Each morning I begin the day with my prayers, an eclectic array of lines drawn from traditional Jewish prayers; I end with the Shema, the affirmation that Jews, that I, have heard the word of God and God is one. “Hear, O’Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”
The Shema is the closest that Jews have to a creed; it is found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. The text is foundational to the giving of the covenant; it seals the covenant in memory and embrace. As have most Jews, I have been reciting this since I was a child. And now, after my children awake, I recite it again with them:
You shall love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, inscribe them on your doorposts of your house and on your gates.
The affirmation of God, the affirmation of the covenant, is also, ironically, the martyr’s prayer, the prayer that Jews recite moments before their death. Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, I knew the Shema was the martyr’s prayer before I knew where to find it in the Torah; its original context was somehow transported to a different day and time. I was taught the prayer as an act of remembrance for those who had died in the Holocaust, and if I, God forbid, faced the same situation. As with those who perished in the Holocaust these might be my last words on earth.
Even more, I think of this prayer as one that will be with me as I step forward, commit myself to justice and reconciliation, even at a personal cost. With my children I also think of their preparation for commitment and the consequences of that commitment. A strange thought: to prepare your children for commitments that can be costly.
In 1980 I thought of this prayer when I heard that Archbishop Romero had been assassinated and then, without reflection, I recited it. I was at that time at the epicenter of liberation theology in North America, Maryknoll, where two Maryknoll Sisters had been martyred in El Salvador just months earlier.
The people at Maryknoll knew these women well as classmates, friends and comrades. I had students in El Slavador, and some of them knew Archbishop Romero. I had just met Gustavo Gutierrez and others involved in the movement. I was beginning to be immersed in the world of liberation theology, a world that emphasized the God of Life.
It was also a world of death. Was there a God of death? As some wrote, the God of Death is a non-being worshiped by the powerful, a form of idolatry. The God of Life, the real and living God, was the one who prompted the poor and the marginalized to struggle for more and a better life. Those who died in that struggle defied death; they were embraced and resurrected by the God of life; even in their death they seeded the world for more life.
Here I was reciting the martyr’s prayer as a child as a lament for those who had perished and for my own life, as a memory and possibility. But what Jew was prepared for the rise of martyrdom in our time and, even more startling, within a religion that had for more than a thousand years perpetrated martyrdom on the Jewish people?
The conceptual difficulty of understanding this massive transformation was countered by attending the liturgies of those who were now named as martyrs, liturgies presided over and peopled by those who knew them.
The whirlwind of publicity, the politicization of the deaths of the Maryknoll Sisters and of Romero, was immediate in those early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the escalating policies of repression in Central America, sponsored and funded by the United States government. Early on, Maryknoll and others concerned with the fate of the Religious and the people of El Salvador distanced themselves from the political. After all, the Church was charged with preaching the Gospel, not playing politics. Others who were against the emerging Church stance on behalf of the poor spoke critically of the Church as entering the political realm. Soon the discussion was divided by those who saw the Maryknoll Sisters and Romero as martyrs and those who saw them as utopian dreamers who had crossed the political red line.
I was not taken in by this debate. Instead I wondered about the incredible transformations of Christianity in the last decades, first on the question of the Jews and now on the defense of the poor. Had Constantinian Christianity simply been a phase of Christian history, one that endured for over a thousand years and seemed intrinsic to its very life? Was this phase of Christianity over or was this a new civil war within Christianity, a war over the very meaning of the Christian witness? Phase or war, the outcome was uncertain. After all the rulers ruled; those in opposition were being celebrated as martyrs.
Did God receive their testimony? Was their testimony to the depth of their faith and to humanity? Could Christianity celebrate its martyrs in a manner as triumphant as those who celebrated Christianity in its conquests?
Triumphalism in death is a conceit practiced in proximity to the powerful. The powerful are thereby tainted even as their power may be further consolidated. The power of the martyr’s death, at least its claim, is that material and political power is transitory, always unstable and destined to collapse. The martyr is testimony to that collapsing idolatry, a marker on the way that is planted like a cross on the demise of empire.
