What is 'Holy Week' about? In some ways, important history

In the last few weeks I've written a fair amount about how our history shapes us and why we need to know that history to be able to make sense of the present. You can find two examples of that here and here.

That idea about history includes not just the history of our nation but also religious history. For instance, here we are in the middle of what we Christians call Holy Week (see graphic above) and in the middle of what our Jewish siblings call Passover.

The history of how what became Christianity eventually separated itself from Judaism helps us understand how and why that painful separation continues today. If we don't read such books about that split as The Reluctant Parting, by Julie Galambush, our grasp of reality today will be faulty and misleading -- perhaps even in destructive ways.

And if we don't have an understanding of how and why the new Christian faith, almost from the beginning, preached a virulent anti-Judaism, our ability to make sense of modern antisemitism will be severely limited. I've linked you in this paragraph to my longish essay about how Christian anti-Judaism helped to birth modern antisemitism. Read it and weep.

Beyond that, in a world in which brutal acts of terrorism sometimes get approved and even applauded by certain people who claim to be following Islam, which is the third of the Abrahamic faiths, we must understand how the late Osama bin Laden and others cruelly misinterpreted and misused traditional Islam to reach the conclusion that terrorism was justified. I wrote a fair amount about that subject in my latest book, Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.

In the adult Sunday school class that I attend at my church, we were speaking recently (and briefly) about the Protestant Reformation, and I mentioned that although the person credited with starting the Reformation, Martin Luther, did advocate for wide and deep education of people, he excluded Jews from that. I was surprised to find that when I mentioned Luther's vicious 1543 publication, On the Jews and Their Lies, a long-time member of our class said he'd never heard that or about Luther's eventual hatred of the Jewish people.

With famous people in history, we need to describe not just their victories and their achievements that have helped humanity but also their failures.

An unrelated aside: Speaking of important dates in history, did you know that two days from now, April 18, is National Columnists' Day, chosen because the patron saint of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Ernie Pyle, was killed that date in World War II? And do you know how the day got created? Find out here. Take a columnist to lunch that day and learn some more history. You'll be better for it.

(The graphic art at the top here today came from this site.)

* * *

THE ANTI-JEWISH ACTS CONTINUE

And speaking of important history, as I was above here today, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a regular columnist for Religion News Service, writes here that in response to the recent Passover attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family in Pennsylvania, Jews return to their memories of previous attacks on Jews -- and should. After all, he writes, "There is a long and ignoble history of antisemites scheduling their attacks on or around Jewish holidays." And then he lists some. Somehow what's often called the world's oldest hatred -- antisemitism -- continues, and Christian history is stained with it.

The good news is that Shapiro and his family were physically unhurt, though there was damage to their home. And there was an arrest. But this is one more traumatic time in this Jewish family's story that its members will have to process and from which they now must try to recover.