Another Reason to hate Easter… AND Christmas

You know the Messiah? 

Not the Jewish future-dude who makes men in black hats dance… but the musical winter holiday event with lots of shouting? 

You know… Hallelujah!! Hallelujah!!!  Hallelujah!!! Halellujah!!! Hal-lay-lay-ew-YAH!  That one?

 Well, it's weird, but I've always thought of that as a pretty inoffensive Christmas event.  Maybe because my Jewish grandmother once took me to hear it performed by the Baltimore Symphony when I was a kid.  Maybe because I think of it as "classy", unlike little babies in plastic mangers and zoo animals with red shiny noses…

Or maybe because it's in another language, so you don't know what's being said… you don't know WHY they're so full of joy and hallelujah-ness.

But now we know what they're saying.  Thanks to this week's Sunday Times.  And it should come as no huge surprise:

“Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the “Hallelujah” chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.

Yeah, it turns out this was intended to be another fun Easter game for us.  Along with bloody Passion plays and pogroms.  A celebration of God's rejection of the Jews.

The article is pretty complicated, and goes on to discuss the complexities of the libretto and the religious text from which it was taken, but it doesn't much matter to me.  I'd always understood that the Hellelujah chorus was a celebration of a birth.  And I could overlook the Jesus factor in the name of ecumenical good spirit.  The idea that this rousing chorus was in fact intended as a celebration of our destruction… that's all I need to know, really.

But this brings up another bigger question too.  The Richard  Wagner question.  The TS  Elliot question.  Can we admire and appreciate brilliant art when the artist has an anti-Semitic agenda?

Can you?