He was right. I had lived so long in the mainstream that I never even thought about how I sounded from the margins. My audiences were exclusively Christian. I spoke to them in Christian language, which was loaded with exclusivity. So much of the New Testament was written by people at odds with the Judaism of their time that their anti-Judaism was baked into the gospel. If I spoke the language of contempt with ease, it was because that language was so embedded in the Christian narrative that I did not even hear it when it reared up and hissed.
That it took Jews to wake me up to this is important. Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. If we want to hear and see more—even the parts that expose our scornfulness—we need partners from outside our in-groups to keep telling us how we sound. Some of them get tired of doing this, I know, since those of us in the mainstream are not particularly fast learners. The people who stick with us seem to understand that they can benefit as much as we do, since one of the best ways to learn more about your faith is to engage people who do not share it. The more we mix it up with others, the more we find out about who we really are.
Jews have had a lot more practice with this than most Christians have. Part of it is numerical, since Judaism is the smallest of the world’s great religions. This multiplies the odds of encountering people who do not share your faith. But another part of it is theological, since Judaism has always recognized that God made more than one covenant with humankind. God’s exclusive covenant with Jews exists inside God’s inclusive covenant with all people.
This is one of the things I envy most about Judaism. When I first learned about the Jewish custom of actively discouraging converts, I assumed it was a “no room at the inn” kind of response. “So sorry you didn’t call sooner, but the covenant with God is all filled up.” As it turned out, this was not the case at all. Depending on which rabbi you ask, sending potential converts away three times is meant to remind them that there is nothing easy about being Jewish. Having to pester an uncooperative rabbi may be the smallest obstacle a convert ever faces. But the more important teaching is that a person does not have to be Jewish to be righteous in God’s eyes. According to Jewish tradition, God made a covenant with Noah that included all people before making a covenant with Abraham that included one particular people. Between the two covenants God has everyone covered, and the one does not replace the other.
In the words of Jonathan Sacks, who served for twenty-two years as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth:
The God of Israel is larger than the specific practices of Israel. Traces of his presence can be found throughout the world. We do not have to share a creed or code to be partners in the covenant of mankind. The prophets of Israel wrestle with an idea still counterintuitive to the Platonic mind: that moral and spiritual dignity extend far beyond the boundaries of any one civilization. They belong to the other, the outsider, the stranger, the one who does not fit our system, race, or creed.1
I was awash with holy envy when I read that. Why didn’t my faith have a teaching like that? Why was my religion so set on being the sun? Judaism sees the universe differently, and it makes a difference in how Jews welcome religious strangers.
Once, when I took a bunch of students to a Saturday morning Shabbat service in Atlanta, we thought we had gotten the time wrong since there were so few other people there. The Temple administrator had told me there were no bar or bat mitzvahs scheduled for that morning—which was a shame, since witnessing that ceremony teaches students more about Judaism than the chapter in their textbook—but the day worked on the class schedule, so we went.
The Temple is an Atlanta landmark, not only because of its age and beauty, but also because of the congregation’s activism during the American civil rights movement. In October 1958, a group of white supremacists retaliated by placing fifty sticks of dynamite at the north entrance to the Temple, blowing that corner of the building apart. Originally founded as the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation in 1867, the Temple’s benevolence continues today, touching lives across the Southeast through its commitment to social justice and religious tolerance.
The main sanctuary holds more than a thousand people on high holy days, so on the morning of the field trip it was easy to see that there were only eighteen people there and eleven of them were us. The rabbi took this in as she entered the room to welcome the congregation. Since she knew we were coming, she introduced us to the other people who were there as well as to the cantor (who was also a woman) before making sure we all had prayer books and were on the right page. Then the cantor began the morning service, and we were off to the races—some of us trying to sing along with her in Hebrew and others taking in the splendor of the space without trying to keep up at all. When the time came for the reading of the Torah, the rabbi looked at us and said, “Do you want to come up here and stand around me while I read?” This would not have happened at any church I knew of, so I was not prepared. The students looked at me for a clue as to what they should do.
“You don’t have to go,” I said, “but I’m going.”
Every single student stood up to follow me. The cantor waited until we had all shuffled out of our pew and arrived at the lectern, where she arranged us around the rabbi so we could all see the Torah scroll in front of her. Then the cantor picked up the yad—a golden pointer shaped like an arm with an extended index finger at the end—and aimed it at a line of Hebrew text so the rabbi knew where to begin. When I leaned in, I felt the softness of the rabbi’s prayer shawl against my arm. Her body swelled every time she took a breath to read the next line. The Hebrew words came out of her mouth like a murmuration of birds she had released from the page. The students held very still around me, as stupefied as I was to be standing where we stood. When I looked up at the members of the congregation, they were smiling at us like grandparents.
