The Shema

We live in a world that seems to endlessly talk of love. Yet we seldom see love in action. Love is one of the most misused and abused words in the English language. People “love” all types of things, experiences, ideas, places, interests, pleasures, and types of people.

The Scriptures tell us that “God is love” in 1 John. God’s love is a very specific and special type of love. Yet many go far beyond this truth, preaching that love itself is a god of sorts. There are really two types of love. Love from below, human defined love, which has nearly endless definitions. And love from above, divine love, Agape. Throughout human history, the Jewish people were chosen by God to reveal this special type of love, Agape, to the world.

In Deuteronomy Chapter 6, God, or Hashem, gave the Shema to the Jewish people. The Tanakh is the testament of the Jewish people in history. The Tanakh is also called the Old Testament by Christians. In the Tanakh, God describes how He loved his chosen people, the Jewish people, as the primary example of His Agape love. As a result, He refers Jews as His “treasure” and “the apple of my eye.”

God taught the Jewish people how to love Him through His love for them. He loved first, demonstrating this higher love from above. In turn, God commanded the Jewish people to love each other in the same manner. To teach them, in Deuteronomy Chapter 6, God, or Hashem, gave the Shema to the Jewish people. Deuteronomy 6: 4-6 states the Shema:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our GOD, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your GOD with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your head, and they be as frontlet between your eyes.

Once God taught them the Shema, to love God, He then taught the Jewish people to love your neighbor as yourself.

Why are Jews so hated today? Because they proclaimed the one true God, Yahweh, to the whole world. The word God is not even used by many Jews today. They referred to the Most High, Hashem, by four Hebrew letters known as the Tetragrammaton, which is sometimes expressed as Jehovah or Yahweh. The God of the Jews is a not an idol like the other “gods” of this world. Rather, He is the Creator of heaven and earth who embodies and teaches Agape love. He is God alone. Thus, the Jewish people proclaimed one God. Another way of saying this is that the Jews told the world about monotheism. One God.

In the New Testament, God continues his revelation to followers of Jesus Christ, who repeated the Shema verbatim. The same love that God had for the Jews, He now revealed to the Gentiles through Jesus Christ. Christians were to love each other, and to love others as God loves. The Good Samaritan is an example of how love should function for those who truly love God. And the Cross is the ultimate expression of love for Gentiles. God Himself gives His own Son to demonstrate His love for this fallen world.

Sadly, very few Gentiles demonstrated Agape love for their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust. On the contrary, many Gentiles demonstrated hatred and silent indifference. Most of these Gentiles called themselves Christians. Christians who did not directly participate in brutality and mass murder frequently looked away, engaging in complicit silence. Other religious Gentiles informed on their Jewish neighbors, extorted money from Jews, misappropriated Jewish property, and quietly aided and abetted local authorities.

Over 99% of those individuals responsible for Nazi genocide escaped secular justice, an affront against our Jewish neighbors, and a dark stain on the conscience of humanity. Gentile sins of omission and commission during the Holocaust are still a blemish on the earthly church that claims to be following Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior, God, King, Creator, Shepherd, Great Physician, and the Way, Truth, & Life, as well as Light of the world (John 8:12). Jesus Christ was a “man of sorrows.” If we are being sanctified in His Image, we will do likewise.

Jesus said “Unless you repent, you shall likewise perish (Luke 13:3),” and “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Many means majority. How terrifying that most people who believe they are Christian will hear Jesus Christ reject them on their judgment day!

There were a few Christians, or followers of Jesus Christ, who did walk the Shema like Good Samaritans. They loved their Jewish neighbors, often risking their lives. Pastor Heinrich Gruber is not as well-known as other Christians such as Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie Ten Boom, who stood up to the Nazi regime and worked to rescue Jewish people during the Holocaust. Pastor Gruber was a witness at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. He was the only German called to testify.

