Jesus

I say this all both seriously and lightly. (This is the gentle humor with which I and other Jews in America speak of going to eat Chinese food on Christmas eve.

I even dare to say I think it is the way of the future: both the movement away from money and the abolition, the transcendence, of the family unit. But his emphasis on action is simultaneously remarkable for its difference to the way institutions have since focused their energy and their persecution of others, and simultaneously unremarkable to me, in that action remains the focus of Judaism 2,000 years later. While it would be cheeky to suggest that Jesus is straightforwardly “socialist”, it is not entirely preposterous to suggest that Jesus himself, and even many of the Christians who followed him, are somewhat interested in that most radical and least loved idea in left-wing political theory, the abolition of the family. It is from statements like these that Paul derives the assertion that we are all related through Christ as much as through blood, that the most important union for humans to be concerned with is that of the body of Christ as a whole. To show you what I see here, as an outsider to Christianity: I see Jesus as a virtuous Jew in ancient Palestine, which means I understand him to be a member of a householder religion. This is remarkable given its contrast with, for example, what Aristotle termed the “executive virtue” of knowing how to make and give money well, what Jews emphasize in household ethics, and of course what our current society values today. (Try to see it my way – in my religion, we think forgiveness is nice, but not the chief virtue. Very few Christians I meet are interested in giving up their earthly possessions to serve the poor (though I am always delighted when I meet one who is). When I sang in the King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, the windows of the building were designed to show that the most sacred texts of my religion were merely a predecessor for the true, developed view, the Christian faith. It is not just my life but my mind that has adapted to fit the Christian world. This is the nod between the worker at the Chinese or Indian restaurant and the Jew on the same night.) I have sung in Christian choirs and listened to Christian sermons and sworn in on Christian bibles and been graduated from every institution I have ever attended with Christian prayer.