Reflections on "Paul"

The only recognizably Roman Catholic member of the clergy I could identify was a nun sitting in the front row. We (and a capacity audience) were watching the North American Premier of Howard Brenton’s “Paul” at the Gamm Theatre. When the play was over, she was the first person to stand and applaud. I turned to my wife, tapped her on the shoulder, pointed to the nun with my chin and asked “Did she see the same play we did?” It’s hard to imagine.

Some background: According to “The Acts of the Apostles” the fifth book of the New Testament, those who knew and followed Jesus were still Jews, but Jews who thought the Messiah had come in the person of Yeshua (Aramaic for Joshua). They still obeyed the old laws but because they shunned rabbinic authority and were baptized, they were shunned and persecuted. The principal persecutor was Saul of Tarsus who, hearing that there were Jewish followers of Yeshua in Damascus determined to go there to stamp out the community. On the way, he was blinded by a light and heard a voice saying “Why do you persecute me?” and realizing that only the voice of Yeshua would say such a thing—though he was dead—he converted to the new faith. And to him it was a new faith. Unlike Jesus’ old colleagues who thought of themselves as Jews, Paul (the name he adopted upon having his miraculous experience on the road to Damascus) creates a new religion, one where circumcision is not required, nor eating of kosher meat etc., the better to attract gentiles (Greeks) to the new faith.

Now, all of that is a given. The play, though, assumes facts not generally found in the Christian texts—that Jesus and Mary Magdelna, a prostitute, were married, that Jesus did not die on the cross, so was not resurrected but kept in hiding by Peter and James (Jesus’ brother—another thing not generally accepted by Christians) that Joseph and Mary were wealthy purveyors of religious objects in Nazareth, that Peter and James sent Paul out to convert the gentiles assuming that he’d be ignored—or stoned, that they brought Yeshua with them to Saul’s encampment and had him talk to Saul, a well meaning hoax that Saul believed in its entirety. The depiction of Nero is so off the wall that I won’t even mention it other than to say that if you missed Kelby T. Akin as the despotic emperor you missed something rare.

So, we are there the night before Paul’s execution is scheduled. He’s chained, chanting almost as if in a self-induced trance “Christ is risen” over and over and over again. He is a man of faith. But then Peter (played by Gamm veteran Jim O'Brien) is brought into the prison and as the play unfolds he reveals to Paul all the deceptions. Jesus was not God, but an inspiring man. This Paul the believer refuses to believe, that he has been deceived, that his life’s work is based on someone else’s artifice. Peter, who knows the truth ultimately joins in with him intoning, imploring, Jesus the risen God, to help them. If he’s going to die, he may as well die for a cause—whether he believes it or not.

So, why was that nun applauding? I don’t know, but I suppose she does.

A good piece of theater ought to leave us with questions—all the best literature does. Here the question is not so much was Jesus God (the answer is “No”) but the epistemological question, how do we know that the things we know (and are the things we know truly true)?

And we Jews? We enter the Passover season in a couple of days. Our tables will groan under the weight of food, we’ll be a little drunk after four cups of wine, we’ll open the door to allow Elijah the prophet to come join us (he hasn’t yet, but maybe this year) we sing songs and prayers, we ask questions to which we already know the answers, but do we? Were our ancestors slaves in Egypt, rescued by God through his servant Moses? Were there all those plagues? Or miracles? It hardly matters. If one wants to believe, there’s no harm; if one sees the story simply as a metaphor for the potential of the oppressed to rise and liberate themselves, so be it. To my uncertain knowledge there is no historical evidence that the story of the Exodus is true, but it’s a wonderful story nevertheless. If nothing else it gives us the opportunity to clean behind those corners we never normally get to, to be with friends and family to sing and rejoice. Dayenu.

What's a Jewish Subject?

A recent letter complains that the Voice & Herald is becoming a platform for the Democratic Party with a leftist agenda that alienates conservatives and uses me and my last column as his prime example. I admit to being an economic liberal. In fact, I’m proud of it. I think that taxing the wealthy to support public programs such as bridge repair, heath insurance, medical research etc. is all to the good. I think that President George W. Bush was right on target when the announced that his form of conservatism was “Compassionate Conservatism” suggesting that the other kind, the usual kind, the Reagan kind, is not. It’s too bad that his words were lip service only. In his 1988 acceptance speech when nominated by the Republicans to run for President George H. W. Bush talked of making America a kinder gentler nation which upset Reagan acolytes, but he too was on to something. Do liberals have all the answers? No. Do I disagree with some liberal positions? Yes. As to being called a liberal or a conservative, I think the terms have lost their meanings. Given the choice I’ll define myself as a “Humanist” by which I mean someone in the tradition of Cicero, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, someone who believes that if an action liberates humanity it is positive; if it retards it, if it enslaves, it is to be opposed. If humanist is too vague, just call me Jewish.

So, in my last column I started out by discussing union-busting in Wisconsin and elsewhere and then segued to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Where’s the Jewish content? My critic wants “to hear about Jewish news and interests in the paper.” In the Forward (a Jewish newspaper) Leonard Fein (a Jew) writes in his March 2 column about “Sam Gompers, David Dubinsky, …Albert Shanker, to say nothing of … Andy Stern, Randi Weingarten and a host of others who have played — and still play — central roles in America’s labor history…[Labor] is… a Jewish issue because justice is everywhere and always a Jewish issue.” Who can disagree? You don’t have to be a Marxist to know that the ruthless exploitation of the worker is not only immoral but economically counter-productive—just read Adam Smith’s “On the Wealth of Nations,” that primer of capitalism and you’ll find the same thing. Is Smith not Jewish enough? “Justice, Justice thou shall pursue,” is or ought to be a familiar quotation. It’s from an old book my critic might once have read. Each Yom Kippur we chant from Isaiah on treating our workers fairly and find nothing with which Governor Walker and his ilk would agree. Jeremiah’s explanation for the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was that masters were enslaving their workers. Micah (another Jew) asks “what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Does this include depriving people of their rights so that the wealthy can become wealthier? Is Moses Jewish enough? Read what he has to say about Egyptian labor practices and about how Jews in their own land should treat gleaners.

Too old fashioned? There’s Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who along with James Cheney were lynched, two Jews and a black man murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi because they tried to register Negroes to vote. Not by liberals. When Ronald Regan, that demigod of the modern conservative movement began his quest for the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1980 he went first to Philadelphia, Mississippi of all places, and proclaimed that he believed in states’ rights, a code word in those days (and maybe in ours) for segregation. He was a conservative; I’m not, I’m a Jewish humanist, and if being a humanist offends those who are not, such is life.

If there are conservative Jews who in the modern context place the greed of the land owner above the rights of the gleaner, who do not walk humbly with their God, who do not place Justice before all other considerations, are they living up to the standards set before them by generations of greatness? Or have they succumbed to Mammon like the Jewish owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Max Blanck an Isaac Harris, union-busters who locked poor immigrant girls into their factory and escaped while 146 of them died within a few minutes, jumping out of the building, crushed against the bolted doors, of burns and smoke inhalation. Blanck and Harris were found not guilty of manslaughter by a jury of their peers, other people who as Abraham Cahan (another Jew) reminds uswere businessmen, salesmen, rent-collectors, not poor Jewish women denied the rights of collective bargaining.