As I sat through the Masses at Maryknoll, I wondered at this sense of triumph. The certainty of resurrection, the too easy claim of God’s faithfulness, struck a wrong chord. It was as if their deaths were cleansed of the brutality that befell them, the women raped and shot at point blank range, Romero assassinated as he intoned God’s protection and grace.
My memories raced to the Holocaust and the question, despite the recitation of the Shema, of whether they were victims or martyrs. After all, martyrs are thought to have a choice in their testimony of faith, the ability to recant or even convert. Those who died in the Holocaust did not have that chance and they were murdered regardless of whether they had faith or not. They were murdered because they were Jews. Was God with the Jews who died by the millions?
Was God with the Sisters and Romero as they were brutally murdered?
With Romero it is clear; his religious vision guided him until the end. Whether God was with him is unknown. He asserted, beautifully, tragically, hauntingly, that he knew that God was with him and the people of El Salvador. He said it often in his last days: “I should mention to you that I do not believe in death, but in resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise in the Salvadoran people.”
This thought was not an idle one, mystifying and transforming death into life without cost; it was not an afterthought. Rather the preface was hard hitting, deeply political and religious at the same time, asserting his authority and the authority of the Church: We warn the government to take seriously that reforms achieved with so much blood serve no one. In the name of God, then, and in the name of the suffering people, whose cries rise to the heavens, every day more steadily. I beg, I ask, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression.”
Was there ever a more haunting statement of hope for a world where the divisions of class and culture cease and empires collapse into a community foreseen in parts of the Torah and the New Testament? In these words there seems no division of religion either; the empire that Christianity followed and blessed is foresworn. History is at a standstill, even the progress of reform is called to account.
Is this the moment of the giving of the covenant, rehearsed and expanded at a different time and place? Or is this the time of the covenant that never changes, the offer of fidelity always available in the here and now? “Take to heart these instructions I charge you with this day.”
“Impress them upon your children.” This transposition: then, Jews as martyrs in Christian Europe; now, Christian martyrs in Christian Central America.
What do I say to my children now that the martyrs are Christian, for their faith and for humanity, and that now, with our new-found power, Jews are creating martyrs?
The truth of this is clear in Israel and Palestine; it was only dawning on me at the time that I was becoming acquainted with liberation theology. The death of the Maryknoll Sisters and Romero were part of my own awakening, paradoxically, as a Jew. As I traveled throughout Lain America, Asia and Africa in Christian liberation circles, I was drawn back to the meaning of Jewish testimony today. Hadn’t we now embraced a Constantinianism that had infected Christianity and ultimately led to the martyrdom I am speaking of today? A Constantinian Judaism had arrived, though the words to describe it would come later.
The martyrdom of the women and Romero was in close proximity to Constantinian Judaism. As I embarked on writing what would become Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, I became aware of Israel’s military and security role in the dictatorships of the Americas. I also learned of Israel’s close relationship with South African apartheid, where Israel and South Africa together explored and developed atomic and nuclear arms.
I discovered these alliances as I researched the origins of the state of Israel, the displacement of the Palestinians, and the continuing expansion of Israel after 1967. While uncovering these disturbing facts in the mid-1980s was difficult, in retrospect that seems to have been almost an innocent time. Today the expansion of Israel is on the verge of completion, as is the Wall that will segment, surround and ghettoize the Palestinian people. The 1980s were before the policy of might and beatings, before the use of helicopter gunships that target defenseless villages and towns, before the settlement expansion and permanence, before the hope for a real two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ended. Or was I, even in my new-found learning, simply naive?
In the 1980s I also visited Israel many times, and it was at that time that I began to move among Palestinians. There under occupation, Palestinian life was marked by the violence perpetrated by Jews in Israel. The Jewish establishment in America enabled this violence with a narrative of Jewish innocence and redemption. Was this the same innocence and redemption that Christians used as a shield for their violence against the Jews of Europe, but also, among other areas of the world, in the conquest of the Americas?
I was brought into homes in Gaza and the West Bank where children had been lost, murdered by Israeli soldiers for stone throwing, for resisting home demolitions or for even crying out against the murder of a family member. There I sat with families, often large and poor, surrounded by framed portraits of their sons, murdered - and yes, martyred - by Israel. I wondered if these known to the Palestinians as martyrs were also martyrs to me. Were they enfolded into my history, part of the Jewish narrative that I affirm, so that now the separation of Jew and Palestinian has been foreclosed?
