If you haven’t seen The Good Place, I highly recommend you seeking it out. There is lots I love about the show, so I will probably talk about it again in future.
In the show, Tahani and Kamilah are sisters. Tahani has died and gone to “The Good Place” where all the best people end up. She is clearly very accomplished, having raised millions for charity and worked in a range of up-market places. She is also incredibly beautiful and focussed on being fashionably attired. However, her constant celebrity name dropping and need to consistently outline her achievements gives the viewer the impression that she is desperately insecure, despite her achievements and her good looks.
As the seasons progress, we come to learn that this is becuase she has always been in competition with her younger sister, Kamilah. Kamilah is a grammy award winner, a famous artist and loved by the whole world. Kamilah also has their parents’ attention and approval, something Tahani clearly lacks. The competition between the two means they don’t have a great relationship and often say awful things about the other.
I always thought Judaism was like a parent to Christianity but I read recently a comment about Christianity and Judaism being siblings. For me, this is a really interesting framing and it is a space where I have been doing a lot of reading. Part of the reading has been in trying to understand the Psalms of Ascent, which I am thinking about in terms of constructing identity. Another part has been thinking about Jewish claims to the land of Israel, in response to the genocide that is being perpetrated in Gaza. Part of it is thinking about the many different iterations of Jesus that there are, many of which are claimed as the ‘authentic’ understanding.
For a very long time I understood that the Jews were first and Christianity emerged out of that space. If we accept the gospel framing, this makes sense and it is understandable to place Christians in contrast to the Jews who did not get on board with Jesus’ ministry. However, its really important to understand that this is rhetoric designed to authenticate Jesus work by making the Jews the enemy. This rhetoric has been taken up and supported throughout Christian history and encourages the anti-Semitism we still see today.
If however, we think of them as siblings, perhaps Christianity is the uber successful one (in terms of world power and dominance) that becomes arrogant about its acheivements and always takes the opportunity to rub it in the other siblings faces. That is, Christianity is Kamilah. In this framing, Judaism may be like Tahani. Also incredibly successful, but without the same level of power and influence that the other sibling has.
Cynthia M Baker, wrote a book called Jew and she argues our understanding of Jewish-ness, particularly the negative stereotypes, are becuase they have been imposed from outside rather than being an insider term. This has all sorts of consequences for how the term is used and abused, and used to abuse. By the end of the The Good Place both Kamilah and Tahani have grown and changed in very positive ways.
In a similar way, I hope that Christianity and Judaism can continue to grow and change in positive ways, too.