And… a four-line quote from John 8:12, which readers of this blog might recognize as belonging to the New Testament. Better luck next year, Santorum.

Happy Hanukkah from Rick Santorum [Slate]

Israeli Scholars Say 2,000-Year-Old Burial Box Linked to Bible’s High Priest is Genuine [WP/AP]

The last time I was alone for Christmas, I had to be told it was a problem. It was 1979, and I was living in a cold, damp flat in West London, earning a pittance in publishing. When a colleague asked about my plans for Christmas, I said I had none. “Poor dear,” she exclaimed, “alone for Christmas. We won’t have that!” I kept to myself that I had never before celebrated Christmas. Two days later, I hopped aboard the family “dormobile,” a VW microbus with mattresses on the floor instead of seats. The kids—Annabelle, Natasha, Tristram—and I slept in our coats and woke up in Inverness. We stayed in a hunting lodge heated (imperceptibly) by an Aga stove in the kitchen and lit by a whining generator that was powered down at bedtime. Christmas Eve we trekked across the moor to a small cabin—a Scottish shtibl—and sang carols with the local crofters. Christmas day, we baked a Christmas cake full of sultanas, popped Christmas “crackers” (a wrapped tube that snaps open like a cap gun), and took the Guardian’s Christmas Quiz. Christmas night I warmed myself with Glenfiddich, a hot-water bottle, and a novel about sweltering Rhodesians. So this was Christmas: dark by 3 p.m., bone-cold, but otherwise not bad, not bad at all.

Thirty years later, I’m alone for Christmas, and I know it. I ponder a solitary afternoon of chow fun and Meryl Streep, and I decide I won’t have it. Instead, I sign up to work at Elijah’s Promise, a nearby soup kitchen, in a basement in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

When I arrive, I’m hurried off to wash my hands, issued a hairnet and plastic apron, and told to find Felipe, “the guy in the red apron.” He’s a stocky guy with a biker’s swagger and a wide, open smile; among the volunteers, an eminence. His charges are me and Gwendolyn, a lithe, black 20-something with amber eyes. She seems embarrassed by her beauty, like a swan caught becoming a woman.

Felipe explains our task. At noon, when the doors open, the line of people waiting out in the cold will file in. (Pairs of legs, hopping to keep warm, can be seen through the basement windows.) Each client, as the patrons are called, will take a carnival ticket and sit in front of a red or green placemat adorned with snowmen, candy canes, and Bible verses scrawled in a child’s cursive hand. Our job is to serve them dinner. Like school kids on a lunch line, we’re to present our trays to the women of the missionary club of the First Baptist Church of Carteret, who will portion out the turkey dinner—with green beans, sweet potato, gravy, and cranberry sauce—the women spent Christmas Eve preparing.

“If they ask for seconds?” I ask.

“Sometimes they do, but most don’t stick around,” Felipe says. “Some of them eat and run to catch the shuttle to the other soup kitchens in town, they go from one Christmas dinner to another.” He shrugs, amused. “Ya can’t blame them.” The cohort of volunteers has swelled, most of them African-American: a grizzled 75-year-old man, a tall dad with two skinny-jeaned teenage daughters, assorted able-bodied young men, one goateed like a calendar Confucius. The only other white person is a well-heeled petite woman in a chunky cable sweater. She’s Jewish, and I think I know what she’s doing here—repairing the world where it’s caving in. But how many of those here are alone for Christmas, like me, without husbands, wives, parents, children?

Felipe has left us to join a woman with a reporter’s pad at a nearby table. Apparently he’s not just the majordomo; he’s also the press secretary. But Gwendolyn knows the drill. “The hungriest folks will wave their tickets in the air,” she says. “Serve them first. See that everyone at the table is served at the same time. And don’t bus their plates; they have to do that themselves.”

While we wait for the stroke of noon, we place a platter of pie—slices of pumpkin, pecan, and pineapple—on each table, then pour 80 paper cups of V8 juice. One of the skinny-jeaned teens sticks out her tongue in disgust “V8?” “Never mind,” says one of the Carteret ladies. “It’s filling and nutritious. It’s almost soup.”

