Holy Envy

by Barbara Brown Taylor

  Sometimes, on the last day of class, I hand out cards with versions of the Golden Rule on them. “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” That one is from Judaism. “None of you is a believer until you love for your brother what you love for yourself.” That one is from Islam. “This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you.” That one is from Hinduism. Some version of the principle shows up in all the great religions of the world, which is a large part of what makes them great: they ask members inside the tribe to use their humanity as the benchmark for how to treat those outside the tribe.

  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That one is from Christianity. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” That one too.

  When students first encounter the reality of multiple religious worldviews, they often race to the lowest common denominator: your truth is true for you and mine is true for me. This is their peace offering, their way of living with religious difference without fighting, but it also prevents them from exploring the differences in any meaningful way. Holy envy gives those students another way forward, especially those who are inclined toward religious absolutes. To embroider a metaphor from the inimitable Robert Farrar Capon, human beings who wish to understand the ways of God are like oysters lying at the bottom of a tide pool, wishing to understand the ways of a prima ballerina.5 Clearly, there are limits to our abilities. As brilliant as our tide-pool theologies may be, the brilliance of the ballerina exceeds them all. The metaphor is imperfect, to be sure, but it can still free believers to question each other’s absolutes, test them, challenge them, and improve them without believing we can know for sure which oyster wins.

  This can be difficult for people whose religious histories include a lot of winning. At the moment, Christians and Muslims are tied in that regard, depending on how you measure the rise and fall of empires. Their sacred texts, along with those of Judaism, have lots of strife in them. All three faiths evolved under circumstances in which their followers faced people who wanted to kill them, so they come by their defensiveness honestly. At the same time, all three view God as being the main force behind their victories over their adversaries, who have often included each other. This is old news, but it does complicate the cultivation of holy envy between people who may equate shared ground with lost ground. It does not help that some of them still want to kill each other—but not all of them, and none of them all the time.

  In his book God and the Universe of Faiths, British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe—and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together.

  Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it. The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, “We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.”6

  There are dozens of other ways to imagine the relationship of the world’s great faiths. Raimon Panikkar, another renowned scholar of religion who was also a Catholic priest, spent a lot of time thinking about what it might mean for Christians to focus on contributing to the world’s faiths instead of dominating them. Born in Spain to a Catholic mother and a Hindu father, he used the analogy of the world’s great rivers. The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges all nourish the lives of those who live along their banks, he said. One flows through Israel, one flows through Rome, and one flows through India. If he were writing today he might have added the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which flow through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

  None of these rivers meet on earth, Panikkar said, though they do meet in the heavens, where water from each of them condenses into clouds that rain down on all the mortals of the earth. In the same way, he said, the religions of the world remain distinct and unmixed on earth—but “they meet once transformed into vapor, once metamorphosed into Spirit,” which then is poured out in innumerable tongues.7

  Eventually all people of faith must decide how they will think about and respond to people of other (and no) faiths. Otherwise they will be left at the mercy of their worst impulses when push comes to shove and their fear deadens them to the best teachings of their religions.

  Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, “Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best person you can be. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Thank you for coming.” Then he was gone, leaving me with a fresh case of holy envy.

  I could do that, I thought. I could speak from the heart of my faith, wishing others well at the heart of theirs—including those who had no name for what got them through the night. It might mean taking down some fences, but turf was no longer the reigning metaphor. I was not imagining two separate yards with neighbors leaning over a shared boundary. I was imagining a single reservoir of living water, with two people looking into it. One might have been a Muslim and the other a Christian, but there was nothing in their faces to tell me that. All I saw were two human beings looking into deep waters that did not belong to either of them, reflecting back to them the truth that they were not alone.

  5

  The Nearest Neighbors

  This is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of danger and of risk, of eternal beginning and eternal becoming, of opened spirit and of deep realization, the kingdom of holy insecurity.

  MARTIN BUBER

  My faith in my own tradition took its hardest hit during the unit on Judaism, for at least two reasons. The first was that teaching the basics of Jewish belief and practice gave me a chance to measure how far Christianity had moved from where it started. By the end of the first century, the religion of Jesus had become the religion about him, so that even he might have been alarmed by what his followers had done. When had the faith of his ancestors become the adversary? When had people turned his lifelong faith in the one and only Father to a new faith in the one and only Son?

  This leads directly to the second reason, which was that hearing straight from Jews about Judaism helped me see how much hatefulness I had absorbed about Jews from Christian scripture and tradition. Listening to them brought Stendahl’s first rule of religious engagement to mind: “When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.” When I did that—when I let Jews teach me about Judaism—I found much to envy, though never without a dose of holy shame for belonging to the religion that had done theirs so much harm.

