Older members of my family, Jewish refugees from eastern Europe, turn their eyes the other way each time they walk past a church. Some of them tense up when they see a cross or even hear the sound of distant church bells. As a child, I used to ask many questions about Jesus, but I received only a few reluctant answers. In the presence of some of my aunts, talk about Jesus and talk about sex evokes an identical reaction: why don't we talk about something pleasant instead?
When I was eight or nine, I came home from school one day and revealed to my grandmother that Jesus was actually a Jew. I thought she would deny it on the spot, but she just commented sadly: "Well, I wish he weren't. For thousands of years, every one of us Jews gets blamed for the troubles he so eagerly brought upon himself." I grew up nursing a strange mixture of emotions concerning "them" and "us", finding myself siding with Jesus and the Jews, the underdogs, rather than with the Church and my aunts.
Many years later, I shared a second-class compartment on a French night train with two young Catholic nuns. We passed the time in small talk, and it came out that I was from Jerusalem. As I mentioned it, they exchanged a look of alarm and then one of them asked me sheepishly, isn't Jerusalem full of Jews these days?
I said that as a matter of fact I was myself a Jew. Silence. Then the younger of the two said: "He was so sweet; how could the Jews do it to him?" There was such piercing pain and sadness in her voice that I wanted to tell her that it wasn't me - I just happened to have had a dentist's appointment on that particular Friday. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time in my life, this Israeli-born Jew got a sense of what my aunts and my grandmother were not talking about.
And yet, the more I read about Jesus, the more I agreed with that nun on one thing at least: he was indeed sweet. That his name evokes such bitterness in members of my family, indeed in millions of Jews, has to do with his disciples, not with him. First and foremost, it has to do with the Catholic Church which for centuries portrayed the Jews as God-killers. How awesome and how gruesome the Jews must have seemed to generations of simple Christian believers: people who could and who would kill a God must be both more and less than human.
But my Jesus is neither. He is entirely human. As Pope John Paul II visits Nazareth and Bethlehem, goes to the Sea of Galilee and to Jerusalem, he travels in the footsteps of one of the most genuine Jews who ever lived. I often call him Rabbi Jesus. Some of my Jewish friends as well as some of my Christian friends are uncomfortable with this title, yet Jesus' original followers often called him just that: "rabbi" - a Hebrew word that does not mean "father" or "prophet" or "holy", but simply "teacher".
And a teacher he was; a non-orthodox Jewish teacher who wanted to take Judaism back to what he regarded as its pure origins, or forward towards what he regarded as its uncompromising consequences. Needless to say, he was no Christian: he taught and argued in many synagogues but could never have set foot in a church, nor ever crossed himself or kneeled before any cross, or icon or image, not once in his life. In modern-day terminology, he lived as a reforming Jew and died as a non-conforming Jew.
I often wonder how Rabbi Jesus would have felt inside a cathedral or amidst earthly manifestations of Catholic might. I wonder how this blunt, ironic, barefoot, young Galilean poet would view the Vicar of Christ if he met him travelling these days across Galilee with his majestic retinue, surrounded by thousands of armed Jewish guards. Would Jesus regard himself as one of the guests? Or as one of the hosts? Would he be among the cheering crowds? Fall on his knees? Would the pontiff's visit to Galilee make him feel more like my aunts and grandmother or more like those French nuns?
Although every Christian calls him Saviour, to me he is simply Yeshu Jesus - son of Miriam and Yosef, who was absolutely right about the rigidity and the hypocrisy of organised religion, for instance, as well as about the universal need for compassion.
For centuries, the Jews have been on the receiving end of Christian love. They have been constantly told they must change. They have to love Jesus whether they love him or not. Since the Jews have usually had trouble loving Jesus, Spanish inquisitors or Christian pogrom makers or next-door anti-Semites were always there to assist them in finding love. "The conversion of the Jews", in the vocabulary of the Church, has become synonymous with the Second Coming, and with the salvation of the world. By stubbornly rejecting Jesus and refusing to convert, the Jews have made themselves guilty of postponing Redemption, so prolonging the suffering in the world. Therefore they belong on the cross.
This, of course, is not a summation of the entire Jewish-Catholic history. There have been bad times and worse times. In the 20th century came the lowest point in this relationship, at least since the days of the Spanish Inquisition, when Pope Pius XII failed to condemn unambiguously the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazi Germans, and refrained from calling upon his flocks to shelter the hunted Jews. On January 15th, 1964, Pope Paul VI came to visit the Holy Land. From the Jordanian West Bank, he crossed the next day into Israel and spent a few hours there, frequenting holy sites, but never once mentioning the term "Israel".