It was all happening at the same time: the Maryknoll Sisters and Romero; my understanding of a sea-change in Jewish life; the Palestinian martyrs. The transformation of Christianity and Judaism in opposite directions; the emerging civil war within both Christianity and Judaism between those who seek empire and those who struggle for community; the expansion of martyrdom and thus of fidelity to a broader tradition of faith and struggle. This broader tradition included those throughout history and today who struggled, with and without faith, against empire and for another way of life. Was this the tradition I genuinely belonged to, a tradition that included some Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, agnostics and Jews? Was this my tangible particularity, one I would then hand down to my children?
“Inscribe them on your doorposts.” The mezzot on my doorposts carries the Shema in full, hearkening back to the Exodus where the homes of the Israelites were marked to be passed over so that death mandated by God for the Egyptians would leave the Israelites untouched. When I pass and touch the mezzuah as I enter and leave my home, I am admonished to be just and compassionate; the gateways of my home are signed with this intent. In a world of empire, I must reach out to the stranger, widow and orphan, to the poor and marginalized, as a sign of the covenant and as a sign of God’s presence. I must move toward community with others so moved; that is my community.
Those who pursue empire, whatever their denomination, are also part of a joint effort. They, too, range across denominations and religions. They are also part of a tradition, a tradition that produces martyrs, again across the religious and ethnic boundaries. The great, fundamental, I would say, foundational division is now named. The question of why it has taken us so long to discern these true divisions and why we have accepted the established oneness of faith and nation for so long is a mystery, one covered in the blood of the martyrs.
Still, no matter this recognition of the broader tradition of faith and struggle, the Cross remains for me a symbol of violence; I shudder as it approaches me. Now the Star of David, adorning a military that subjugates another people, also produces that tremor for Palestinians - and for me.
Here lies the great crime of those who pursue empire in the name of religion. The very symbols which produce meaning and nurture a people, even and especially in their suffering, are debased in the cycle of violence and atrocity they engender. Those very symbols, the Cross and the Star, become infected with atrocity. Such are the ways of Constantinian religion, whether it be in its Christian, Jewish or Islamic variant.
Do the martyrs rescue those symbols, and thus the tradition, from this infection, cleansing the virus from the religion and thus restoring it to health and well being? Another twist: those who murder do so in the name of that religion; they also murder the dissenters within - or hand them over, or silence them in the name of that very religion.
The martyrs are the prophets silenced, surrounded by violence, doomed. The doomed prophet is another way of looking at the Catholic women and Romero himself, or the prophetic embodied in them, struggling to articulate a truth that will live on in history, in the history of the people, as a seed for the generations of prophets yet to come.
Martin Buber, the great Jewish religious figure, understood this well when he spoke about the circle of prophets that spiral through history, staking out an alternative history that identifies with the suffering and the hope that one day the world will revolve around justice and community rather than violence and empire. As witnesses to the failure of Israel live to see its vision and mission, the prophets struggled against inertia, greed and brokenness. Through the ages they continue to lift up a destiny inscribed upon Israel from the beginning, that of a liberated and liberating people and a God that is with Israel in that struggle for a new kind of community.
Before his death Martin Luther King, Jr. described this vision as the beloved community. His language was quite beautiful, having confidence in a universe with an arc that bends toward justice.
Through failure and martyrdom?
The German and larger European Jewish communities that Buber came from and served were annihilated. The Palestine that Buber entered as a refugee from the Nazis, the Jewish homeland that Buber sought to build alongside the Arabs in Palestine, was already failing in his lifetime. King’s vision of an America based on values and character rather than race, a demilitarized America that embodied the justice and freedom it spoke about, was, in his lifetime, severely challenged by entrenched racism and America’s war in Vietnam. King’s assassination poignantly enshrined this sense of failure.
The prophetic then as failure. Does the failure of the prophetic become deeper in death?
In some ways yes. In other ways no.