  When I was in fourth grade my best friend was a dark-haired girl named Abbie Hoffmann. We attended the same public elementary school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where our fathers both worked at the state university. We lived close enough to walk to each other’s homes, which we did almost every afternoon. One weekend I went to church with her, riding home with a replica of Noah’s ark made of Popsicle sticks on my lap before the Elmer’s glue had completely dried. Another weekend she invited me over to see the elaborate hut that
her parents had built in the backyard—a wondrous thing with a slatted roof open to the sky, where the whole family ate dinner every night for a week in the fall. I missed Abbie when her family moved to the West Coast. We quickly lost touch, though when a hippie revolutionary named Abbie Hoffman made the news years later, I remembered my fourth-grade friend every time I heard the name.

  But how old was I when I realized that Abbie and her family were Jewish? When did I know that we had gone to a synagogue instead of a church, and that the hut in her back yard was a sukkah built for the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles? How much did I miss about my best friend because I assumed she was just like me? And how accustomed was she to being invisible in that way? These are not questions most ten-year-olds ask, but since I was at least thirty before I began asking them, there may be something here worth looking at.

  When I ask students in Religion 101 how many of them have been to a bar or bat mitzvah, two or three raise their hands. A few more say they have aunts or uncles by marriage who are Jewish. I convince the rest that they know someone who is Jewish by showing them a photo montage of their favorite celebrities: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elizabeth Banks, Daniel Radcliffe, Mila Kunis, Shia LaBeouf, and Jon Stewart among many others. Elvis Presley is grandfathered in, since his mother was Jewish. Sometimes I include Marilyn Monroe, who converted to Judaism before marrying the playwright Arthur Miller, and Elizabeth Taylor, whose Jewish name was Elisheba Rachel.

  In some ways this opening exercise does more harm than good, since many of these celebrities identify as Jewish without being particularly religious. This is a difficult teaching for Christians—that it is possible to be a secular Jew, who embraces Jewish culture without embracing Jewish religion. When I ask them if they know any Catholics who only attend Mass with their grandmothers, the concept of secular Christians begins to take shape. It is not exactly the same thing, but close enough.

  After we parse the differences between Judaism as a religion, a culture, a nation, and a family, the most common question is why Jews do not believe Jesus was the messiah. “Why don’t they believe what he said about himself?” one young man asks. “What makes them think Jesus would lie?” His underlying assumption is that all Jews are hostile to Jesus, because that is what he has learned from reading the Bible. It has never occurred to him that there might be good Jewish reasons to decide Jesus was not the Jewish messiah, the same way there might be good Christian reasons to decide that neither Sun Myung Moon nor David Koresh was the Christian messiah.

  I hate to tell you that I did not know the difference between Jewish and Christian concepts of the messiah before teaching Religion 101. Why would I have? I was Christian, with no other frame of reference. The New Testament was my primary source. When I discovered that Jews had their own list of authoritative scriptures about the messiah, I understood that no one was impugning Jesus’s character. He simply did not do what Jewish scripture said a messiah would do. He did not restore Jerusalem. He did not rebuild the Jerusalem temple. He did not usher in the age of peace on earth, so that wolves and lambs lay down together and no one learned war anymore. Most Christians expect these things to happen when the Son of God comes again, but that is where Jews and Christians part ways. When Jesus’s early followers began to worship him, those who confessed faith in the one God waved good-bye to those who saw God as three.

  When I arrived at Piedmont, the most visible Jew on campus was a beloved biology professor who looked like a cross between Jerry Garcia and a Hebrew prophet. He took time away from his lab to visit my class more than once, showing us how phylacteries work and teaching us the difference between Ladino and Yiddish, but I knew there was a limit to how often I could ask him to do that. Then for a few years I invited the nearest rabbi to visit, knowing full well it would take him the better part of a day to make the hundred-mile round trip. The first time he came, he blew his shofar for us, saying he was pretty sure he was the first Jew ever to do that in Habersham County.

  Then one day a young man who wishes to be called Shlomo showed up in class wearing a fedora. He was Jewish on his mother’s side. He had studied for several years at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. He had returned home to live with his father’s Christian parents in a neighboring county, which was how he ended up at Piedmont College. This was interesting in all sorts of ways, not least of which was that Shlomo identified as an Orthodox Jew. He quickly eclipsed the biology professor as the MVJ (Most Visible Jew) on campus and seemed to enjoy the role.

