Judaism: an introduction by C. M. Hoffman

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Visiting the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam last summer I was really aware of how little I actually know about the Jewish faith and people and getting this book out the library as a small step to address that.

It is part of the “Teach Yourself” series, but in a number of places it is self aware that the practice and life of a religion and a people is not something that you can actually “teach yourself” - it is fundamentally embodied, only by living it in community will you really have the possibility to “get it”.

But within those limits this was a good introduction – in part helping to see the differences between different parts of the Jewish community, the dynamics between the religious and the cultural identities, overlapping be not co-determinate – perhaps just giving me a glimpse of how much I don't know, don't understand.

It was also fairly abrupt about the ways in which Christians misunderstand Jews and Judaism. Even when you get past the long painful history of Christians demonising Jews as the murderers of Christ that are still a number of ways in which well intentioned Christians act in ways that do not actually treat the Jewish religion with the respect and dignity that it deserves.

This affirmed a discomfort I have always had about the habit around Holy Week of Christians holding Seder meals as a way to teach us something about Jesus' Last Supper and the Eucharist. Now there are flaws even from a purely Christian perspective around the fact that it is debatable whether the Last Supper was a Passover Meal, and, even if it was, the extent that it was the primary model for the Eucharist that developed.

Following the destruction of the Temple many Jewish rituals went through significant transformation, and there is a body of evidence that the Eucharist and the Seder Meal actually grow up alongside one another in the post-Temple era in a period when Jewish and Christian communities still overlapped – so where you might see common features it is just as possible that the Seder took from the Eucharist as it is that the Eucharist took from the Seder.

But the real problem is the arrogance – if the shoe was on the other foot and a group of Jews got together and held themselves a Eucharist as an “experience” I think Christians would be puzzled, probably offended, and certainly highly unlikely to see this as the act of solidarity and friendship which we ascribe to ourselves when we sit down for a Seder.