As often as I have worried about how a class visit might disrupt other people’s worship, my hosts of other faiths have never yet shared my concern. Over and over, they seem glad that students want to know more about a religious tradition whose followers are in the low single digits of the US population.
On another class visit—this time to a new Sephardic congregation in the suburbs that met in the basement of a Methodist church—the students and I discovered that we had arrived on Simchat Torah, the day when the annual cycle of public Torah readings ends and a new one begins. Among many other things, this meant that at a certain point in the service the two rabbis (a man and a woman who were married to each other) invited the whole congregation to rise and dance behind them as they carried a huge Torah scroll around the room.
“Yes, you too,” the woman rabbi said when she saw my eyebrows go up. So the students and I rose and joined the dance line, adding all our best moves to the others on display, while the members of the congregation sang loud happy songs with lots of “Heys!” in them. When the Torah scroll had made it all the way around the room seven times and the last song had come to an end, we all went back to our folding chairs and sat there panting while the rabbis put the scroll back where it belonged, adjusted their kippahs and prayer shawls, and got ready for the next part of the service.
When the woman rabbi stepped up to the microphone, she said, “You know, sometimes those of us who are here every week get so used to things that we forget how important they are. Then one week we welcome some visitors for the first time, and they enter in with more enthusiasm than we do. It’s a good reminder, isn’t it?” Holy envy, from the Jewish point of view. She turned to where the students and I were sitting, looked down the whole row of us, and said, “You Gentiles sure can dance!”
I have many memories like this one, in which I felt warmly included by a tradition other than my own, but most of the students have never visited a synagogue before and may never visit one again. That makes it hard to decide where to take them on their one and only field trip. If I take them to a synagogue where the cantor and rabbi are both women, they w
ill come away with an entirely different view of Judaism than if I take them to one where men and women sit in different sections. If I take them to a landmark like the Temple, they will think of Judaism differently than if I take them to a service in the basement of a church. Wherever we end up going, there is no way to control how students will interpret what they see or hear or what they will tell other people they saw and heard when they return home.
In the van on the way home from the Temple I eavesdrop on a student talking on her cell phone. She is telling her mother about the visit, delivering her conclusions about Jewish faith and practice based on her recent firsthand experience. Wait! I want to shout. You’ve only been to one place! She sounds like a traveler who has eaten a single meal at a single airport restaurant during a two-hour layover at JFK, which has become her gold standard for the character of the American people and their food.
As alarming as it is to think about the impact that a single visit can have, there is a truth here that I do not want to miss: it is not what we believe that defines us, but what we do.
When visitors come to a worship service in my own religious tradition, a great deal depends on how warmly they are welcomed and whether they feel included or excluded by what they hear during the short time they are with us. We may have exactly one shot at communicating who we are to people who know nothing about us—or who think they already know a lot about us—but who, in either case, will remember us as the embodiment of our entire tradition, the prime exemplars of our faith.
In her book Out of Africa, the Danish author Karen Blixen (writing under the pen name Isak Dinesen) tells the story of a young Kikuyu boy named Kitau who appeared at her door in Nairobi one day to ask if he might work for her. She hired him on the spot. Kitau served her household so admirably that she was stricken when, after just three months, he asked for a letter of recommendation to a Muslim in Mombasa named Sheik Ali. Since Blixen did not want to lose Kitau, she offered to increase his pay, but he was firm in his desire to leave.
He had decided that he was going to become either a Christian or a Muslim, he explained to her. His whole purpose in coming to live with her had been to see the ways and habits of Christians up close. Next he would go to live with Sheik Ali for three months to see how Muslims behaved. Then he would make up his mind. Aghast, Blixen wrote, “I believe that even an Archbishop, when he had had these facts laid before him, would have said, or at least thought, as I said, ‘Good God, Kitau, you might have told me that when you came here!’”
The fact that Kitau was weighing the habits of Christians and not their beliefs is relevant, since on the whole Jews are less interested in beliefs than Christians are. Jewish identity hinges on how one lives, not what one thinks—another source of holy envy for me. Sometimes, when I am eavesdropping on students in the college van, I am sobered by the questions they ask each other to determine how Christian they are:
“Do you believe in the virgin birth and the physical resurrection?”
“Do you believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God?”
“Do you believe Jesus is the only way to God?”
Few of them know that the items on their orthodoxy checklist do not date from the first century but from the early twentieth, when the Bible Institute of Los Angeles published a series of essays to establish the fundamentals of Christian belief.2 I wish the Institute had spent as much time on the fundamentals of Christian practice, so that students had more to talk about than what they believe. After all these years behind the wheel of the college van, I am still waiting to hear a single student vet another’s faith by asking a different set of questions:
“How does being Christian change the way you live?”
“What’s the hardest part about loving your neighbor as yourself?”
