Loving and Honoring Jesus the Jew

 

We should love and honor Jesus the Jew as a proto-Rabbinic (re-)visionary and as a Palestinian crushed beneath the Roman Imperial wheel. Unfortunately, that sort of love and honor is thoughtlessly and routinely denied to Jesus and, instead, he is fetishized as a Mediterranean Dying-and-Rising God (a notion acceptable to gentiles but abhorrent to Jews, not to mention Muslims).

Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly observed, "As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect...Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's or his brother's brother's God" (Self-Reliance).