At noon, the doors open, and the line of people slowly slithers in. I ask myself if, out on the street, I could peg these people as Elijah’s clients. The answer, for nine out of 10, is yes. Many are elderly and move slowly; they walk with difficulty, as though back pain is a fact of daily life, not a cause for steroid shots and acupuncture. Several are missing front teeth, and here and there are cheeks with open sores. The men tend to be unshaven; the women look more kempt, and a few sport silver and green Christmas beads. Some are both hungry and obese, which is perhaps why there are diabetes information posters on the walls, in English and Spanish. And many, more than I want to admit, have a withdrawn, absent look that means—what? That they’re resigned to life on the bottom? Or that fate has consigned them to the limbo of their minds?

A clutch of teens from a nearby Hindu temple appear out of nowhere, giving each client a wrapped, ribboned gift, a pair of gloves, and a scarf. “Let us bow our heads!” bellows an elder of the First Baptist Church, then he mumbles a speedy grace. The Hindu teens, as if on cue, begin to sing “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” reading the lyrics off their Blackberrys. Singing along are four siblings ranging in age from 3 to 8, the only little kids in evidence. Two walked in with winter jackets, two did not; all are clad in Gymboree castoffs of aqua and pepto-bismol pink. Presently trays arrive for them with plates of baked ziti, not turkey; they’re vegetarians. While mom runs off in search of missing napkins, spoons, juice, dad hovers to make sure they finish their food.

It turns out Gwendolyn was wrong. The hungriest are not the ticket-wavers. The hungriest are the ones who sit down and tear into the pie on the table. One woman drains a styrofoam cup of water and begins stuffing it with pumpkin pie; the pie’s to go. I bring a plate of food to a man in a black overcoat whose placemat has verses from scripture but no utensils. I’m starting to feel expansive, and put my hand on his shoulder. “You can’t eat string beans off the words of God,” I say, and offer to fetch utensils. “Fuggetit, darlin’,” he says broadly and plucks a fork from his overcoat pocket. Five minutes before closing, two stragglers arrive: an old man in an army jacket and a large woman lashed in scarves and bundled in three layers of coats. They’re not ticket-wavers; in fact, they keep their eyes on the table and speak to no one, so abject, they make the others look like game-show hosts.

It’s good to be busy, and I’m saying “Merry Christmas” to all comers, happy to be wished one in return. There’s a buzz of purpose and enthusiasm, at the tables, in the kitchen, among the ferrying volunteers. In fact, I’m starting to feel freilach, and not because it’s Christmas. It’s like being at the wedding of a beshert match: a hungry person, a steaming plate of food.

Felipe’s journalist is heading for the door, and Felipe returns to the lunch counter. He’s revved, a little anxious; whatever that interview was about, it didn’t go so well. “She heard that I’m the volunteer of the year, that I’m taking the culinary arts course,” he says. (Elijah’s Promise doesn’t only feed people; they train people to feed others.) “I told her I started coming here every day to give something back, but all she wanted to know about was how I ended up in prison. She smelled a story, but I wasn’t gonna talk about it. Those journalists, they seem interested, but they just wanna sell papers.”

“You have to be careful with journalists,” I tell him. “At least you have to make them read back the quotes.”

“I told her mainly I come here because I love the volunteers,” Felipe continues. “They just love doing what they do, taking care of these people. So what if some are just putting in hours for their community service?” I take a second, harder look, at my fellow volunteers—felons? Misdemeanants?— but all our crimes are expunged by the smell of ammonia. The goateed man stacks the chairs, and a guy with a bandana mops up. Gwendolyn and I wipe down tables. At each, two or three cups of V8 remain, uncouth, unkissed.

When I get home, I look up Elijah’s promise. It is not, as I’d assumed all day, a story about Jesus. It’s a promise to the starving Widow of Zarephath: “The jar of meal shall not be spent, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the land.” (I Kings 17:14) It’s a promise of bread for those with a handful of meal, and oil for those who bear an empty cruse—a promise that, when the heart is cracked and dry, the God of Israel will notice.

Esther Schor, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Emma Lazarus.

I am a conservative Christian. I’ve come to realize that I do not know why the Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. I sincerely would like to understand. I’m quite sure that there is no simple answer to this, but if you could point me in the right direction that would get me started.

From Judaism’s perspective, Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies and therefore is not regarded as the Messiah. The best-known of the prophecies concerning the messianic days is that “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). Since world peace must accompany the Messiah, and world peace (or, for the past 2,000 years, anything remotely approaching it) has not come, clearly the Messiah has not come either. In addition, Jewish tradition teaches that the Messiah will enable the Jews to lead a peaceful and independent existence in Israel. This, too, was not achieved by Jesus. One of the greatest rabbis of the Talmudic era, Akiva, believed that the second-century Jewish warrior Bar Kochva was the Messiah, and that he would fulfill in particular the messianic mission of restoring Jewish sovereignty. But when Bar Kochva’s revolt against the Romans failed, Akiva recognized that he could not have been the Messiah (even though he was still regarded as an essentially righteous person).

