When I speak in churches, I often say that Christianity has it
mostly wrong about the Pharisees. In the Jewish orbit, it’s something that we rarely
think about—but we should. The early rabbis who re-created Judaism in the form that we
know were the direct successors of the Pharisees. In other words, we are the
heirs of the Pharisees.
Yet in common speech, “pharisaic” denotes hypocrisy, self-righteousness,
or obsession with rules. The term Pharisee derives from the Hebrew root l’faresh,
to interpret. Originally, it described Jews of approximately the first century CE
who believed that the Torah should be studied for its underlying principles rather
than solely as a rule book for ritual practices. Although they were highly concerned
with ritual purity, they emphasized ethical teachings over ritual for its own
sake.
Their opponents, the Sadducees, focused on careful adherence
to the rules, mostly in Leviticus, for con-ducting sacrifices in the Temple. When
Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, those sacrifices became impossible and the point
of view of the Sadducees became irrelevant to Jewish life. It was the Pharisees
and the early rabbis who refashioned Judaism as a religion that did not depend on
specific sacrificial practices in a specific place—a Judaism built around prayer,
study, and mitzvot.
Paradoxically, Christianity also has its roots in the rabbinic
tradition, not in the rituals of the Sadducees. Over the centuries, however, the
term “Pharisee” became a club used by Christians to beat Jews—often
figuratively and sometimes literally.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin wrote about this recently in a column for
the Religion News Service. He raised this issue after Mayor Pete Buttigieg used
the term “Pharisee” to criticize Vice-President Mike Pence. Rabbi Salkin does not
think that Buttigieg is anti-Jewish.
He writes that the term embodies “subtle and unexamined
religious perceptions—Judaism as a religion of law vs. Christianity as a religion
of love; Judaism as a “separatist” faith” and that it is “so ingrained in the way
that so many people think, that it has become unconscious.”
I don’t think that we
can eliminate this from almost two thousand years of Christian thought, but I think
that we should speak up when the occasion demands it.
Sadly, however, the kind of hypocritical obsession with rules
that it denotes still exists in Jewish life. There are so-called religious Jews
who may keep strict kashrut and pray together three times a day, but who have no
qualms about sheltering child molesters and domestic abusers, mis-educating their
children, or cheating the government.
Or those who vituperatively criticize other Jews. As (Orthodox)
Rabbi Bob Carroll says, we should all be at least as careful about what comes
out of our mouths as about what goes in. We may choose to ignore it when other Jews
merely call us bad Jews, and usually that is best. But should we keep quiet about
immoral or criminal behavior carried out in the name of Judaism? Sometimes we fear
that speaking out would give fodder to anti-Semites. Yet if we are silent, are
we complicit?
