McCain to Hagee: Drop dead.

Ruh-roh! John McCain has repudiated Pastor John Hagee, who withdrew his endorsement, after it emerged that Hagee had once said God used Hitler to help bring the state of Israel into existence. I liked this:

“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well,” McCain said in a statement to CNN Thursday.

He added that his relationship with Hagee did not compare with Obama’s lengthy association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “I have said I do not believe Senator Obama shares Reverend Wright's extreme views. But let me also be clear, Reverend Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual advisor, and I did not attend his church for twenty years. I have denounced statements he made immediately upon learning of them, as I do again today,” said McCain.

Exactly right.

If Hagee really does believe that God allowed Hitler to kill 6 million Jews so Israel could be reborn, is that something he should have kept to himself? Seriously. My friend David Klinghoffer, a religiously observant Orthodox Jew, stirred up a hornet's nest, to put it mildly, about 10 years ago by making a related claim in a First Things essay called "Anti-Semitism Without Anti-Semites":

Jews who don’t believe in the Bible, who think it is a mere pastiche of ancient propaganda tracts culled together by rather unskilled editors called redactors, can still agree that it embodies the essence of what Jews are. After all, it is our national literature. We wrote it, and we have embraced it, however fraudulently, as God’s own word for more than three thousand years. It defines us, and always has. What, then, does the Bible tell us about anti-Semitism? The answer is nothing, and everything.

For, to put it simply, the Bible has never heard of such a thing as anti-Semitism. Naturally it records stupendous disasters that have befallen our people: none greater than the destruction of the First Temple by Babylonian invaders, when Jewish mothers were compelled to cook and eat their children in the streets of Jerusalem, as the Book of Lamentations so appallingly records.

But in Lamentations, and throughout the Bible, there is a striking difference between the way biblical Jews understood the hostility of non-Jews and the way we understand it. When the Jewish people suffer in the Bible, it is almost exclusively at the hands of non-Jews. Occasionally God will send a plague, but, for His own reasons, he prefers to work through Gentile aggressors. The difference between us and the Jews of the Bible, and indeed the Jews of every generation until a century or two ago, is this: They understood Gentile hostility to be an expression of God’s displeasure with us as a community. We understand it to be essentially meaningless.

What’s more, however difficult it is for us to square this mystery with our modern assumptions, they understood that God punishes the People Israel as a community. They believed in collective responsibility. That means that when individual Jews do wrong and bring punishment down from Heaven, innocent Jews may get caught up in the maelstrom. In fact, the guilty may escape punishment in this world altogether, while the innocent die and must wait for their reward in the world to come.

Take that time, recorded in the Book of Joshua, when God stopped the sun in its course. That happened during the conquest of Canaan, when the Israelites emerged from the desert after their wanderings. Shortly before that, we find a typical incident that reflects the authentic Jewish view of collective responsibility. When the Jews besieged Jericho, God instructed them to refrain from looting the ruined city. One man disobeyed. His name was Achan. As a result, when the Jews went out to make war on their next target, a modest little Canaanite city called Ai, they got chased away and lost thirty-six apparently innocent men in the battle. But Achan was not killed. It was only after Joshua had punished Achan that the Israelites could resume their campaign undeterred.

There is perhaps no better example of this dynamic than the Holocaust. It would be a presumption to assert that God caused the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism. In any given historical event, we can never know God’s true intention. But it would also be a presumption, and a worse one, to assert that such a punishment was not what He had in mind. It is that latter presumption of which most Jews, including many religiously observant ones, are guilty today. Anyway, if He did intend that event as a punishment, a warning, or a lesson, it would fit the Bible’s pattern neatly. The Jews liquidated by Nazi Germany were not only, or even mostly, Reformers and secularists. Many deeply pious Jews perished as well, for they were often the last to seek escape from rising Nazi power. Which makes sense. God views the People Israel as an eternal community, not merely as disconnected individuals. All are responsible for all. And as the story of Achan and his friends demonstrates, maybe to emphasize our deep interconnectedness, the Lord does not practice precision bombing.

If David believes this, should he have said so in public? Should the magazine have published it? I'm asking with reference to our "forbidden knowledge" discussion below. Is it conceivable, in light the record in the Hebrew Bible, that Pastor Hagee -- who is demonstrably a passionate philosemite -- and David Klinghoffer might have a point? And if so, are they required to keep quiet about that theological interpretation of history? I'm not asking whether you think they're right or wrong; I'm asking whether or not they should say these things out loud.