Rocky Mountain News, March 9, 2004

Our topics today are anti-Semitism and, of course, the movies. And, because I'm not a movie critic, I'll start by giving away the surprise ending.It wasn't only the BMH-BJ Congregation synagogue that was targeted by what looked like the hate-filled work of neo-Nazis - and their all-too-familiar swastika motif.




There was another place of worship vandalized over the weekend. You irony fans should be way ahead of me here. Also hit with swastikas was, yes, the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church.

Honest to, well, God.

And if you can make sense of any of this, you've got my number. Because, I'm thinking, this is the last place the neo-Nazis would take their cans of spray paint.

You remember the Lovingway church. Or you remember the Lovingway church sign anyway. It was in all the papers. It's still in some of the papers. On Ash Wednesday, the day that Mel Gibson's provocative The Passion of the Christ opened, the Rev. Maurice Gordon, who doesn't mind being provocative himself, put up a sign for all who travel South Colorado Boulevard to see: " 'Jews Killed the Lord Jesus' " 1 Thess. 2:14, 15."

Is that anti-Semitic?

Gordon defends the sign by saying the words come directly from the New Testament, which is, if you think about it, provocative in its own way. Not that it answers the question. "I wanted to start a dialogue," said Gordon, who acknowledges that dialogue doesn't begin to describe the conversation that followed.

The sign's latest appearance came alongside Frank Rich's column in The New York Times Sunday. It's used as a symbol of the anti-Semitism that some fear Gibson's movie could spawn. But as needlessly hurtful as the sign was, our story is more complicated than that. It always is.

On Saturday morning, worshippers from the BMH-BJ Congregation found the synagogue spray-painted with Nazi symbols. A Holocaust survivor who came for services that day gave full meaning to what is an old story, told too often, and the attendant pain.

On Sunday, the story turned, and again in a familiar way. Hundreds of people, Jews and non-Jews, came to wipe away the ugly symbols.

But anti-Semitism does not exist on its own. And for some in the congregation, the obvious place to look was Gibson's movie. I saw The Passion last week and have wanted to write about it since, because, from all I've read and heard, I get the feeling that despite the $200 million-plus grosses, no one has actually seen the movie.

People go in. They settle into their seats. They cry or they cover their eyes - or they do both - and they leave the theater with exactly what they had brought in with them. For some, this is a clearly religious experience, but only - I'm guessing - if you bring your religion to the movie with you.

You've heard all the arguments by now. If you want a look at the movie versus the Biblical text and the movie versus the historical subtext, read Jon Meacham's piece in Newsweek, titled, "Who Killed Jesus?"

As a Jew, I had a special interest in Gibson's answer. But soon, I had other things on my mind than the question whether Gibson tilted the blame toward the Jews. What I saw was an underdeveloped story with its stylized violence. What I saw was a movie by a director who finds rapture in the slo-mo driving of a nail through a man's hand. Jesus is the underdeveloped character in the movie, who is defined almost exclusively by the beating and flaying and the flaying and beating and the beating and flaying he receives.

It's a beating no one could survive, not even Mel Gibson in Braveheart. And when Jesus says, near the end of the movie, in capital letters, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," I'm thinking, can I forgive Gibson, because he knows exactly what he's doing?

Some worry that after watching this horrific beating, moviegoers will leave the theater looking for someone to blame. I doubt it. I think you'd be too numb to think of anything but the blood you saw.

But Gibson does little to calm anyone's doubts. As Rich points out, Gibson gave this answer in Reader's Digest to the question of whether there was a Holocaust: "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps."

You read that - the Holocaust was just another byproduct of war? - and wonder if Gibson is the best person to tell this story. And that brings us back to ours.

Rabbi Daniel Cohen of the BMH-BJ Congregation said the attack on his synagogue and whatever problems he has with Gibson's movie are different stories. The vandalism, he said, could be "a lone voice of craziness." Then he told me about the vandalism at Lovingway church.

I called Gordon, who confirmed that his church was hit. "You can laugh or you can cry," he said. Which may be a theological question unto itself.

Gordon wasn't that upset by the vandalism, and he's still having trouble understanding why people were so upset about his sign. He says he wouldn't do it again, but only because of the uproar. He has since replaced that sign with a new one: "I am deeply sorry for offending the Jewish people, whom I love. Brother Gordon."

And, now that I think about it, maybe that's what the haters with the spray cans saw.