“What is your favorite way to pray?”
“Well done is better than well said,” reads a country church sign near my house. It is a teaching that Jews and Christians have in common, though Christians often need reminding that our beliefs are just things we say unless they lead to things we actually do. A Jew might not put it that way, but it is another central teaching that inspires holy envy in me.
When I first started looking for the Jewish equivalent to the Nicene Creed (one of the earliest statements of Christian belief), I learned that there is no mandatory set of beliefs for Jews. A famous twelfth-century rabbi named Maimonides came up with thirteen principles of Jewish faith, but there is nothing binding about them. What is binding, for Jews who choose to be bound, is Jewish practice: how to worship; how to pray; how to conduct business; how to care for the land; how to treat the neighbor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. It is all about relationships. The closest thing I could find to a Jewish creed was the Shema, a combination of three biblical passages that begins with Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (JPS).
As small as the first word of that verse is, it made a big impression on me. What must it be like, I wondered, to put hearing God ahead of being heard? So many of the prayers in my own tradition are about beseeching God to hear us. So much of our worship involves listening to each other talk and then going out to proclaim the gospel to others. What do we think will happen if we stop talking? The Jewish emphasis on hearing and doing are both curative for me. “Hear, O Barbara! The LORD is your God, even when you are mute.”
The day I bring kosher food to class clarifies the relationship between belief and practice. There are so many grocery bags in my car that I have to arrive thirty minutes early and make two trips, so that when the students arrive they will find mountains of foodstuffs piled on the tables before them: Pringles, Pop-Tarts, Reese’s peanut butter cups, Cracker Jacks, Jello-cup snacks, Starkist tuna lunch kits, Vienna sausages, party-sized packages of Lay’s potato chips, tubs of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting, Lindt Lindor truffles, and Blue Diamond smoked almonds. When students come through the door and see all of this, their faces light up as if they have just arrived at the heavenly banquet. The rule is that they may eat anything with a kosher symbol on it. Then they have to tell me why the other things are not kosher.
This exercise takes over class as fast as the singing bowls did. Students race to tell the difference between a trademark symbol, a copyright symbol, and a kosher symbol. When they agree they have found one of the kosher symbols from the list I have supplied, there is a shout of triumph as they rip open bags of Reese’s or pop the tops on cans of Pringles. With their mouths full, they bend over a tin of Spam trying to figure out what is wrong with it. I could tell them all kinds of things that are wrong with it, but they focus on the pork. “Two kinds!” one of them says, pointing to the ingredient label. “Pork shoulder and ham!”
As elementary as this exercise is, it does one vital thing that can never be undone: it convinces students that Judaism has been right there in front of them all along, only they could not see it because they were not looking. Now some of them will never pick up a bag of sour cream–flavored potato chips again without showing a friend the little D (for dairy) inside the certified kosher triangle on the label.
Some will take the exercise a step further by trying to keep modified kosher food laws for a day, which is an option on their list of elective assignments. For twenty-four hours they agree to avoid shellfish, pork, and pork by-products; to separate meat from dairy by at least three hours; and to make sure that all the snack foods they eat have kosher symbols on them. One student reports that his first crisis came at breakfast, when he realized he could not have his usual bowl of cheese grits and bacon topped with Lucky Charms. Another student reports that the bacon on her salad was already on its way down before she realized that it was, in fact, pork. By the end of the day some are so worn out from thinking about food that they skip dinner and go straight to bed, while others express fresh appreciation for being Christian, since it means they can eat anything they want.
“I honestly was not expecting to learn anything from this assignment,” one stu
dent wrote. “I just thought it looked easy. Who knew food could teach you life lessons? Saying you love God is one thing; changing the way you eat for God is something else altogether.” She was not Jewish, she said, but she had borrowed Jewish shoes, and she would remember the feel of them for years to come.
Every now and then I meet a student who had little exposure to religious teaching growing up. This is hard to believe in the deep South, but also refreshing, since those students seem not to have sucked up as much invective as their more religious peers. Rochel was one of those. When she became a spiritual seeker in high school, she did it with an almost blank slate. “People made fun of my Jewfro,” she said (a variation on “Afro”), so she figured that was a good place to start. When a rabbi heard her tell her story at a Jewish summer camp, he heard something that convinced him to bypass the traditional wisdom about sending her away three times. He came up to her afterward and offered to sponsor her conversion, which was already under way when she signed up for Religion 101.
Rochel was a great student, full of questions and unafraid to speak up in class. During the unit on Judaism, when I tried to honor her extracurricular learning by asking her a question about minor prophets or lesser holidays, she would cheerfully say, “I haven’t gotten that far yet.” But as soon as she saw the list of elective assignments for the class, she asked if she could do an oral report on welcoming the Sabbath.
Holy Envy Page 9
