The Living Word Christian Center and Christians United for Israel hosted their fifth Night to Honor Israel on September 14th.

It was a night of extraordinary interfaith partnership (Christians and Jews); solidarity (United States and Israel); covenantal affirmation (by Pastor Mac Hammond); tribute to survival and redemption of the Holocaust (Professor Irving Roth—he exclaimed that "the American soldiers who liberated him from Buchenwald looked to him like the moshiac—messiah); international musical tour-de-force (Dudu Fisher); personal friendship (Rabbi Norman Cohen of Bet Shalom Congregation, who provided the benediction, and Pastor Hammond have been friends for thirty years when both were leading their nascent congregations and shared adjacent office space) and thousands of people participating in gemulat chasidim – the act of loving kindness between neighbors, friends, colleagues or even strangers – of celebrating and contemplating the sacred relationship between Christians and Jews.

Professor Irving Roth

Dudu Fisher

It wasn't always so – particularly in the upper Midwest – which makes the Night to Honor Israel all the more uplifting and profoundly important. And often it isn't so as a present survey of Europe and the Middle East will show. (Which includes the persecution of Christians in the cradle of Christianity – the Middle East.) And so it is wonderful to bend the arc of history towards justice (repudiating anti-Judaism by embracing the common heritage of Judaism and Christianity) from Brooklyn Center projected to the rest of the world.

Pastor Mac Hammond – as he has for years – forthrightly addressed the issue of Christian anti-Judaism by way of the reason for the Living Word Christian Center's bringing to life the Night to Honor Israel.

Succinctly, he identified three major points:

  1. Biblically, Genesis 12 teaches: "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." From this precept flows the necessity of honoring Jewish friends and Israel, which is God's heart, as critically important for the Christian psyche. The foundation, in turn, for Christian-Jewish interfaith relations is the "everlasting" Jewish covenantal relationship with God. As Pastor Mac Hammond noted: "It is impossible to honor God and ignore his heart."
  1. Honoring the spiritual heritage of Christianity which is embedded in the Torah and recognizing this as the essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This truth relates back to the birth of Christianity with Church fathers who were all Jews – including Jesus. As Pastor Mac Hammond emphasized: as the Ten Commandments teach – honoring your parents (in this case spiritual parents) is necessary to preserve spiritual heritage.
  1. The dangers of Christian anti-Semitism and the necessity of loving and respecting the history and spiritual journeys of Jews and Christians as a countervailing force. To his great credit and not without some controversy from certain Christian circles, Pastor Mac Hammond decries the dangers of Replacement Theology. That is, the millennia old belief that resurrection of Jesus marked the replacement of the Jewish covenantal relationship with the Christian relationship with God. Pastor Hammond pointed out that millions of Christians persist in this belief. Pastor Hammond advised and urged that is the obligation of Christians to "purge [this] poison of anti-Semitism from the body of Christ" or Christians risk losing their spiritual identity.

Pastor Mac Hammond in the presence of Christians and Jews, young and old, veterans of the armed forces of the United States and Israel, and in a congregation full of people which reflected Minnesota's rich racial diversity affirmed this elemental truth – vibrant Christianity and Judaism relies on the reciprocal acknowledgement of the intertwined fates of Christianity and Judaism. That is mutual respect is the foundation of Christian-Jewish interfaith relations and all the good which can emerge from it for the benefit of all.

The profoundly serious and heartfelt message of Pastor Mac Hammond is reflected in two stories told over the course of the evening involving "Righteous Gentiles," which is the name given to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust often at great personal peril. Dudu Fischer paid tribute – in song and with video of the reunion – of the Polish family which saved his father's family in the Shoah – 16 souls saved by one family. For Irving Roth--who survived Auschwitz, the Nazi Death Marches and Buchenwald – he returned to his village to find, a miracle, that his parents had survived the Holocaust in Budapest. Implicitly, this meant his parents' survival pivoted on the supreme efforts of Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats of the neutral nations who prevented Eichmann from deporting to Auschwitz the last surviving Jewish community in occupied Europe: the Jews of Budapest. This we celebrate.

Rabbi Norman Cohen