Though it has been apparent for almost 2,000 years that the messianic days of peace have not arrived, Christians still assume that Jesus was the Messiah. How do they explain this? By arguing that there will be a Second Coming, during which Jesus will return to Earth, and fulfill the messianic functions originally expected of him. For Jews, however, this argument is unconvincing, since the idea of a Second Coming is nowhere found in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians refer to as the Old Testament). This idea seems to have been unknown to Jesus as well, since the New Testament cites him as telling his followers that some of them will still be alive when all the messianic prophecies will be fulfilled (see Mark 9:1 and 13:30). I would guess that the idea of a second coming was formulated by later Christians to explain Jesus’ failure to fulfill the messianic prophecies. In short, from Judaism’s perspective, to call someone who does not bring about the messianic era the Messiah does not make sense.

• Yet! Western officials believe Abbas will reverse his position and agree to direct talks in the next month. [Ynet]

• Syrian President Bashar Assad visits Lebanon today, for the first time in five years, to meet with Lebanon’s and Saudia Arabia’s leaders. The summit seems connected to the impending international indictments for the assassination of a former Lebanese leader, for which Syria was credited. [WSJ]

• Not wanting to fall behind the Western Joneses, Australian imposed its own sanctions on Iran. [Jewish Journal]

• Charles Krauthammer notes (as I did) the increasing pressure Iran apparently feels itself under. [WP]

• The Jordan River spot where John the Baptist is said to have baptized Jesus has become too polluted for use. [WP]

But, guys, if you thought that was bad … well, here was Beck last week (and sorry I missed it then):

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. … If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would’ve come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did.

I’ll keep my checkbook handy, just in case.

Glenn Beck: Jews Killed Jesus [HuffPo]
Jewish Group Runs Ad Criticizing Glenn Beck [JTA]
Earlier: Glenn Beck Says Jew Follows Nazi Logic

• M.J. Rosenberg says that Millennials, and especially American Jewish Millennials on the question of Israel, would be more aptly named “the Jon Stewart generation.” [MediaMatters]

• What’s your #ish? It makes more sense if you click the link. [What’s Your #ish?]

• Comedy Central will air a cartoon starring Jesus as an average New York City guy trying to escape an overbearing, video-game-obsessed father Father. N.B.: I am not kidding. [Newser]

• Roger Cohen, hopeless romantic. [NYT]

• Matt Yglesias explains his disdain for politically conservative Jews: “nobody should be eating bad bagels, but it’s especially sad when you see Jews do it.” [Yglesias]

Happy Mother’s Day! Not enough people know that “Julia” is about John’s mom.

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Cabinet rejected U.S. calls to cease building in East Jerusalem. [NYT]

• Despite what you’ve always been told, Jesus’s Last Supper was (probably) not a Seder. [Slate]

• Palace intrigue! Reported internal disputation over Israel within the Obama Administration. [Laura Rozen]

• Thomas L. Friedman on the necessity—not preferability—of peace in the Mideast. [NYT]

• Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan advocates against sanctions on Iran. [Haaretz]

• The Simpsons are going to Israel! (Actually, they went, last night; Sacha Baron Cohen voiced the Israeli tour guide.)

Nazis replaced the star atop the Christmas tree with a sun, in part to “break the emotional power of the Church,” but also to ensure there was no resemblance to Jewish or Bolshevik symbols. They also rewrote Christmas carols, changing references to baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary into snowy fields and the like. It’s a good thing we already pretty much boycott the Nazis, because otherwise the American Family Association would be all over this; instead they’ll have to stick with protesting The Gap for daring to use the word “Christmas” in the same breath as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in ads.

How the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas [Times (London)]

Hyatt said she plans to canvass churches for support, since she doesn’t have the $2 million it usually costs to collect enough signatures to get a measure on the ballot. But we can’t really see this one making it past the old church-state separation hurdle, even though the “Freedom to Present Christmas Music in Public School Classrooms or Assemblies” measure includes a provision requiring schools to give parents who prefer their Christmases light on the Jesus—not just Jews, of course, but Muslims, and atheists, and all kinds of other folks—an opt-out notice. Because, you know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to take kids out of school in order to put the Jesus back in December.

