Alwayswriteagain: Feeling Betrayed

As the first reports appeared of the death of Amos Oz, I had begun to read Shlomo Kalo’s **The Day Is Coming: a book of Faith.

This was an ironic and unsettling personal coincidence: Although both men were hugely popular Israeli writers and each were viewed as potential Nobel laureates, their respective work and philosophy could not have been more different. Further, while the title of Oz’s final novel, Judas is based on the figure of the traitorous apostle, Kalo’s story purportedly traces the final three years of Jesus’s life from a Jewish perspective.

I’m openly hostile to Messianic Judaism and those who practise it. So although I understand that this novelettish version of the New Testament story is widely admired, those reading this short review will appreciate that I can never share that enthusiasm. Indeed, I refrain from using more astringent language here to avoid offending devout born Christians or those from other traditions who view Jesus as an important prophet.

Kalo, a Bulgarian-born Jew who survived a Nazi labour camp, emigrated to Israel in 1949 and enjoyed successful twin careers as a microbiologist and writer. A turning point came in 1969 when (my words) he felt he received some sort of revelation or calling.

The result, among other things, was the formation of a spiritual self-awareness organisation named “DAAT" (Hebrew acronym, meaning knowledge, standing for "know yourself always") that also publishes his work.

There are several aspects of The Day is Coming I find especially troubling from a Jewish viewpoint: First is seeing the word ‘God’ used as a regular alternative to Jesus’s most frequently used name.

Second is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate as being weak and easily manipulated by the Jewish authorities.

Then last and worst in my opinion, is the nature of a quasi-fictional Holocaust story that is inserted into the thread of the biblical narrative:

Between Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and subsequent suicide and Jesus’s trial comes a story of a teenaged Jewish camp inmate meeting, loathing and ultimately betraying a Jewish-born Catholic monk who goes serenely to his death at the hands of their Nazi captors. ‘Brother Anastasius’s name means ‘resurrection’. The dead man is then metaphorically ‘resurrected’ by the youth as he later becomes a Christian monk and renames himself as ‘Anastasius’.

Kalo’s book has been reprinted in many languages since it was first published in Hebrew and this review is of the third English edition published in June 2018. I cannot find the date of the original DAAT Hebrew edition but it was surely many years after the Catholic Church’s historic ruling of Vatican 11 in November 1963.

So the Church, whose aeons of extreme Jew hate climaxed in the Shoah, has for a near half-century agreed that it was “unjust to call this people deicide or to consider it cursed by God".

This renders the words of Kalo’s fictional characters all the more incomprehensible.

“For the past nineteen hundred years”, says the first Ánastasius’, “there has existed a narrow strand, like an unbroken chain, of people who seek to atone for the deeds of our forefathers by changing their religion out of faith. By this means, as by others, they bring closer the salvation of our people and of the world”.

Today I am without further words.