c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Two giants of the human spirit died within a week of each other last month in Jerusalem. David Flusser, a scholar of the first century, and Yehuda Amichai, a poet of the 20th, were among the intellectual crown jewels of Israel.

The 83-year-old Flusser, professor of comparative religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was revered and respected in both the Jewish and Christian communities. Born in Vienna and raised in Prague, Flusser immigrated to Israel on the eve of World War II at the age of 20. Had he remained in Europe, he most likely would have been one of the 6 million victims of the Holocaust.

Because he lived in Israel, Flusser was able to devote his life to the intensive study of the Jewish roots of Christianity, especially the Jewishness of Jesus. Flusser’s classic work, “Jesus,” was published in 1965 and translated into 11 languages.

Flusser asserted Jesus lived and died as a faithful Jew. Executed by the Roman occupiers of ancient Israel, Jesus never meant to establish a new religion nor even a new sect within existing Judaism. Jesus was not a revolutionary or even a questioner of the fundamentals of the Judaism of his time.

Flusser was a master of the traditional Jewish texts in Hebrew and Aramaic,and was thoroughly at home with Latin, Greek and Arabic sources as well. He separated the historically verifiable material about Jesus from the later Gospel writings and works written by early Christians.

It’s not often that a scholar of ancient texts achieves world headlines, but it occurred when Flusser provided evidence that the claim Jesus was the Jewish messiah _ attributed to the historian Flavius Josephus _ was a forgery written by Christians nearly 200 years after Josephus’ death in 100.

Many Christians, including Marvin R. Wilson, professor of biblical studies at Gordon College, welcomed Flusser’s research on Jesus: “I was privileged to know Professor Flusser. His impact as a Jew upon New Testament studies was for many Christians quite revolutionary. Flusser’s teachings drew evangelical Christians to Jerusalem to pursue doctoral studies under this unassuming genius. He leaves a deep hole in biblical scholarship.”

Amichai was born in Germany in 1924 and came to Israel with his parents at age 12. He probably would have been another of the 6 million. Happily, Amichai became one of Israel’s most acclaimed poets. Although he wrote about love, loss and growing old, Amichai believed that all poetry was political.

He was no ivory tower intellectual, something almost impossible to be in modern Israel. Amichai fought in the British Army during World War II, and in three of his nation’s wars, the last in 1973 when he was 49 years old. The old soldier-poet wrote “Seven Laments for the War Dead” that sadly declares all things of war are written in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and Death.

He lived in the same Jerusalem neighborhood for more than 35 years. Indeed, he became a celebrity in Israel where he received the kind of adulation usually reserved for sports or entertainment figures in the United States.

Because he wrote in Hebrew, the Israeli’s writings were not known to much of the world until the 1970s, when the poet Ted Hughes and Amichai collaborated on an English translation.

“That translation put me in orbit,” Amichai said. Another poet friend was W.H. Auden, whom Amichai had read in the 1940s while stationed in Egypt.

Reading Amichai in Hebrew is like sipping deliciously aged wine. His verses are both modern, almost colloquial, and literary. They speak directly to head and heart. Seventeen years ago, Amichai wrote “1924,” one of my favorites.

It begins:

I was born in 1924. If I were a violin my age

I wouldn’t be very good. As a wine I would be splendid

Or altogether sour. As a dog I would be dead. As a book

I would begin to be expensive or thrown out by now.

As a forest I would be young, as a machine ridiculous.

As a human being I’m very tired.

In 1994 Amichai wrote his most exquisite poem:

Tombstones crumble, words come and go, words are forgotten,

The lips that uttered them are turned to dust,

Tongues die like people, other tongues come to life,

Gods in the sky change, gods come and go,

Prayers remain forever.

While I mourn the deaths of Flusser and Amichai, I am comforted knowing they had full, productive lives. But I cry thinking about all the other potential world-class scholars and poets who were murdered in the Holocaust.

KRE END RUDIN