Taking that Christmas Spirit to the People [Blockbuster Democracy Blog]

U.S. Jews Protest Catholic Document on Salvation [AP]

And while love has its day, its celebrants, its canon of songs and books and films, hate is rarely allowed into the limelight. When we speak of it, it’s always as love’s darker twin, the demon we must exorcise before we are able to become enlightened human beings, at peace with ourselves and at home in the universe. The only thing we can do with hate, we are told everywhere from kindergarten to cable TV, is to somehow miraculously transform it into love.

Once upon a time, there lived a Jew who was reportedly very good at doing just that. If someone slaps you, he told his buddies, just turn the other cheek. He loved the prostitutes and the lepers and the sinners. And he told his entourage to follow his lead: “This is my commandment,” he summed it up elegantly, “love one another as I have loved you.”

That Jew, alas, is long gone, and his followers in time have quite often chosen to replace the word love with other words—ike auto de fe, for example—that don’t quite square with the Boss’s vision of amity. Still, if you choose to follow his lead, his words couldn’t be clearer: all you need is love.

The rest of us, however, Jews who are not so much for Jesus, are left with a more nuanced narrative. A few weeks ago, the Torah told us all about love, instructing us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This week’s parasha, however, goes even further. It tells us how to hate.

As we begin the story, God is in a foul mood. He reiterates some laws, but then, like a sadistic parent a few vodkas into the afternoon, speaks at great length about what will happen to us, his children, if we fail to play by his rules.

“I will order upon you shock, consumption, fever, and diseases that cause hopeless longing and depression,” muses the Almighty. “You will sow your seed in vain, and your enemies will eat it.”

He’s nowhere near done: as the parasha continues, God riffs on various threats, beginning by not to partaking in his erring people’s pleasant fragrances, progressing by promising to incite the beasts of the field to swallow the sinners, and ending with the simple declarative sentence, “You will eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you will eat.”

So far, the whole invocation sounds like a bit of dialogue from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. But the Lord is not one for cascading fury. As He concludes his catalogue of catastrophes, He gets around to the point.

“But despite all this,” God says, “I will not despise them nor will I reject them to annihilate them, thereby breaking My covenant that is with them, for I am the Lord their God.”

A contemporary reader, sophisticated and educated, may be excused for feeling dumbfounded by this statement. To most of us moderns, a deity who resorts to familial devouring is, without doubt, a deity who has long decided to despise, reject and annihilate his folks.

If we were only told how to hate properly, this confusion might have been avoided.

And had we been taught how to hate properly, this parasha would have been the perfect primer. Hate, it tells us, is both natural and, sometimes, instructive. It can serve as an engine of change, often propelling us with great force and clarity to do noble and worthwhile things we wouldn’t have otherwise dared to do. But when we hate, we mustn’t forget the supreme lesson, the one rule without which our rancor turns reckless. It is this: hate, but don’t despise, reject, or annihilate. Hate, but realize that even the most abhorrent among us may one day be redeemed. Hate, but never neglect your primary covenant, that with God and the universe and your fellow man.

Next time you see that impossibly smug bloviator on television, then, or hear that neighbor who’s playing Midnight Oil after midnight, or encounter anything or anyone that makes your blood boil and your graces take their leave, rejoice: you’re a hater, my friend, and as long as you do it right, there’s nothing wrong with that.

After all this, it would be easy to regard the subtitle of Fredriksen’s book as a bitter joke; for Augustine’s theology, she insists, constitutes “A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism.” With defenders like these, the Jewish reader might feel, who needs attackers? Yet there can be no doubt of Fredriksen’s passionate sincerity, or of the ingenuity with which she tries to interpret Augustine’s thought as, in some sense, respectful of Judaism. Modern, liberal, secular eyes may find it hard to detect much daylight between Augustine’s Johannine sermons and the virulent tracts of, say, Tertullian, the Church Father and master calumniator of the Jews. To Fredriksen, who reveres Augustine as one of the subtlest and most profound Christian thinkers, it is morally imperative to stress that there is a difference. “In the changed social context of medieval Christendom,” she concludes, Augustine’s thought “ultimately would safeguard Jewish lives,” serving as a bulwark against the Crusaders who wanted to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

Augustine may have had no love for Jews or Judaism, but he nevertheless believed that God’s plan required their preservation. His favorite text on the subject was Psalms 59:12, in which the Psalmist implores God, “Do not kill them lest my people be unmindful; with Your power make wanderers of them.” This is just one of countless instances in the Psalms where the poet calls down God’s vengeance on Israel’s enemies. But to Augustine, a master of typological reading, the verse was actually a prophecy of what would befall Israel itself after the crucifixion. God would not kill the Jews as punishment for their treacherous slaying of his only son; instead, he would scatter” them in a Diaspora throughout the world. By the time Augustine was writing, in the fourth century CE, it seemed that history had amply fulfilled that prophecy. Didn’t the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, followed by the razing of Jerusalem itself by the Emperor Hadrian, demonstrate God’s wrath at his formerly chosen people?

