For my Christian friends, today is the day Jesus rose from the dead.

O the stone was rolled away

he’s no longer where he lay.

Or so goes the country hymn.  Did Jesus rise from the dead?  Even analytic philosophers would concede that the question is meaningful, since — had one been in the vicinity of the tomb on the third day following the crucifixion — one might have seen Jesus if indeed he had risen.

One of the privileges of my former life in Manhattan was the many years of friendship I enjoyed with philosopher/theologian Michael Wyschogrod and his distinguished wife Edith.  During some part of those years, Michael had formed what he titled a “Rainbow Group.”  This was an interfaith gathering of religionists who met about once a month to consider questions at the cutting edge of the theological differences between Christians and Jews.

In a different setting, captured in the photo above, Michael was also active in negotiating with the Vatican and Presbyterians to modify or remove anti-Jewish doctrines.

The Rainbow Group was doing something rather different. It had the astringency and sense of risk that’s a recognizable feature of the serious search for truth. Each of us may have different notions of what constitutes high drama.  For me, Michael Wyschogrod’s Rainbow Group collected together all the basic elements of high drama.  It was where people personally and professionally committed to particular faith-systems — particular views of the Absolute — met and put their founding beliefs on the line for reciprocal challenging!

It was there that the eminent Jewish scholar Irving Greenberg first tried out his hypothesis that Jesus, after his crucifixion, actually had risen from the dead in accordance with Christian belief.  It was not that Jews had misrepresented the resurrection experience.  They had not experienced it.  But not from any narrow-mindedness nor from self-deception.  They had not experienced it because God hid it from them, or at least hid it from their major opinion-shapers.

Why would God do that?  Because, Greenberg hypothesized, the Creator wanted both religions: the Christian one slanted upward with its vertical or transcendent emphasis; the Jewish one with its horizontal slant toward common life and its shared realities.  Both are necessary, Greenberg suggested. Since it’s hard to do both at the same time, each was assigned a different specialization, the vertical or the horizontal, inside which to sustain its natural and proper relation to the divine.

From what I heard later, Greenberg subsequently modified his talk, but it was very striking to hear it fresh, possibly for the first time, before the sharp edges got rounded off. People live and die by what they believe and disbelieve about God. So is Christ risen?

Listen, do you take me for a fool

and a social blunderer?

I’m staying out of it!