Adolf Eichmann was one of the primary architects of the Holocaust. After World War II, he obtained false papers through the Nazi Rat Lines and escaped to Argentina, until Israeli Mossad agents arrested him. Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem and found guilty of crimes against Jewish humanity and related war crimes. He was executed on June 1, 1962, by hanging.

At Eichmann’s trial, Pastor Gruber testified about his encounter with Eichmann during World War II, when Gruber was helping Jewish people and “non-Aryan” Christian Jews through the Bureau Gruber. He had been ordered to appear before Eichmann to give an account of his activities. Pastor Gruber was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to Sachsenhausen, where he had his teeth knocked out by SS guards, as well as Dachau concentration camp. He told the court: Perhaps he took pity on me. I don’t know if the accused remembers this incident. He (Eichmann) said: “Why are you bothering with these Jews, anyway? No one will thank you for this work. Why all this big fuss for the Jews?

I answered him, ‘Do you know the road that leads from Jerusalem to Jericho? And then I said, ‘Once there was a Jew lying on this road, who was the victim of robbers. And then someone came along who was not a Jew and he helped him. The Lord alone I obey says to me, “Go thou and do likewise.” That is my answer.

Gruber also noted that Eichman was a man who would not respond to pleas for mercy. He also reportedly had a “demonic hatred of Jews.” The parable of the Good Samaritan was a powerful motivator for Pastor Gruber to do what was right in God’s eyes.

Wiktoria and Jozef Ulma, a Polish couple who hid eight Jewish people in their farmhouse during the Holocaust, are another example of Good Samaritans from a Biblical perspective. Before executing the couple and their six children, and throwing their bodies into a ditch, the Nazis executed these Jews in front of the Ulma family.

One of the passages that was emphasized in the Ulma’s Bible was the Good Samaritan. In response to this passage, they wrote “yes!” The Ulma’s understood that the truly righteous are not religious hypocrites, but the humble who seek God’s grace and mercy, and obey His command to love their neighbors. They understood that everyone, Jew, Gentile, or Samaritan, was their neighbor. More importantly, the Ulma’s fulfilled God’s command to be good neighbors themselves.

The Ulma’s understood that the text was more than just intellectual knowledge or moral principles, but a way of life that demanded the highest price. Their faithfulness to the Scriptures lead to the entire family’s execution. Their love of their neighbors is an example of Agape, the sacrificial love God has for mankind. The Ulma’s actions demonstrated that they were obedient to the Shema, the call to love God with “all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your strength.” All who love God will love their neighbors.

In the Old Testament or Tanakh, Deuteronomy 6: 4-6 states the Shema:

Love for GOD Almighty, Hashem, is to be written on our hearts, seen through our eyes, and always at the forefront of our minds. This is Yahweh’s command to all humanity, not just the Jewish people.

Solomon, in his prayer at the dedication of the first temple in Jerusalem, said:

Foreigners will hear about you and your mighty power, and some of them will come to live among your people Israel. If any of them pray toward this temple, listen from your home in heaven and answer their prayers. Then everyone on earth will worship you, just like your people Israel, and they will know that I have built this temple to honor you.

And the prophet Zechariah wrote in Zechariah 8:23:

Thus says the LORD of hosts: In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”

The goal of the LORD has always been to use the Jewish people to bring “the nations of every tongue” to Him. That day is coming…very soon.

In the New Testament, Jesus Christ repeated the Shema verbatim, in Mark 12:28-30, which has been called The Great Commandment:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing them answered them well, asked them: “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you love the Lord your God with all your heard and with all you soul and with all your strength.’ (The Shema) The second is this: ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

And the scribe said to him, “You are right, teacher.” You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.”

Like a good Rabboni, Jesus Christ was debating with Jewish scribes about the truth of the commandments. Jewish men today, whether in Jerusalem or New York City, also debate these questions as they study the Talmud, which is a historical record of these rabbinical debates about the Tanakh. Jesus Christ reminds us that the Shema, a Jewish prayer recited in the morning and evening devout orthodox Jews, is the basis for our love for God, or Hashem, and the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves in the New Testament.

