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| Arnold Belzer, rabbi of Congregation Mickve in Savannah, Ga., greets David Hughes, pastor of First Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., at the Baptist Center for Ethics luncheon on June 25. |
About 500 Baptists and Jews gathered for a Friday luncheon sponsored by the Baptist Center for Ethics encouraging “a new era” of improved relations between Baptists and Jews.
Between markers of a 1980 comment by an SBC president that God does not hear Jewish prayers and controversy over anti-Semitism in “The Passion of the Christ,” BCE Executive Director Robert Parham said, “Southern Baptist Convention leaders have jettisoned a wonderful tradition of interfaith dialogue, passed a resolution which targeted Jews for evangelism, prioritized Jews for conversion during their high holy days, refused to participate in joint worship services after 9/11 and compared the Jewish faith to a deadly tumor.”
“That, my Baptist friends, is more ‘Christian love’ than any group ought to bear,” Parham said.
Describing Baptist-Jewish relations as “rock bottom,” Parham compared moderate Baptists and contemporary Jews to the Bible story of Jacob and Esau facing each other after years of estrangement. “We are uncertain. We are not sure what to do. We are unclear about what steps to take.”
In an era of religious conflict, Parham urged moderate Baptists to reclaim “the best of our tradition” in relating to people of other faiths. “We would do well to reclaim the centrality of Jesus, who taught us to love our neighbors, not as means toward conversion but because it is the right thing to do,” he said.
Rabbi Arnold Mark Belzer of Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah, Ga., described his congregation’s historic relationship with First Baptist Church of Savannah.
While most scholars date the modern interfaith movement to the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, Belzer said he believes it is actually rooted in Savannah, which has featured good will between religious communities since the 1700s.
Belzer characterized the relationship between Savannah’s Baptists and Jews as “a paradigm for how the Jewish community and the Christian community can live together as friends.”
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul wrote that the cross of Jesus is “stumbling block” for Jews. Two thousand years of church-sanctioned anti-Semitism hasn’t helped.
Scott Hausman-Weiss, associate rabbi at Temple Emmanu-El in Birmingham, Ala., said as a rabbinic student studying missionizing of Jews that he learned to identify Baptists as “the evil menace, so to speak.”
When he heard that his congregation would meet temporarily in a Baptist church during a 14-month renovation of the temple, Hausman-Weiss said, “I couldn’t believe it.”
The temple accepted Southside Baptist Church’s invitation because the sanctuary didn’t include a lot of Christian symbols. One small cross atop the organ case was draped during the Jewish services.
“The problem with the cross is not that it is ugly or ostentatious,” Hausman-Weiss said. “It is that for Jews it represents the complete and utter opposite of salvation.”
Jews associate the cross with “mayhem and murder and institutional hatred,” Hausman-Weiss said.
For that reason, everyone was surprised when one service the congregation forgot to cover the cross, because it was no longer offensive. The experience, Hausman-Weiss said, “proves that symbols and institutions are not eternally marred by th