Out of the mouths of babes

I rarely agree with anything posted by the Yeshiva World News, most of the time I find their coverage amateurish and sensationalist. But aside from questions of malice, to which I won't pretend to be able to ascertain, this article spells out exactly what I was thinking when I read about Pastor Hagee's remarks the first time. I'd slap his wrist for chutzpah (look tatie, the man thinks he's a navi!), but I can't completely disagree with the sentiment. After all, I've heard some of my own rabbis say that for every tragedy there is a degree of tochacha.

“Tonight I humbly ask forgiveness of the Jewish people for every act of anti-Semitism and the deafening silence of Christianity in your greatest hour of need during the Holocaust.”

Those words were spoken before a crowd of several thousand Jews attending an AIPAC Policy Conference in March, 2007. The speaker was Pastor John Hagee, the evangelist who heads the group Christians United for Israel – the very same Pastor Hagee whom Reform Rabbi Eric Yoffie now accuses of “insult[ing] the survivors” of the Holocaust.

Reform Rabbi Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, was referring to a speech Pastor Hagee made about a decade ago, about Yirmiyohu HaNovi’s nevu’ah that Hashem would one day “bring the Jewish people again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers” (16:15). In the next posuk Hashem proclaims that He will send “many fishers” and then “hunters.” The latter word was interpreted by Mr. Hagee as referring to Hitler, ym”sh, leading the pastor to regard the Holocaust as part of a Divine strategy to move Jews to Eretz Yisroel.

One needn’t agree with the pastor’s take on history; or accept his assumption that simple people can identify events with prophecies; or even consider him to be in command of the facts (in his speech, he has Theodore Herzl, a resolutely secular Jew, invoking Divine command as the reason Jews should move to Eretz Yisroel). But nothing in fact could be more Jewish than to accept that, no matter how inscrutable, Hashem is just; and that as we look into the maw of tragedy we are to look inward as well.

And so, while the Reform rabbi may have seen the Christian minister’s words as “an affront” to those who perished in the Holocaust, I saw only an attempt, imperfect but without malice, to discern the fulfillment of a Jewish prophet’s words in recent history. Continued...

Labels: Hagee, Yeshiva World News