Leviticus 19:18 states:

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

Do you love the Most High? Then live out the Shema in your daily life. Love your neighbors, near and far. 1 John reminds us that this not a new commandment, but an old one:

Beloved, I am not writing to you a new commandment, but an old one, which you have had from the beginning. This commandment is the message you have heard. (1 John 2:7)

The Shema has been taught by Yahweh “from the beginning,” but now believers are sealed with the Holy Spirit to live in this love and truth.

I John: if you see a brother

2 John reminds we are to love others, as the parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates:

Beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the brethren and for strangers, who have borne witness of your love before the church.

John reminds us to love other believers, as well as strangers and those outside the church. Both are an effective witness of a believer’s love for God.

Hate is the very antithesis of love, as 1 John 2:9-10 notes:

Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling.

Hate is darkness, the opposite of light and love. Those who walk in hate are without love and disobedient to God Almighty. Those who walk in love are walking in obedience to God by demonstrating their love for others.

Agape love is not natural to human beings. Because of our selfish human desires, the flesh, which is sinful and fallen. Every person is naturally self-centered. Every human being readily serves what has rightly been called the mini-trinity, “me, myself, and I.” Serving others in a sacrificial way is extremely difficult.

In contrast, Agape love can only be perfectly demonstrated by God Himself. He alone is the highest example of Agape love. This type of love involves much more than understanding, knowledge, an ideal, lawfulness, outward appearance, morality, or reciprocity. The King James Bible uses the word “charity” for Agape love. Charity is love in action. Agape is more than only affection or adoration. Agape is a willingness to act for the benefit of another. Emanuel Levinas speaks of coming face to face with “the other,” and putting his or her benefit above my own. Rather than mutual benefit, the other is valued above self. Only God Almighty has consistently, unreservedly, and perfectly demonstrated Agape love throughout human history.

Agape love involves a one-to-one relationship. 1 John 3:16-19 demonstrates that love is individual rather than collective:

By this we know love, because He (Jesus Christ) laid down His life for us. And we (plural) also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren (plural). But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother (singular) in need, and shuts up his (singular) heart from him (singular), how does the love of God abide in him (singular)? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And by this we know we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him.

The language in this verse moves from a group (we-brethren) to individual (him) expressions of love in practical action. Just as God wants a personal, intimate relationship with each believer to express His love, he wants us to demonstrate His love in a personal, sacrificial relationship with another person.

Many professing Christians during the Holocaust had intellectual knowledge of the Scriptures, God, and religious ideas. But the churches themselves, Catholic, Luther, and Protestant, were abysmal failures when it was time to act on the truth of Agape love as outlined in the Tanakh and the New Testament Scriptures.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the verbal expression of love for God, but failing to demonstrate this love toward our neighbors, “cheap grace.” People who believed in cheap grace were unwilling to, or ineffective in, standing up for their Jewish neighbors and their children. Bonhoeffer argued that a professing Christian cannot proclaim belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and then act completely contrary to everything He taught.

Perhaps as Charles Spurgeon stated, the distance to salvation is 18 inches, from the head to the heart. Intellectual knowledge is not the same as a heartfelt love that expresses in concerted action. Even worse, most theologians during the Holocaust were pro-Hitler and antisemitic. They could provide a supposed Scriptural basis for their hatred, claiming that God was judging the Jews, when the Scriptures are clear that God has offered grace to everyone, first to the Jews and then to the Gentile, and that Jewish Christ died willingly in Agape love for the sins of the world. Agape love must act. Followers of Jesus Christ demonstrate Agape love, although imperfectly, toward their neighbors. Those who truly know God display yada, or relational intimacy. Yada is relational rather than solely informational.

C.G. Jung, the eminent psychologist, in his book, The Undiscovered Self, after examining the human potential for evil, identified what he called the shadow. Christians, in contrast, call the shadow sin. To reduce and potentially neutralize the destructive nature of the shadow or sin, Jung believed: the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principal of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbor.

