Redemptive Suffering After the Shoah

Abstract

In this chapter, I approach the doctrine of vicarious atonement through the figure of the suffering servant. I probe how this figure has been used both by Christian and Jewish scholars throughout the centuries to better understand their role in God’s plan of salvation and to make sense of their respective historico-cultural experiences of suffering in light thereof. The leitmotiv in my going back and forth between Christian and Jewish traditions is a sense that something did go terribly wrong in Jewish-Christian relations and that Christians have to bear the burden of this history and critically examine what role its understanding of the Christ-figure played in the emergence of anti-Judaism.