he universally positive response to Al Gore's having named Joseph Lieberman as his running mate is taken as a sign that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past, but is it that simple? Still running below the surface of this event are currents of an ancient Christian anti-Judaism that have yet to be fully reckoned with or left behind.
The nomination that Democrats formalize Thursday in Los Angeles can be the occasion of a broader understanding of Jewish faith and practice, but it can also prompt Christians to a needed reexamination of some basic, and slyly destructive, assumptions. The clue to all of this is the Sabbath, what it means to Senator Lieberman, and what it meant to Jesus.
At first the news that Gore had chosen as his vice president a man who, in Abraham Joshua Heschel's phrase, ''experiences the arrival of Friday evening as an event'' was disorienting to many. That the Sabbath prohibition of work normally forbids even the use of the automobile and electronic equipment, including telephones, mystified many Americans. The inauguration is scheduled for a Saturday: Could Lieberman attend? There was a recognition that such rigorous Jewish observance marked a decisive difference between the Connecticut senator and most others, even most other Jews, and for a time the question was whether that difference was disqualifying.
But in short order various experts, including rabbis, asserted that nothing in Orthodox Judaism would prevent an observant Jewish vice president or president from fulfilling all the duties of the office. But the shadow of the question lingers. Suspicions concerning minutely regulated Sabbath behavior of Orthodox Jews spring from the darkest recesses of the Christian psyche, where it is not forgotten that the foundational story of Christianity begins in a conflict between Jesus and his opponents exactly over Jewish regulations of the Sabbath.
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for example, the followers of Jesus are criticized by figures variously defined as ''the Pharisees,'' ''the Scribes,'' and ''the lawyers'' for picking and eating corn on the Sabbath. The dispute escalates when Jesus claims the right to cure the sick on the Sabbath, against heartless Pharisees who prefer observance of the law to restoration of health.
This argument prompts Jesus to declare, ''The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is master even of the Sabbath'' (Mark 2:27). As a direct result of this assertion, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the ''Pharisees began to plot against him, discussing how to destroy him'' (Matthew 12:14), while in John those who want to kill Jesus over the Sabbath dispute are no longer limited to the Pharisees, but are ''the crowd'' (John 7:20-24).
From then on, Christians will remember the ''Jewish murder'' of Jesus - the primordial untruth and source of anti-Semitism - as beginning in an argument about the Sabbath.
In the Christian memory, Jewish obsession with the letter of Sabbath regulations, even when they conflict with the spirit of neighborly love - Jewish form against Christian substance - are the cause of enmity between Jesus and the Jewish people. The Christian memory forgets, of course, that everything Jesus asserted about the primacy of love, life, and health over law, regulation, and ritual was rooted in the heart of Jewish religion. His just cited famous dictum was not, in fact, a ''Christian'' innovation, but an ancient saying of the rabbis: ''The Sabbath is given unto you,'' as Rabbi Heschel recounts it, ''not you unto the Sabbath.''
Because the Gospels were composed decades after Jesus lived and died, at a time when Jewish followers of Jesus were themselves in conflict with another group of Jews - the Pharisees - the Gospels reflect a conflict not of Jesus' lifetime, but much later. This is a complicated question of Scripture scholarship. The point here is that for contingent historical reasons, Christianity defined itself as wholly positive against a negative ''Judaism'' that never, in fact, existed. The Pharisees, and ultimately ''the crowd,'' did not believe what the Gospels say they believed about the Sabbath.
The authentic American happiness that has greeted Lieberman's nomination exists side by side with a continuing, if implicit, Christian denigration of Jewish belief and practice. The curiosity and uneasiness provoked by the senator's Sabbath observances are the clue. American culture has gone a long way toward the defeat of anti-Semitism, but the mental structures of Christian anti-Judaism that spawned it are still waiting to be dismantled.
For starters, Christians must retrieve the essential and permanent Jewishness of Jesus, a Sabbath-observant Jew until the day he died. His life cannot be understood as a rejection of the Jews. Christians must acknowledge how their church has long portrayed Judaism in a negative and distorted light. As a result few non-Jews have any sense of the real meaning of Jewish belief and practice.
Therefore, it is not up to me, a Christian, to say what Lieberman's observances mean to him, but I can look forward, with everyone, to the final discrediting of the anti-Jewish stereotypes of Sabbath legalism.
As the senator becomes better known, we can expect the nobility of his faith to shine through as an educational beacon. Perhaps the world beyond Judaism can learn how and why, despite everything, the Jewish Sabbath survives, in Rabbi Heschel's phrases, as ''a palace in time,'' as ''the spiritual underground of history.''
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