Although Jung was not a traditional Christian believer, his analysis of the human heart and mind led him to the conclusion that Christian love was the essential for human relationships and societal cohesion. However, he warned: it is just this love of one’s fellow man that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection.

Jesus Christ revealed this same truth, although with authority from above, in Matthew 7:3-5:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

During the Holocaust, the church was quick to see the speck in the eyes of their Jewish neighbors. Jung would say that Gentiles saw their own shadow, or evil side, in Jews as a projection. That is, Gentiles saw their own sins in Jews. They then accused the Jews of being evil, and, eventually, unhuman. The Jewish people became a scapegoat for every problem and tribulation suffered by Europe. Throughout history, the Jewish people have suffered as scapegoats.

Seeing evil in another human being allows us to dehumanize the other. It prevents me from looking at my own faults and impure heart. I heard someone recently say, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, “I no longer see these liberals as human.” The shooter of Charlie Kirk, I have become aware, had the same thought. He saw Kirk as someone evil and unhuman.

The heart or inner person is where hate begins. Hate dehumanizes. It de-images, distorts, and demonizes creations made in God’s Image. Hate calls for justice for others, but never for ourselves. Jewish people, the recipients of the world’s “oldest hatred,” antisemitism, understand this truth better than billions of Gentiles ever will.

Allowing a log in our own eye invites me to see sin and evil in others. Jesus Christ warned that the only way to see others clearly is to deal with our own sins first. What are your sins? Where do you struggle with other people? Could my struggles with others be telling me something about the “log” in my own eyes?

Jesus was warning believers, and all human beings, that it is very difficult for me to look at my own sins. Self-deception (Jeremiah 17:9), which is also present in every human being, leads to arrogant certainty and unloving condemnation of others. I can then throw stones at others so my sins are denied by me, and “projected” onto others. This self-deception allows me to maintain self-righteousness by comparing myself to others, and seeing my own character flaws in others.

The danger of projection, or as Jesus said, casting stones and seeing the speck of sawdust in my neighbor’s eye, is that it leads to dehumanization and self-righteous self-deception. Before and during the Holocaust, Jews were seen as the root cause of every problem in Germany, and, to a large degree, all over Europe. Projection allowed Gentiles to dehumanize and demonize their Jewish neighbors. Gentiles then “attacked” their own sins in their Jewish neighbors, while at the same time feeling as if they were righteous and religious, “good people.” The scholar Jan Grabowski calls this the Righteous Defense. The Bible would refer to this attitude at arrogant self-righteousness. So how do I overcome this strong human need to project my sins onto others? Jesus told a parable about a tax collector and a Pharisee to demonstrate the difference between self-righteousness and humble self-assessment. Similarly, the Apostle Paul had the right spiritual attitude in 1 Timothy 1:15: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am foremost.

This was no boast! Paul said it with repentance, humility, suffering, and human weakness.

Jesus also gave us examples of how to relate to others. As God in the flesh, Jesus Christ was able to see others clearly, with both justice and love, accountability and mercy, both our fallenness in sin and our value as human beings made in the image of God. Jesus Christ came face to face, eye to eye, with the people He evangelized and ministered to as human beings.

Emmanuel Levinas, in Humanism of the Other, writes: the face speaks. The manifestation of the face is the first discourse. Speaking is first and foremost this way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form; an opening in an opening.

The initial encounter with other human beings begins eye to eye, face to face. Speech is how the face-to-face meeting of human beings communicates through language, leading to understanding and connection. The eyes are the windows of the soul. Jewish people talked about these encounters during the Holocaust, when the eyes of another person, their face, “gave away” their motives. One Jewish man in Poland wrote: sometimes we saw the characteristic-familiar to each of us-sinister glint in the eye, which meant, “run away, this man will give you away.”

