THESE ARE THE WORDS

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There is a particular quality to the voice of a man who has been trampled but refuses to be broken. I heard it this week during my Zoom chat with Archbishop Joseph D’Souza of Hyderabad, India — churchman, humanitarian, primate of the Good Shepherd Church of India, president of the Dignity Freedom Network, president of the All India Christian Council, and one of the most steadfast Christian friends the Jewish people and the State of Israel possess anywhere in the world. He is soft-spoken, the way people often are when they have seen too much to waste time with theatrics. And yet what he told me was scalding.

“The Anglican Church in England is lost,” he said, not so much in anger as in disappointment. As he sees it, the Church of England has adopted a woke agenda in a desperate bid to stay relevant for a younger generation.

“Appeasing the Muslims will doom them,” he told me, “we cannot be a party to what they are doing — making it look like Israel is the biggest issue, as if there is nothing else in the world to concern themselves with.”

He was particularly scathing about the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally. The backdrop to our conversation was this week’s General Synod meeting in York, which spent the better part of two days contorting itself over a Middle East document called Kairos Palestine II.

This ridiculous text, authored by a coalition of Palestinian Christian leaders and theologians, accuses Israel of genocide no less than thirty times. It brands the Jewish state a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” speaks of “arrogant Jewish supremacy,” demands BDS, and, tellingly, rationalizes the atrocities of October 7 as resistance “born out of decades of injustice.”

It even calls for a boycott of dialogue with “Zionist voices,” by which it means the overwhelming majority of Jews on earth. Astonishingly, much of what it asserts collides head-on with the very definition of antisemitism — the IHRA definition — that the Church of England itself adopted in full in 2018.

The original motion asked the Synod to “receive” Kairos II. When it became clear that “receive” sounded too much like total endorsement, the wording was quietly amended: the church would merely “hear” the document. Thus laundered, it sailed through, with not a single bishop voting against.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, freshly returned from a one-sided “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land, told the chamber, in an Orwellian turn of phrase, that “to hear the heartfelt expression of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians does not mean we agree with everything in these documents.”

But “hearing” is not neutral when what you have agreed to hear is a libel. This is wokeness in its purest institutional form: the elevation of one anointed victim narrative beyond the reach of scrutiny, and the terror of being thought unkind for asking an inconvenient question.

Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, saw it coming, and warned that the text was “little more than political activism dressed up as theology.” He was heard, in the Synod’s new sense of the word, and then totally ignored. He called it “a sad day.”

To their credit, some Anglicans were openly critical. The prominent theologian Ian Paul asked how a church could claim to oppose antisemitism while tabling a document that calls Israel a racist colonial enterprise.

And that is where Archbishop D’Souza’s concerns become painfully personal, because his own flock – Anglicans in India – are being openly persecuted. Christians make up less than three percent of India’s population, but the hardline Hindu nationalists in power have convinced themselves that this tiny minority is engaged in some grand conspiracy of conversion — a suspicion sharpened by the fact that Christians do the unglamorous work of supporting the Dalits, the so-called untouchables.

“There are over a hundred million Indians benefiting from Christians,” the Archbishop told me. Yet instead of welcoming that charity, the government is preparing a bill to strip the church of its assets. Pastors are dragged from prayer meetings, home worship has been effectively criminalized in state after state, and one pastor was recently seized by a mob, beaten, and forced to eat cow dung while chanting a Hindu devotional.

The question the Archbishop asked, which hung over our whole conversation, was stark: “The Archbishop of Canterbury knows about this. Why has she done nothing?” Why was the first great foreign-policy outing of her tenure a pilgrimage of solidarity over Gaza, while the plight of her own persecuted brethren in India does not elicit so much as a single word?

This is the part that should shame the Church of England most of all: the suffering Christians of India are not distant strangers to Canterbury — they are Anglicans, members of the Anglican communion, brothers and sisters in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s own faith. She has tears for a fashionable if controversial cause, yet none at all for her own family under siege.

“No wonder there is a schism,” D’Souza told me, “between the Anglicans in the UK and those in Africa and India.”

The Book of Devarim opens with an interesting statement (Deut. 1:1): אֵלֶּה הַדְּבָרִים אֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר מֹשֶׁה — “These are the words that Moses spoke.” The Midrash points out that the Torah could have used the gentle verb amar, “said,” but instead chose diber, “spoke” — and diber, the sages teach, carries the connotation of rebuke.

In the last weeks of his life, facing the people he had carried on his back for forty years, the greatest of the prophets chose to give it to them between the eyes. One example is when he mentions the appointment of judges (Deut. 1:16): “Hear out the disputes between your brothers, and judge righteously between a man and his brother and the stranger who is with him.”

Hear them out — meaning both sides. Torah justice is not simply amplifying the loudest cry in the room; it is the refusal to render a verdict until you have heard both sides. A judge who listens to one party sympathetically and ignores the other completely – and then calls that compassion – has not been merciful, but derelict.

This is precisely the sin the Synod and the Archbishop of Canterbury have committed. They heard the pain of one side and mistook amplifying it for justice, refusing to consider the other party: the bereaved victims of October 7, the families of the hostages, and the two million Arab citizens of Israel who vote, and whose representatives sit in Israel’s parliament and on Israel’s supreme court.

And there is a bitter logic here that Archbishop D’Souza grasped without citing Devarim: a church that will not hear the stranger will, in the end, fail even the brother — which is exactly why the Anglicans of India have been abandoned by their own Archbishop.

When you decide in advance whose suffering is fashionable, you have not chosen the oppressed; you have chosen to appease the mob — the very trap Moses warned against, as he said (Deut 1:17): “you shall not fear any man.” Justice belongs to God, not to the mood of public opinion as expressed on social media.

Moses did not rebuke Israel as a power play. He rebuked them because truth is often not convenient, but it is always the best medicine. This is the standard the Church of England has abandoned, and the standard Joseph D’Souza — soft-spoken, besieged, and utterly unbowed — still upholds, from a country where speaking it can cost him his freedom.

As the Torah says: “These are the words.” May we still be brave enough to speak them, so that those who traffic in lies can never say: why didn’t you tell us?

Image: The burned out Evangelical Lutheran church in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh after being set ablaze by unknown individuals in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Matters India)