A Menorah in My Window: A Christian Woman’s Response to Christian Anti-Semitism
A Menorah in My Window: A Christian Woman’s Response to Christian Anti-Semitism
It was just a cheap wooden children’s menorah, intended as a teaching aid and not as a ceremonial object. It was painted a gaudy blue, with a pasteboard cut-out of a train attached to the wooden backing with springs, and it held eight wooden “candles” that fit into the holes on top like pegs into a cribbage board. My Mom would have called it “tacky.”
My menorah was a far cry from the precious ancestral menorah of the story of “The Lost Menorah,” to which I breathlessly listened on NPR every Hanukkah. It bore no resemblance to the family menorah in the story that Leonard Nimoy so tenderly narrated in “Hanukkah in Story and Song.” But it was the only menorah left in Hobby Lobby, and I wanted it in time for Hanukkah 2018 to teach my children the story of the Jewish Festival of Lights.
The 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh woke me up to the horror of rising antisemitism. This wasn’t resentful rumblings on social media or on my university campus. This was the slaughter of innocent people at worship, and it was close to home.
I thought nothing could feel so close and so personal as the Pittsburgh synagogue attacks. But when I woke up early on the morning of October 7, 2023, to the news that the State of Israel was under attack and that a state of war existed between Israel and Hamas, I knew I was wrong. These were my people who were under attack.
There are no words, only tears, only anguish and sorrow too deep to be eased by tears, for the atrocities committed that day. But for me, the most horrifying spectacle was the outpouring of antisemitic hatred in direct response to the unspeakable horrors unleashed in Israel. The antisemitism from the political Left, from academia, from activists of all stripes, appalled me but did not surprise me. As a recent university graduate, I’ve been watching that tide rising for years. But the worst antisemitism I have seen comes from my fellow Christians.
As a Christian woman raised fundamentalist evangelical, love for and kinship with the Jewish people and fealty to the State of Israel is woven into the very warp and weft of my being. Until October 7, 2023, I assumed all Christians felt the same way.
Growing up as a fundamentalist evangelical, I was privileged to sit under the sound of thousands of hours of lectures on the Tabernacle, the offerings and feasts, the chronicles of the kings of Israel, and the prophets. We ingested the stories of the Children of Israel leaving Egypt with our mother’s milk. We cut our teeth on the story of David and Goliath. I learned the story of Ruth, for whom I am named, long before I could appreciate the timeless beauty of the love story.
When we got a little older, we learned to stand strong in the face of temptation by reading about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who “wouldn’t bow, wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t burn.” We “dared to be a Daniel.”
I spent countless hours in private, curled up in the reading corner of my room, reading the Old Testament for myself, with special interest in the prophetic books from Isaiah to Malachi, marking up my Bible, and memorizing whole passages. I did not understand at the time, but I was taking the stories of the Jewish people into my very being, and braiding their stories together with my story.
We read the Bible aloud every night as a family as well, not even skipping the piles of bloody foreskins and those awful jaw-breakers in Chronicles. Not only did we read the Bible; we sang it constantly. Our very hymnody was studded with allusions, not only to the River Jordan and the Promised Land but to Eshcol’s grapes and the water of Marah and the manna in the wilderness. My best friend’s mother sang Psalm 131 (“let Israel hope in the Lord”) as a lullaby, and we sang the twenty-fifth psalm as a canon.
Today, when I see Christians casually dismissing the Old Testament as “not important” because “we have the New Testament” now, and casually dismissing the Jewish people as “not important” because “the Church has replaced the nation of Israel,” I am heartsick. But the absolute worst response to the Hamas attacks that I’ve seen from the Christian community? “The Jews had it coming because they killed Jesus.”
I trust I am speaking as a representative of all Christendom when I categorically condemn this statement. You cannot be a Christian and believe that the Jews are solely responsible for the death of Jesus. Christians believe that the crucifixion of Jesus was committed by everyone and was for everyone, and that the blood of Jesus is not a condemnation of the Jewish people but rather a fulfillment of the story of the spotless lamb sacrificed at Passover, and that we are protected by the blood on the lintel and two side posts. By definition, condemning the Jewish people for the death of Jesus is unChristian.
If there was ever a time when people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and beliefs, needed to come together in love and sorrow, it is right now. There is a tide in the affairs of men that has produced such evil as our world has not seen since the Holocaust, and if we are to overcome, we have to overcome that evil and that hatred with goodness and love. We Christians cannot afford to sit up on our high horses and turn up our noses at the suffering of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Because without Israel, there would be no Christ and no Christians.
I have been standing for and with Israel since I was an eleven-year-old apolitical nerd girl deep-diving into eschatology, and I’m not about to shift my moorings at this late date. The love and kinship for the Jewish people was nurtured in those formative years poring over the Old Testament.
My silly little teaching menorah wasn’t visible from my window. And even if it had been, the small New England village I call home isn’t exactly known for its antisemitism. That menorah was merely symbolic of a resolution forming in my heart. I hope that this essay will serve as a visible menorah in my window, as a sign of love for and solidarity with the Jewish people, and as a call to my fellow Christians to love likewise.
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Very well said. I have also been appalled at the venom spewed at Israel & Jews from those who call themselves Christians. They have apparently not read much of their bibles, in old and new testaments. Much prayer is going up for an awakening in the church.
Well said Ruth Anne. When I got involved in my church’s youth group and activities in the 1980s I took a lot of flak from the guys I played sports with. Growing up on Long Island gave me the opportunity to have a lot of Jewish friends. They were the ones who said don’t let them bully you and stand strong.