Martin Buber in I And Thou, writes about our willingness to view other human beings as objective and dehumanized, treating people as objects, or as a mean to our own ends. In I-It interactions, there is a focus on control, planning, and utility, rather than a genuine encounter that both beings are made in the image of God. I-It interactions are an egotistic, one-sided attempt to control others based on selfish motives that categorize, objectify, and ultimately dehumanize another human being.

Buber believed that authentic I-Thou relationships begin with one’s intimate love and relationship with God. Only then can we truly love other human beings. The intimacy between Jesus Christ and the Father is a primary example of an I-Thou relationship. This Agape love of the Father and Son must be the basis upon which Christians relate to others, both believers and non-believers.

Only individuals can love. Love is never collective, but one on one. Jan Grabowski speaks of the necessity of this type of love and care when rescuing Jewish people during the Holocaust:

For those who took this risk [saving Jews] nobly, it was a difficult and risky necessity to act, on their own, each separately. (p. 48, Whitewash: Poland and the Jew; The Jewish Quarterly)

While small partisan groups such as the White Rose acted collectively during the Holocaust, saving Jews often meant acting alone or with a few other trusted Gentiles, usually family. Christian churches were complicit in their silence and indifferent hatred. Even worse, many Christians during the Holocaust were arrogant, self-righteous, self-deceived, hard hearted, without love or mercy, stiff necked. Where was Agape love?

Perhaps the greatest testimonies of love during the Holocaust do not come from adults who rescued Jews, but from Jewish children. Liliane Gerenstein, an 11-year-old Jewish girl, wrote the following letter to God:

God? Because of you are good, you are kind, and if one had to count the number of your good deeds and kindnesses one would never finish; God? It is you who command, you who are justice, you who reward the good and punish the bad. God? After this I can say that I will never forget you. I will always think of you, even in the last moments of my life. You can count on it. What you are to me is something that I can’t express, because you are so good. You can believe me. God? Thanks to you I had a beautiful life before, thanks to you I was spoiled and had beautiful things that other people don’t. God? After this, I ask you only one thing: bring my parents back, my poor parents, protect them (even more than me) and let me see them as soon as possible; bring them back one more time. Ah! I used to be able to say I had such as wonderful Maman and such a wonderful Papa. I trust you so much that I say think you in advance.

No theologian ever wrote more beautiful, sincere, heartfelt words to God. Liliane’s faith, gratitude, humility, and love for the Most High exemplifies Shema. She even asks God, with Agape love, to protect her parents more than her own life. She knew death was imminent. Liliane was deported on convoy 71. She was murdered several days after this letter was written.

Jacques Friedman, a Jewish boy who was 12 years old when he and his siblings, Salomon, Bernard, Frida, and Rachel, were arrested in March 1943 and detained at the Poitiers camp. He wrote his former teacher:

Dear Sir: We have been in the camp of Limoges since 7 o-clock Friday morning. From here I thank you for all your exertions on my behalf. There are twenty-five of us here. The youngest of the condemned is four weeks old. I wonder what crime this baby can possibly have committed. Probably not having chosen Aryan parents. Except for us, everyone is half-Aryan French. Their crime is that they are rich and that someone needed their wealth. Now we are all going to be skinned. No can say there’s no equality in France. But we are not despondent: on the contrary, we feel more courageous than before. We remain faith to our Jewish tradition: love thy neighbor as thyself.

As millions of Gentiles were silently complicit, Jacques lived what he had been taught, to love his neighbors. His insight, courage, and sardonic sense of humor are remarkably mature for a 12-year-old. Jacques understood that Jews were to walk the Shema, to live Agape love.