He was cautious not to say "Jews" either, but insisted on the term "the children of the Covenant of Abraham".
He made it very clear that he had come for a pilgrimage, not for a visit. Concluding his stay with a mass on Mount Zion, he avoided Yad Va'Shem, Israel's national Holocaust museum and memorial, and every other site with Jewish religious or national significance. In his farewell speech, as he was about to leave the country that he refused to mention by name, Paul VI nevertheless praised his mentor, Pope Pius XII, defending Pius' silence during the Holocaust.
After returning to the Vatican, he sent a polite telegram addressed to "President Shazar, Tel Aviv", evading not only the word Israeli but even any reference to Jerusalem as its capital city (de facto), so adding insult to injury: even as recently as the 1960s, the Vatican treated Israel as a non-country, its people as a non-nation, and its government as a nonentity.
Rabbi Jesus might have regarded such haughty papal conduct as Pharisean. Much has changed since that unfortunate previous pontifical journey to the Holy Land. Even earlier, an initial breakthrough in relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people was accomplished by Pope John XXIII who acquitted the Jews of collective responsibility for the killing of Jesus. There followed a gradual, hesitant beginning of Church-sponsored Jewish-Catholic dialogue that eventually led to an official apology by the Catholic Church for its part in the historic ordeal of the Jews. Pope John Paul II is the living spirit behind the various reconciliatory steps that culminated in the establishment of full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican.
However, my one aunt who is still alive (though very old now) is not quite satisfied. She maintains that an apology is not enough, that the Catholic Church - and the Christian world in general - has yet to do some serious soul-searching and self-criticism about their historic treatment of the Jews. In her view, the least the Christians can do now to atone for their many sins toward the Jews is to side with Israel in its dispute with the Arabs.
I suspect that what my aunt really wants from the Pope is something that even Jesus could not supply: a river of unconditional love which she thinks the Christians owe the State of Israel and every single Jew. She wants the Pope and every other Christian to want Jerusalem to be full of Jews. After what the Church has inflicted on the Jews for thousands of years, my aunt will settle for nothing short of a Zionist Pope.
The Arabs, on the other hand, want him entirely on their side. They expect the Church and the whole of Christendom to see things their way. Moreover, various Arab publications often portray the Jews as the common enemy of both Christianity and Islam. In fact, some of the ugliest anti-Jewish Islamic manifestations are borrowed word for word from the vast arsenal of centuries-old Christian anti-Semitism.
As Pope John Paul travels the Holy Land, through those parts which are the State of Israel and those that will soon become the State of Palestine, he might do well to turn his trip into more than just another pilgrimage to holy sites.
He could turn it into an emotionally significant visit with two nations, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, deeply injured not only - and not primarily - by each other, but first and foremost by Christian Europe.
Perhaps the Pope's prime message during this visit could be addressed not to Jews or Muslims but to Christians: Christian Europe bears a long-standing responsibility for much of the suffering of both conflicting parties in the Middle East. It is therefore the moral duty of Europe to sponsor peace in the Middle East by assisting all parties in every way possible rather than constantly taking sides, wagging their fingers like an old-fashioned schoolmaster chastising an unruly pupil, it is time for the people of Europe to give all parties every possible form of moral and material support in their current attempt to reach a compromise solution that is destined to be painful and frustrating for everyone involved. It is no longer necessary for anyone outside the region to choose between being pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian; it is now possible to be pro-peace by empathising with both.
When I was a small child, my wise grandmother explained to me in simple terms the difference between Jew and Christian (but her words of wisdom could well apply to any religious differences). "You see," she said, "the Christians believe that the Messiah has been here once and will one day return; the Jews maintain that the Messiah has yet to come. Over this, there has been endless hatred and bloodshed. Why? Why can't everybody simply wait and see? If the Messiah comes saying, `Hello, it's nice to see you again,' then the Jews will have to concede. If, on the other hand, he comes saying, `How do you do?' then the entire Christian world will have to apologise to the Jews. Until that time, why not just live and let live?"
"Forgive them," said Rabbi Jesus, "for they know not what they are doing."
Well, I would go along with Christian wisdom about forgiveness, but not with the "know not" bit. Even as we ought to try to forgive one another for various past injustices, we should not do so on the grounds of moral infantility or ethical imbecility. We all know what we are doing whenever we inflict pain, cause humiliation or give offence, because at one time or another we all have been at the receiving end.
Amos Oz 2000. English translation by Amos Oz and Maggie Bar-Tura.
Amos Oz's most recent book, The Story Begins, a collection of literary essays is published by Chatto & Windus.