Yes in the sense that the life that embodies the prophetic is no more; the vision become articulate is suspended, as it were, in mid-sentence. The words that we want and need to hear, the presence that so illumines our own destiny, can now be found only in picture, representing the prophet who is no more.
No because the life that is gone is also rescued from the moments after, a duration that is frustrating in its ordinariness and in the fact that the prophetic vision will not come to pass. Alive the prophet feels the pain of his commitment since any resolution will be partial, limited, contained and overturned. Alive the prophet may even glimpse the promised land as it actually will become.
So in death the prophet martyr is spared the future and perhaps even his loss of the prophetic. Imagine Buber today with Star of David Helicopter gunships patrolling the Palestinian territories. Or King with the victory of civil rights so partial and, in its own way, conforming to power. Imagine King with his successor, Jesse Jackson, and the disappointment he would feel. Imagine the Maryknoll Sisters and Romero with a changed and unchanged El Salvador.
In martyrdom the prophet is spared a reality that would quiet and sear his soul.
The Maryknoll Sisters and Romero, Buber and King, and Christians and Jews and Muslims of conscience - of every faith and community throughout history - are the voice of the doomed prophets and the prophetic that will never die. Remembering them as they have been and are handed over by all political and religious authorities to be disciplined, mocked and executed is a necessity. It represents our stake in the prophetic voice and the foundation for our call.
Our call to be prophets? Throughout history there have only been the few that we can genuinely call prophets. Why some are prophets is a mystery. Are they called; is theirs a destiny felt within themselves? If so, where does that destiny come from? How does it unfold? Does this separate them from the rest of us? Or is it simply that they, at the appointed time, stand up where others back down?
Perhaps at other moments they did back down or will in the future. The point is that they stood up, and for a moment or a lifetime, for causes and people that are unpopular with the powers that be. The prophets who say no to unjust power and die as a consequence also say yes to another way of living. Their death is a prophetic moment, a martyrdom, a testimony to life.
Yet the prophet martyrs are nothing if they stand alone and they do not and cannot stand alone. The prophet martyrs come from traditions that, though deeply bruised and abused, remain as subversive memories; memories of a calling and destiny, memories of another way.
Those memories are those of the community and so call others to that calling and destiny. Always, there is a community that gathers around the prophet martyr; they are witnesses beyond his death. They bond together to carry on the mission.
Perhaps there is a yet another bonding that accompanies us, albeit, for now, without articulation. What if the death of the prophet martyr in one part of the world and coming from a particular tradition responds to and begins the healing of a suffering at another time and place or even anticipates a future time when a healing is needed or the foundations for another in that same line.
I think here, in Italy, of Primo Levi who, in his own struggle and the struggle of his people, experienced an inversion of hope so terrible that even the Shema could not be recited unchanged. Thus his haunting poem, Shema:
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who, returning at evening, find,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way
When you go to bed, when you rise:
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
On the one hand, Levi’s Shema serves a retrospective celebration of the martyrs life. The dead are not cleaned up; they remain without names or hope. Memory here is the telling of the story that has no transformed story or moral. The tale is to be told; instead of a renewed boldness of action in the future only a penalty is invoked for not telling the story. Levi’s Shema rejects a rising or a symbolic seeding of the earth. Blood is blood; the fight for a crust of bread remains; the eyes are empty.
Did Romero ever read Levi’s Shema?
I doubt it.
Romero does not believe in death. Romero’s rising is within the history of his people, but that history, at least in Romero’s vision, will be different: it will be redeemed. In fact, Romero’s death, along with the Maryknoll women and the thousands of other Salvadorans who died, is preparation for that moment of redemption. In this sense the dead are already redeemed, the prophet martyr among them.
Does Levi’s Shema stop Romero’s rising? Does Romero’s rising add a stanza to Levi’s poem, an ending not unlike Job? Or do Romero and Levi simply stand side by side, without comment or theory?
In the decades after there are those who still struggle. Our fidelity is to their vision, one that should be inscribed on all of our doorposts. The Shema within the mezzuah, the mezzuah now expanded with the texts of all prophets, the words of Romero too: “I beg, I ask, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression.”
