No. Abe was not a Christian.

On the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat, the seventh day of the week when God rested from the labor of creating the world, we Jews are supposed to follow suit, and take a break from “business as usual.” Some bloggers take the day off. Joe Katzman blogs Sufi mysticism and other spiritual or non-confrontational stuff on Shabbat. That’s cool.

But yesterday, Joe blogged some comments from Mark Shea’s “Catholic and Enjoying it” concerning the life and death of Abraham "Avremel" Zelmanowitz that really were, well, pretty confrontational. Although that probably wasn't Joe's intention.

Here’s a link to Mark’s post. I’m not going to quote his remarks on this subject at any length here because, frankly, I don’t want to. But I encourage you to follow this link and read the whole post (as well as others there – it’s a good blog). Mark is clearly struggling with the notion of a person who is not a Christian making a truly selfless sacrifice and also with the idea of such a person being allowed into heaven. And he resolves this dilemma by concluding that Avremel Zelmanowitz, a devout Orthodox Jew, somehow, without knowing it, must have been, at least in some small part, a Christian.

Now, I never knew Abe Zelmanowitz. But I do know a few Jews, Orthodox and otherwise, and I’ve spent more than a small part of my life studying Judaism. And I can assure Mark that he will have to find a different way to resolve his dilemma if he’s going to be truly honest with himself or with the spirit of the man whose hereafter he’s taken it upon himself to contemplate. Joe called Mark’s ruminations “a shining example of interfaith understanding, without denying or glossing over the conflicting principles of either faith.” I have to disagree. Mark’s comments reflect an appalling but all-too-common lack of “interfaith understanding” and totally ignore one of the most basic conflicts between Judaism and Catholic theology.

It’s fashionable these days to pretend that Judaism and Christianity are really just two sides of the same coin, two views of the same picture. They’re not. A fundamental premise of Christianity is, was and always will be that Judaism is dead. History. Superceded by a superior theology. And ever since the rise of Christianity, one of the fundamental premises of Judaism has been that the Christian heresy was just that – an error. A mistake. A misinterpretation of our scriptures by which we must not be led astray. There are conflicting views on this subject. But for the most part they represent ineffective attempts to paper over the very real and inevitable conflict between these two great faiths. Which is not to say that there has to be conflict between the people who profess them, as long as we respect each other’s space. The problem arises – the problem with religion has always arisen – when the adherents of one faith feel the need to intrude themselves into the sanctities of the other faith. And that’s what Mark Shea, with all due respect, has done here.

So, with that long-winded introduction, let me try to respond succinctly to Mr. Shea’s comments. In our tradition, Mark, in our tradition, the ability to do good in the world comes from our God-given inner being, created in God’s image. We constantly struggle with the temptation to do evil (the "bad inclination") and, hopefully, the "good inclination" wins out, but the ultimate outcome is up to each and every one of us. This "grace of god" thing, this necessity of divine intervention to facilitate righteousness, is alien to Judaism.

If Avremel Zelmanowitz were here to respond to your well-intentioned attempt to sneak him into your heaven in the guise of an inadvertent Christian, I suspect he would thank you politely and tell you that he has his own ticket. Jews, you see, don’t really go to “heaven.” They earn a place in the Olam HaBa, the World to Come, which is both a "place" and a "time." And in the Olam HaBa, according to at least one tradition, Jews are ultimately rewarded by spending eternity in the blissful study of Talmud. So if Abe Zelmanowitz does in fact meet Jesus in his hereafter, it's likely to be across a table when they’re sitting to study Gemara together. And nobody will be calling anybody else “Lord.”