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April 13, 2001/Nisan 20, 5761, Vol. 53, No.28
Turn iconoclasm on its head
BARRY COHEN
Editor
I'll admit it. When I was a little boy in religious school and imagined Abraham traveling through the Promised Land, I pictured an old man with a long-flowing beard, wearing sandals and a robe. And he was white. I kept that image in my head until I became an adult.
I don't exactly remember when, but I had a moment of clarity: Abraham, born and raised in what is now Iraq, was no Caucasian. The tumblers clicked and I realized that no one in our Torah, from Adam to Ezra, was white.
I was not threatened by this realization. If anything, I felt foolish to have thought that anyone in our ancient past looked anything like me.
But then again, childhood conceptions, images and beliefs - notions that form the foundation of our religious identities - are difficult to question and even more difficult to change.
Just ask Kathleen Parker. She wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in the April 2 issue of The Arizona Republic entitled, "Jesus Christ gets a makeover for Easter." (Search the archives at www.arizonarepublic.com.) Her article is a rant and rave about "Jesus, the Early Years," a documentary airing on the Discovery Channel at 8 p.m. Sunday, April 15. She complains that the program's computer-generated Jesus, based on what a Jew may have looked like 2,000 years ago, destroys her childhood image of him as an Aryan man, "wispy pale and blue-eyed." She off-handedly rejects the idea, based on historical record and rational investigation, that her Jesus could have looked different, foreign, alien.
Parker needs a moment of clarity. She should visit the Discovery Web page, dsc.discovery.com and study the incarnations of Jesus that appear there, from different times, from different lands.
Parker's op-ed piece and the Discovery Channel documentary are valuable reminders to us as Jews that we are Middle Eastern, North African, Eastern European, Western European, North American, South American and Australian. We possess beautifully overwhelming ways of looking, being and doing Jewish.
Jewish scholars believe we are living in a post-denominational age, that we are moving beyond Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Orthodox to an identity yet to be labeled or defined. The reality we face is that no expression of Judaism is more truthful, meaningful or legitimate than any other. Every expression of Judaism - spanning through a history thousands of years old and existing today, across a world of diverse peoples and lands - possesses truth, meaning, legitimacy.
Let's take this opportunity of springtime and rebirth to open our eyes to traditions, beliefs and practices beyond our family, our synagogue, our city and our nation. While doing so is often painful, awkward and humbling, we will gain a better understanding of why we have survived and thrived for thousands of years.
Parker condemns alternate religious conceptions as iconoclastic, attacking and seeking to destroy her ideas and beliefs.
But learning more about our religion, faith, practice and ideas can be an inherently productive undertaking; the effort involves gathering our people's widely held beliefs to build and enhance our identities. In the process, we will discover the greater truth, meaning and legitimacy of Judaism.
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