One Nazi, who helped design the gas chambers in which hundreds of thousands of Jewish children were brutally murdered, reported:

And when the bunker was already so filled they couldn’t put no more people, no more…they made the kids crawl on the top of the heads, all the way in there, just kept on pushing them in, to fill them all in…the door was slammed behind them…And as soon as he threw the gas in he slammed the lid shut, so the gas couldn’t escape. And all you could hear is one loud sound, “Shema…” [the Jewish declaration of faith] and that was all…

Jewish children and their parents, packed into gas chambers to suffer horrible deaths, spoke Shema as their last words. Their Gentile murderers, in sharp contrast, were cold, soulless, hard-hearted, beyond mercy and compassion, ready and willing to systemically exterminate their neighbors, fellow human beings made in the image of God. Even children. 1.5 million Jewish children.

Human history is filled with our violence and hate, injustice and treachery, brutality and massacre, murder and genocide. Human beings are not the good people we believe ourselves to be. Adding insult to injury, nearly every person believes he or she is incapable of evil. “Not me,” each of us says. History and our shared human nature say otherwise. The verdict for humanity is “guilty.”

Of all the collective events in human history, I believe the most evil and despicable is the systematic murder of Jewish children and their parents by Gentile nations during the Holocaust. This egregious depravity was committed by ordinary Gentiles just like you and I. They were civilized, educated, religious, law-abiding, moral, family-oriented, hardworking, church-attending people, just like us. “Ordinary.”

Could the Holocaust happen again? It already has for Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge and Tutsi Rwandans. Antisemitism and Judenhass, or Jew hatred, are increasing around the world. Could “never again” become “once again” for our Jewish neighbors? Will the Jewish people once again become a scapegoat for the world’s problems? Will Gentiles hide in churches again as Jewish children and their parents are targeted with hatred, intimidation, violence, and murder?

James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses state, “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” In our current climate of ahistorical education, Holocaust denial, and historical revisionism, how are we to awaken from the horrors of our collective history? Individual and collective evil threaten the future of humanity. History is more than remembering, although remembrance is essential. History also demands that I examine my shared human nature. Me, not in my neighbor.

Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Psalm 14:3 states, “All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” There is no one who is good, although most people believe they are good. It is not us versus them, neighbor versus neighbor, Gentiles versus Jews, but me versus myself. Each person sees evil in someone else, never in ourselves, not in my mirror.

Each of us can choose good or evil. The conscience, given by God to every human being, as well as the Scriptures, teach us what is good and evil. They instruct us how to walk in true goodness and holiness, from above. Until every human being repents and comes to the Lord in humility, many more nightmares are in store for humanity, “wars and rumors of wars” and “nation will rage against nation.”

The Jewish people gave us the Shema in the Tanakh. The Shema is repeated verbatim by Jesus Christ in the New Testament. I am challenging every person, Gentile and Jew, to read the book of John and Romans. What do you have to lose? As a former atheist and new ager, I know you have everything to gain. Eternal life and a new heaven and earth. One day, Jews and Gentiles will live in peace under One Messiah. Our Jewish friends are still waiting for Messiah. Or are they?

Christians believe the Messiah came 2,000 years ago, and will return to establish His Kingdom, as outlined in Isaiah 53 and many other Tanakh passages. However, have Christian Gentiles invited and welcomed their Jewish neighbors into the Kingdom of God with ridicule and hate, exclusion and marginalization, slander and lies, pogroms and ghettos, blame and forced conversions, murder and genocide? The time is now to love your Jewish neighbors. Time is very late in human history.

As a Gentile with a Jewish heart, I invite all people to come and know the highest freedom. “If the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed!” Until that day, love your Jewish neighbors, near and far. Hatred is unchristian and unbecoming of any follower of Jesus Christ. Are you a follower of Jesus Christ? Is He your King? Is He your Savior? Then go, act your Image. In the Image of the Jew of Jews, the Word made flesh, Yeshua Hamashiah.

How must our theology change in light of the Holocaust and contemporary Jew hatred? Perhaps, as the poet C.S. Hale wrote: becoming salted sacrificial love soaked in charity. Spirit-goaded deeply shocked divinely dressed selfless Shema overcoming death by laying down to die in perfect peace for every “other” smaller than us unsafe outside Kingdom Come on Samaritan Road.