  I know I did. Shlomo had the entire Talmud on his cell phone. He could give me an educated answer to any question I asked him about a fine point of Jewish law. While I had to suppress the urge to make him the spokesman for worldwide Jewry in Religion 101, he was happy to share his experience of being an observant Jew with students both in and out of class. When we got to the unit on Judaism, all he had to do was be there to bring the material to life.

  Shlomo helped me zero in on things I envied about Judaism. There was first of all his intentional observance of the Sabbath, which, like his understanding of the messiah, was based on scripture. I was used to seeing Christians riding lawnmowers on the Sabbath, trimming tight circles around the Ten Commandment signs in their yards, but Shlomo cut no corners. He did not work on the Sabbath. He did not cause anyone else to work on the Sabbath either. He rested on the seventh day—as God did, scripture says, and as God commanded humans to do—sanctifying rest as the natural, regular, and holy fulfillment of work.

  Once, when Shlomo volunteered to welcome guests at a Saturday religion conference, I tried to pay him for his time. He reminded me that he could not accept money on the Sabbath. I bought him a Barnes & Noble gift card instead, which he returned because he said it was the same thing. Finally I gave up and accepted his presence as a free gift. Later, when he lowered his standards to go on a field trip to a Reform temple in Atlanta, on a Friday night (Orthodox Jews do not ride in cars on the Sabbath), he was the only student who showed up in a suit and tie.

  After the service we went to a Middle Eastern restaurant where I knew Shlomo could get kosher food, but I had not given a single thought to the belly dancing that was a regular feature on Friday nights. When the women came out just before the dessert course with glitter glued to their bare midriffs, Shlomo quietly excused himself and waited patiently in the parking lot while the rest of us finished our baklava. Years later, when I offered him a stipend for reviewing this chapter of Holy Envy, he refused, insisting it was a mitzvah (a good deed done to honor God). Shlomo is a mensch.

  This marginality of his was something else I envied. Because he belonged to a religious minority—and practiced his religion in a way that made him unusual even among other practicing Jews—he was intentional about his faith in a way that stood out. Everything from his fedora to his Sabbath practice reminded me that the root word for “holy” in Hebrew is kadosh, meaning set apart for special purpose, as ordinary food is set apart by saying a blessing over it, or as a person is set apart by taking special vows to become married or ordained. I saw other people in Habersham County whose religious identity set them apart, such as the Old German Baptist couple at the grocery store who wore plain dress like the Amish or the Buddhist monk with his shaved head and orange robes. Although I was not sure I wanted people looking at me the same way I looked at them, I did wonder what it would feel like to get dressed in the morning knowing that my faith would make me odd.

  My faith is invisible to most people, especially since I stopped wearing a clergy collar, though everything from the school holiday calendar to the greeting-card section at the drugstore supports my sense of being in the religious mainstream. I do not have to look for a kosher cut of meat when I have company over for dinner or decline dinner invitations to households that mix meat and dairy. Of course a Buddhist monk has his own challenges when mealtime rolls around, but Christians think of Jews as very close kin. We share so much heritage that we often s
peak of “the Judeo-Christian tradition” as if it were one instead of two. Shlomo reminded me how many differences that hyphen really spans. A plus/minus symbol might work better, since the things that separate us are as vital to our identities as the things that we have in common.

  At the same time, Shlomo lived with Christians he loved, which gave him the ability to speak across the hyphen. He had ready answers for the evangelists who pursued him, delivering up counterarguments that were biblically sound and theologically shrewd, fully meant to extend the dialog instead of end it. This was difficult for some of his classmates not only because they were unused to being challenged by someone who had thought things through so clearly, but also because Shlomo was coming from a whole different place. He did not share their assumptions about scripture, the messiah, or God’s plan for salvation. Works were good for him, not bad. God’s law was a treasure, not a burden. Righteousness was a response to God’s grace, not a substitute for it.

  I had been a pastor for at least ten years when a letter from California arrived in my mailbox at church. It came from a Jewish psychiatrist who said that he had been reading some of my published sermons. While he found much to appreciate in them, he said, he was sorry to note that I was still using the “language of contempt.” I could not imagine what he meant, which was the beginning of our correspondence. With kindness and clarity, he showed me how I used stock phrases such as “the burden of the law” or “the righteousness of the Pharisees” to make my points without the slightest idea how they sounded to Jewish ears. He helped me see how I perpetuated the Gospels’ portrayal of “the Jews” without drawing attention to the imprecision of the phrase or the reasons why it was used so venomously. In short, he showed me how casually I appropriated the language of the New Testament without thinking about how the past twenty centuries affect its hearing today.