I floundered.

Mrs. Bergman’s science class was by far the most difficult for me.

The dream I had about her was so vivid that as soon as I awoke, I hurriedly wrote these words in my journal.

Last night I dreamed I went to Beverly Hills again. 

As if on a conveyor belt, I found myself moving past familiar scenes while the people moved about, unaware of me.

Not expecting anyone to notice me, I saw Rhoda Bergman, my 8th grade science teacher, in the midst of a demonstration, surrounded by students. Though she had aged, I recognized her at once. Her thick-wiry hair, now salt-and-peppered with white, reached down below her shoulder blades. She wore her hair pulled back in a clasp, away from her face. 

The conveyor belt continued on so my gaze had already drifted.

But she had looked up.

I heard my name.

“Carol,” she said. 

“How did you remember me?” I said, as Mrs. Bergman moved to greet me.

She wrapped me tightly in a hug as if I had once belonged to her, and now that she had found me, she resisted letting me go. Our faces inches apart, I could smell her minty breath, feel the warmth of her words as she said she would never forget me, my eyes torn between watching her eyes and her lips. 

Was it what she said or the light dancing in her eyes that kept me spellbound? 

Still, the moving conveyor belt forced me to go on.

As she stepped back into her place, Mrs. Bergman resumed teaching, students fascinated by whatever she held in her hand.

I watched her until she got too small to see. 

I remember the place, but does the place remember me?

The wonder stayed with me long after I awoke from my dream. Mrs. Bergman had remembered me. As a student, I was the least important person in the room.

“It seems unfair that the times and places to which we have given so much of ourselves should know us no more. Our little story is one of unrequited love for a world that moves on.”^⁠

As I Lay Dying, by Richard John Neuhaus

This world existed before I got here and will continue after my departure. In between my own brief visitation, what exactly is my responsibility?

Do I have a responsibility to the Jews?

Each time I think about that dream, so vivid and palpable, my eyes fill with tears.

What about Mrs. Bergman? I ask.

Mrs. Bergman was a Jew.

Will I see Mrs. Bergman in heaven?

As a Christian, I have read the Bible many times. Portions of it more than others.

Where Paul wrote that Jesus became a stumbling block to the Jews, can it also be said that the Jews can become a stumbling block to Christians?

Someone said that the church needs to stop trying to shape people into what they think people should be.

Makes sense, actually, because I cannot even shape myself into what I think I should be.

Any distinction that you and I make as human beings, any form of discrimination that insists that our stories are supposed to align based on beliefs that squeeze every story onto the same page just doesn’t work.

God is bigger than our questions.

“. . . there is no intellectual solution to the meaning of Jewishness . . . There was some enduring mystery, some metaphysical conundrum about being Jewish . . . I could not get over the extraordinariness of Jewish persistence through the ages, its matter-of-fact continuity with itself, in all periods and all places.”

Alfred Kazin wrote in his memoirs, following WWII

I, myself, had witnessed Jewish persistence in, of all places, Beverly Hills, California.

It’s part of my story.

Although limited in perspective, my first person experiences with Jews raised my awareness of their uniqueness. Their humanity. These people I recall had names and faces.

No matter how many years pass or miles traveled since then, I care about the Jews because of that one year that I lived among them––as foreign to them in their context as a grapefruit tree growing in Central Park.

To my lingering questions about God’s grace comes unsatisfactory answers about the Jews. One conceivable explanation came when I read the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson.

“Grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways.” 

The Bible says God will show mercy and extend grace to whomever he chooses. However he chooses. Whenever he chooses.

Even to people who never set foot in a church.

In light of God’s perfect justice, the Bible stipulates that God can be trusted with the souls of all men.

A person can be changed in an instant, like the thief on the cross hanging next to Jesus, in his dying moments asking God to remember him––heart changes in that man to effect his eternal destiny.

Neither in point of time at death or for what lies beyond this life do the outcomes of any person’s life catch God by surprise. All people in all times ultimately answer to God.

Further, in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, the character John Ames refuses to try to prove God’s existence. No dogma. No coercion. No pounding on pulpits.

“Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.” Ames goes on to say that attempting to prove God’s existence [or Jesus Christ’s, for that matter] “only confirms them in their skepticism.”

Is God unjust? Does He discriminate the way people do?

The whole truth or partial?

“Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved.”

The Apostle Paul, Romans 10:1

The New Testament in Romans chapters 9–11 stipulates that as a nation, Jewish blindness to Jesus Christ is partial and for a limited period of time, until that blindness of the Jews fulfills God’s wise purposes.

Therefore, if I can see or understand any biblical truth, my sight and my understanding as a Christian remains partial too.

My story is a partial truth. According to God’s plan, my story serves different purposes than say, Mrs. Bergman’s.

While my story intersects with the stories of other people, God gets to write “The End” to each person’s story.

Post Script

The Internet helped me discover that Rhoda Bergman died in 2010.^⁠ Reading her obituary and another article where she was remembered as a good neighbor led me to imagine the life she lived long after I had left her classroom.

This New York native, who with her husband traveled by car across country to settle in California in 1947^⁠, Mrs. Bergman lived to be 91-years-old. A picture showed her smiling, completely white-headed, and I thought she looked exquisitely happy.^⁠

This is how I choose to think of Mrs. Bergman, who was here on earth before I was even born. Her life touched mine the way a butterfly lights on a flower.

Mrs. Bergman, as well as other Jews I knew in Beverly Hills, made the word Jews personal. They were each one someone with a name, a face, a heart and a soul.

For now, I must leave to heaven questions about the Jews that only God in his wisdom and purposes for each of us can answer.

While the coronavirus shelter in place guidelines have been issued, I have posted a blog on a serious topic at the first of each week. On Friday’s, I turn to light-hearted movies and ideas that me remind me of the breadth of real life as it is lived in the 21st century. Cherish the moments spent with those you love.