A meditation on Palm Sunday, Easter and "the Jews"

Reading the gospel accounts of Jesus's crucifixion and death can be quite confusing to the literal mind. Here we are, on Palm Sunday, visualizing the joyful crowds which greeted His entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey as the Messiah was prophesied to do. They wave palm leaves before Him and acclaim Him with loud "Hosannas".

And then, just five days later, "the Jews" call for his crucifixion. Stirred up by a group of corrupt and greedy Temple priests, the crowd is persuaded to cry for the release of the thief Barabbas and the death of Jesus. How could this happen?

First, we have to remember that "the Jews" in the crowd calling for Jesus's crucifixion were only a small number out of the huge masses who greeted His triumphal entry a few days earlier. The Temple priesthood had a vested interest in suppressing the teachings of this dangerous, upstart rabbi, who had just whipped the moneychangers out of the Temple and who was telling the crowds that God was their loving Father, not the stern judge who demanded more and more animal sacrifices.

And the Temple priests depended on the machinery of animal sacrifice for their very livelihood. If this were abolished, as Jesus seemed to be seeking, they would be out of a job! So they sent "agents provocateurs" into the crowds to shout for the release of the criminal, in place of the rabbi. And then they must have breathed a sigh of relief as Jesus was led away to be killed by the Romans.

But these apparently stupid and easily-led crowd members were but a fraction of Jesus's followers. Weeks later, at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus numbered in the thousands, and a new religion (which was, initially, seen as a new branch of Judaism itself) was born.

As the Catholic church repeatedly pointed out in the 20th century after the tragedy of the Holocaust, it is a grave sin to blame all Jews, right down to contemporary Jewish men and women, for the death of Jesus. Such a charge is foolish, and worse. Only a few had been culpable, two thousand years before, and even they could not bear full responsibility, though the gospels say they willingly accepted it. They were the more suggestible and fearful ones, those who needed for whatever reasons to be in the priesthood's "good books". Perhaps they owed money to the priests or to the moneychangers; perhaps they were offended by Jesus's teachings about sin.

Whatever the reason, they reacted mechanically, just as many I's in us react completely mechanically to outside influences. And the result was not only the death of Jesus, but the birth of antisemitism.

Antisemitism is the world's oldest version of racism, and it led to the deaths of millions of innocent people in the gas chambers of the Nazis as well to the repeated terrorist attacks against Jews today.

Every Easter, all over Europe, the UK (during the periods when Jews were allowed to live there), Poland and Russia, terrible, bloodthirsty pogroms were fomented by local rulers and police. Jews were accused of killing Christian children to take their blood to make matzoh, the Passover "unleavened bread" of the annual Jewish seder ritual. Watch "Fiddler on the Roof" for a sort of "pogrom lite" account. Men and children were murdered, women raped and property ransacked before the few surviving Jews were forced to move on, to somewhere safer. But nowhere was safe.

In York, Jews were herded into a tower and burned to death. In Spain and Portugal, Jews were exiled to wherever they could find that would take them in. Columbus's discovery of America in the same year, 1492, gave the Jews the chance to emigrate to the Americas, and they did so if they could.

It's hard to imagine a more stupid or ignorant accusation. Jews are forbidden to consume any blood, and all animal flesh has to be purged of blood before it may be cooked and eaten. So to imagine that any Jew would use human blood for this purpose simply beggars belief. It couldn't happen. And yet, such has been the world's resentment and envy of Jews, and so strong our need for scapegoats to explain our own failings, that this ridiculous libel has reared its head again and again over the centuries.

It culminated in the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, but it didn't end there.

The forged document known as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which purports to show a plot for Jews to control the world, surfaces from time to time in the Middle East, and contributes to the cauldron of antisemitism and anti-Israel feelings there.

Today, antisemitism, and its concomitant political attitude of anti-Zionism, bedevils world politics and endangers the survival of Jews everywhere. There is so much antisemitism now in Europe, in the UK, and throughout the world that Jews are being exhorted not to wear symbols of their faith in public, and many are considering emigrating to Israel.

Even there, they can never feel completely safe. Radical Islam is sworn to destroy Jews everywhere, beginning with the tiny - and completely legally established - State of Israel. The rulers of Iran and other terrorist States have vowed to destroy Israel first of all, and then to go on to kill Jews wherever else in the world they may be. In the Second World War, Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem collaborated in the destruction of Jewry. They admired each other's goals, just as so many modern Islamist leaders do.

And Israel gets the blame for their own victimization. If they only gave away more land, world leaders insist, they'd get peace. But no such giveaways in the past have ever led to peace. On the contrary: Israel gave away a large part of the Sinai to Egypt, Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, and parts of the Lebanese border in the north to Lebanon. And in return they got only terrorist cells and unceasing attacks. No wonder they are unwilling to try this again.

And I believe much of this hatred can be traced back to the misreading of the gospels and their accounts of the crucifixion.

You may be surprised to read this somewhat political piece in a blog devoted mainly to spirituality. But the root of antisemitism - of all racism - is a spiritual evil. It is a denial of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; of the God of the New Testament, the Father of Jesus. It is a deepseated, unholy passion to control the city of Jerusalem, where the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus took place. If you can control that piece of sacred ground, their reasoning goes, you can wipe out Judaism and Christianity at one fell swoop and prevent the Messiah's return. 

Antisemitism is a Satanic, demonic evil that must be resisted and fought with all our power. I devote quite a large part of my time to endeavouring to educate and inform people about Israel and the Jews, because although in the Work we think of most political ideas as a form of lunacy, the search for peace is definitely not; it is mandatory for all who care about the future of humanity. The level of Jew-hatred and anti-Israel feeling that now exists is capable of bringing about World War III. And that, of course, would be the end of the planet.

There's another reason why those in the Work should support Israel. It's the only Middle East country where there is a Work group. You can't imagine that ISIL, Iran or any other country ruled by fanatics would allow mystics to flourish, and they don't. The Sufis have been persecuted and expelled from everywhere they used to live, from Turkey, Turkmenistan, Syria, Iran and Iraq. The monasteries and Sufi teachers of Gurdjieff's time have vanished, having been murdered or exiled. Christians are being beheaded or burned alive every day. Jews are being terrorized. Only a few Jewish and Christian mystics and the Work group itself remain, in Israel, itself a huge beacon of spiritual light in an increasingly benighted place.

And so much of this irrational, devilish hatred springs from a simple misreading of the gospels. The writers never intended that all Jews, everywhere, should be blamed for the death of Christ! They were pointing out how stupid and mechanical we can all be, when one day we hail a great religious teacher who could be the Messiah, and a few days later call for his death. The "Jews" in this narrative are us, our silly, shallow, suggestible, unconscious I's. The "Jews" swing wildly from side to side of the pendulum in this narrative; so, too often, do we.

It is only when we are asleep that evil can happen. The gospels must be read metaphorically as well as literally, so that we can all picture ourselves in the crowds on Palm Sunday, and then again before Pontius Pilate, faced with the choice between Barabbas and Jesus.

We are all "the Jews" here. The gospels show us why we need to wake up, that our sleep can bring about unimaginable evil. Do we listen to that call? 

Or would we, too, rather sleep? Rather see our Real I crucified than make the effort to awaken? Picture yourself in the crowd, being urged on by the Temple priests to call for the death of Jesus. Do you wake up and resist - or do you shrug, turn away, and betray all that's sacred?