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Jewish scholar Susannah Heschel talks with Robert Owens Scott about God’s wrath, the dubiousness of forgiveness, and the often sobering, sometimes surprising, intersecting histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Robert Owens Scott: I’d like to talk about the way that the Christian story is told and the way it’s contrasted with Judaism. James Carroll, writing as a Christian, finds ample evidence that Christianity has historically bolstered its identity by denigrating Judaism, often with violent consequences.

Susannah Heschel: The history of Christian views of Judaism is a very difficult history. I would say, though, that there are, of course, times of great, wonderful interaction between Jews and Christians. History has to be placed in that context also. The moments of terror and violence grab our attention, and we write about those, as we should. But we also have to remember that there were periods of wonderful harmony.

ROS: You’ve studied Christian Jewish relations in Germany before World War II, and the idea of the Aryan Jesus, and the way that Christianity was shaped into a vehicle of violence.

SH: It was an effort made by some Protestant theologians in Germany who were Nazis and who wanted to bring together Christianity and National Socialism. They argued that Jesus was not a Jew at all, but was the greatest enemy of the Jews. And that Jesus sought to destroy Judaism, just as Hitler today is doing Jesus’ work by destroying the Jews. They tried to de- Judaize Christianity. They got rid of the Old Testament all together, and they had their own version of the New Testament, and the hymnal purged of all positive Jewish references or Hebrew words.

ROS: Let’s talk about the idea that the Old Testament is about a God of wrath.

SH: If one wants to find violence in the Bible, the prophets were violent, in the sense that they spoke out and they disrupted the social order. Look at Martin Luther King, Jr.: I know he’s seen as peace-loving, and of course he was. But what he did was to enter into the deepest recesses of the consciences of this country and completely reorient how we think and how we feel. In the one sense, it was nonviolent. In another sense, it was such a reordering of how we think. He really shook us up and changed us dramatically in the space of a few years. He changed the fabric of this country. That kind of massive social transformation is prophetic.

We ought to have a bit of a prophet in the back of our minds, shaking us up. My father would say, when you go to the synagogue, prayer should be subversive. You should walk out feeling upset, not at peace. Question yourself. Be challenged. Reorder your life.

ROS: How do you deal with violence in the scriptures, though?

SH: I’m of course disturbed by it, but I’m also disturbed by people who say the Old Testament is a book of violence. Because I don’t think it’s teaching us to be violent; it’s giving us a window into human nature and aspects of ourselves that we have to acknowledge.

Here’s an example of one lesson: There was a terrible incident in the family of King David when one of his sons raped his half sister, Tamar and then fled. Another brother, Absalom, then kills the half brother who raped Tamar. Of course it’s a terrible story. What’s the lesson there? David didn’t interfere. Why didn’t he intervene in the first place? People sometimes are afraid to interfere. That violent biblical story is telling us, don’t be like King David and refrain from interfering when you see one family member do something wrong.

It’s one of the things that we see in the history of wives of SS officers in Nazi Germany. They would go with their husband to a concentration camp, knowing the husband is committing murder every single day, in massive numbers. They would make a nice home, a normal, family domestic life. He would come back at the end of the day having killed a few thousand people, and she would have dinner for him. Why would wives do that? That kind of passive acquiescence is very problematic, and very troubling.

ROS: How do we learn to respect each other’s stories?

SH: People often worry about boundaries. I actually found that Abraham Geiger [a German scholar of Judaism] wrote a book in the 1830s about the Jewish influences on the Koran. With that book, he founded modern European Islamic studies in Germany. Until World War II, there were many Jews who became involved in Islamic studies.

I think they actually constructed a very beautiful picture of Islam in the 19th century. It may not have been entirely accurate by 21st-century scholarly standards. But nonetheless, a very positive image. They identified with Islam. Islam was the religion of ethical monotheism, according to these Jewish scholars. Christianity wasn’t. So they sought a kind of alliance with Islam, perhaps in opposition to Christianity, but also because they truly admired this religion. They felt that it had a great deal in common with Judaism — the emphasis on religious law, on family structures, the strict monotheism, and the rejection of anthropomorphism. There was a closeness, an admiration and a sense of alliance between many Jewish thinkers and Islam.

ROS: Do you think that history might represent a way forward?

SH: Things have changed, in part because of the destruction of European Jewry and because of what’s happened in the Middle East since World War II. The geopolitics have changed, and the founding of the state of Israel has been an issue for many Muslims. But yes, I would hope that we could recover that tradition, and perhaps renew it today.

ROS: I know that you’re not altogether a fan of the concept of forgiveness as we usually talk about it. So what role can forgiveness properly play in dealing with violence, particularly religiously inspired violence?

SH: I think the term forgiveness is sometimes used as an alibi to avoid taking responsibility. In a sense to me what we say when we talk about forgiveness, we really mean a kind of openness, empathy, compassion. What’s ignored in much of what’s written about forgiveness these days, is the retention of anger and resentment, and turning it into righteous indignation. Which is, in fact, the prophetic tradition. God is angry in the Bible, but God’s anger is also combined with mercy. It’s because anger and mercy are intertwined in God, that God makes the anger something constructive.

ROS: Your father and Martin Luther King, Jr. worked very closely together. What can we learn from their example?

SH: Some of the things that I took from growing up in that era were the importance of being courageous, of realizing that a religious person can never be indifferent or callous. My father used to say that the central teaching of Judaism is compassion — God’s compassion for us, and the compassion we have to have for others. There is a way, somehow, to carve the callousness, and the calluses, from our hearts and experience compassion. That’s an important starting point.

Susannah Heschel holds the Eli Black Chair on Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. She is the editor of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity , an anthology of essays by her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus , which won a National Jewish Book Award.

This article appears in the Religion and Violence issue of Trinity News.