Even in this dire vision of Jewish history, however, Fredriksen finds reason to be hopeful. God’s plan might involve the exile and suffering of the Jews, but this punishment itself was proof of God’s continuing interest in the fate of Israel. Judaism still had a role to play in the unfolding of God’s providence, as the unwilling, unwitting witness to the truth of Christianity. Augustine wrote that the Jews served Christianity as a scrinaria, literally a case for carrying books or papers—in this instance, the books of the Hebrew Bible. The Bible, to Christian eyes, was nothing but an extended allegorical prophecy of the coming of Christ, and it was the task of the Jews to verify that prophecy by spreading the Bible throughout the world. The fact that the Jews themselves did not read their Scripture this way—that they did not, for instance, see Psalm 59 as a prophecy of their own dispersion—only made them, in Augustine’s eyes, more effective witnesses for Christianity. “The believing Gentiles,” he explained, “cannot suppose that these testimonies to Christ are recent forgeries, for they are found in books held sacred for so many ages by those who crucified Christ, books still venerated by those who blaspheme him.” The Jews “testify to their truth by not understanding them.”

“The Jews as Jews,” Fredriksen summarizes, are thus the servants of the Church.” This meant that the Church should not attempt to extirpate Judaism, either by slaying” the Jews or by forcing them to convert en masse. Here Augustine drew a second biblical parallel that would prove very influential in the Church’s treatment of Jews. The Jews who killed Jesus, he proposed, were like Cain, who killed his brother Abel. In Genesis, however, God specifically prohibits anyone from taking vengeance on Cain for his crime: “The Lord God placed a mark upon Cain, lest anyone coming upon him should kill him.” Just so, Augustine argues, the Jews bear their own mark of Cain—their law, the Torah, “which distinguishes them from all other nations and peoples.” God means for the Jews to bear that law until the end of time, as a symbol of their permanent exclusion from Christian grace.

St. Augustine in His Studio by Sandro Botticelli, c. 1480

It is a gauge of the dismal history of Christian anti-Judaism that this Augustinian “witness doctrine” was, in fact, a notably positive development. To explain why comparing the Jews to Cain, the archetypal murderer, was in fact an act of laudable philo-Semitism, Fredriksen must take the reader on a difficult but fascinating journey through the complications of early Christian thought. She introduces the various schools that competed for Augustine’s intellectual allegiance, in particular the Manichees, who identified the God of the Hebrew Bible with the evil deity who made our fallen world. Faustus, a Manichean preacher whom Augustine challenged in a famous debate, considered the Jewish God no better than the pagan gods of Olympus—”greedy for blood and fat from all kinds of sacrifices, and jealous if these were offered to anyone other than himself.” Such varieties of Christianity sought to completely sever the faith from its Jewish past—to deny that Jesus had anything to do with Judaism, except as its opponent and destroyer.

Augustine’s great contribution to Catholic theology, Fredriksen shows, was to insist that the Church preserve and honor its Jewish heritage. He argued that Catholics and Jews recognize the same God, that Israelite sacrifices were divinely ordained and pleasing to God, and that the first generation of apostles, including Paul and Peter, were themselves observant Jews. Indeed, as Fredriksen shows in the best parts of Augustine and the Jews, Augustine’s “defense” of Judaism was bound up with his most adventurous thinking about time, language, and free will.

Yet while Augustine and the Jews is a marvelous work of scholarship, it never quite manages to pry those quotation marks off the word defense.” Finally, what Augustine offered Judaism was the fate that the damned are meant to suffer in the Christian Hell: not annihilation, but perpetual torment, inflicted by God in execution of his inscrutable judgment. Reading Fredriksen is a powerful reminder that, while today’s Christian ecumenism is admirable, there can never be a secure or happy home for Jews in a society dominated by Christianity. That is why American secularism and pluralism have made it possible for American Jews, for almost the first time in history, to wipe off the mark of Cain and be seen as and for themselves.