What I Learned While Being a Christian

For almost thirty years, I was a Christian.  In the year 2000, I, a child of Holocaust survivors, left the Christian Church and returned to the Jewish tradition.  During my time in the Church, I was a pastor and theologian. But, a strange thing happened. The longer I hung around Christians, the more Jewish I became. In the year 2000, I returned to myself and my community.

 Living inside the Christian community, I learned many things.  Here are just a few.

First and foremost, I learned the importance of the word grace.  For many Christians, the word “grace” refers to the unmerited love of God.  For Jews, the word, “grace” is usually understood through the Hebrew word hesed, meaning, “loving kindness” and refers to God’s kindness in giving the Jewish people, God’s Torah or teaching.  Both Jewish and Christian uses of the word “grace” assert their common hope and faith that there is a God and this God is for human beings and not against them. 

I learned about something called “a theology of the cross.”  This theology looks at the event of Jesus being killed and asserts the presence of God despite the apparent absence of God in that event and paradigmatically in all our lives.   While I have problems with talk of salvation coming through cruelty and death, I can appreciate a theology which proclaims, “when God appears to be absent, that is precisely when God is present.” For thousands of years many Jews have trusted in God despite, in spite and to spite all that has happened to them.  A theology of the cross contains an honest realization:  Despite Jesus, the world remains a dangerous place.  The power of faith in the hidden and revealed God exhibited in the cross of Jesus is central and important to many Christians.  Though, I must admit, that such a faith or theology, as far as I can see, did not work during the Holocaust, a time and place where many Christians were not Christian, God was not God and the world went mad.

 I also learned, there are a variety of ways to be Christian. There seems to be no lack of Christians willing to argue with other Christians about who’s legitimately Christian.  And, no surprise, this is also true among Jews.  The seductive belief that you or your group possesses theological and moral certainty is indeed tempting.  The Christian notion of original sin however, when it is working well, provides an antidote.  It urges people to have humility and admit they know, they do not know. To paraphrase Michael Lewis, in his book, The Undoing Project, a true theologian is “a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”  And this is and ought to be true for Jews, Christians, for believers and unbelievers!

 I learned there are many Christians ignorant concerning Jews, Judaism and the Jewish roots of Christian faith. Perhaps this is different in other parts of the Church.  My view is, after all, limited to the upper Midwest and its Lutheran contingent.   But I have also met and continue to meet Christians who respect the Jewish religion and tradition.  I meet Christians who are aware of the long history of anti-Judaism and persecution of Jews by Christians.  And I have many students who try to study the Holocaust with me.  The schism between Jews and Christians is going through a slow healing process.  We have come so far and we have so far to go.  Let us continue.

When it became clear to me that I could no longer run away from myself and my community, I had to leave the Church.  I knew I had to be Jewish to remain sane and alive. There were Christian friends who encouraged me to keep teaching at the college/ university and so I have done.  They understood why I had to depart. They do so to this day. I have great affection for each of them.

Finally, I learned, irrevocably and inextricably, I am a Jew.  To continue to be a Christian was the equivalent of committing theological and existential suicide.  Those were painful years full of internal struggle and not much sleep.   But I have come to the other side.   My journey has not been in vain.  I have come to respect Christian tradition and to respectfully disagree with that tradition.   

Interfaith Dialogues: A Good Thing??

I teach courses in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.  I, obviously, think learning about what others believe is helpful.  Engaging someone else’s religious beliefs can help you understand what they believe and why they believe it.   

While getting along is a good thing, the point of such learning should not be figuring out a way to be friends,  good as that might be.  Jews, Christians and Muslims have competing revelations.  The point of listening to each other is to learn how each of our religious traditions proclaims its truths.  In this way, we can better learn how to argue with each other.  Argument is not a bad thing.  In Jewish tradition argument is a way to apprehend the truth.   Through argument we learn the strengths and weaknesses of their beliefs as well as our own.  The argument is more important than its resolution.

In studying another’s religion, there are two extremes we need to avoid.  On the one hand, religious absolutism argues, there is only one right way to be religious.  On the other extreme, religious relativism says, all religious points of view are equally valid.  These approaches miss the point. 

The point is to embrace your own religious tradition, defend its theological and ethical truths, listen carefully to the articulated truths of other traditions, and ask yourself how can my beliefs benefit or get stronger by taking the critique of others seriously. You can ask yourself, "Where is my tradition helpful and where is it unhelpful?

The goal of interfaith discussions is not to get along.  It is to learn how to be honest, respectful, and seriously engage your own and another religious tradition. By the way, as you engage in this process, you may become close friends with those you come to respect. 

What We Can and Cannot Fix

Politics, religion, education, science cannot fix everything that is broken.  As human beings, we are forced, squeezed, compelled to live everyday between the real and the ideal.  We know the way people and things should be.  But as we go about our business each day, we see, many times, the ideal and the real do not meet. 

Let’s be honest.  Some people can be fixed.  Others cannot.  Some things can be fixed.  Some things cannot.  Some organizations can be fixed.  Some cannot.  The old St. Francis prayer is right.  The key is having the wisdom to know what can be fixed and what cannot.  And the real key, the real difficulty is figuring out what is worth our time and what is not.

The scriptures can be of help here.  If you look at what has been called the ten commandments, you see that whoever wrote these lessons down believed it was possible to train people to act well.  Btw, the Bible never calls them commandments.  The Hebrew uses the word Davarim or words/things. Through these words, God is teaching us what can be fixed and what cannot.

Here is my take. 

1.       Material things are fine but not divine. Attach yourself to something with more lasting power and endurance.

2.       What is most important right now in your heart, there is your God. Should it be?

3.       Work on fixing things for six days and then take one day to stop fixing and rest.

4.       Be content with what you have.  Don’t pine after what someone else has. Also,  don’t cheat, lie or murder.

5.       The smallest fix can change the greatest problem.  Pay attention to the little things.  Fix the small things first.

6.       You can change a relationship by altering your own way of speaking or behaving in that relationship.  Do you need to be kinder, more caring or more aggressive; do you need to let go?

7.       Act with intention.  Say to yourself, “today I will intentionally act differently.”  Then, do it.

8.       Finally, give yourself some slack.  Everybody is entitled to 25 mistakes each day.  At the end of the day, look in the mirror, say, “I fixed what I could do today.”  Let go, and get some rest.

In case you are wondering, my sense is, whatever else God is about, God is a teacher, doing what God can do each day, sometimes in the smallest ways, to fix us and keep us sane.

The Craziness of Conspiracies

Once again, we are living in a time of conspiracies.  I suppose it’s because human beings love to be in on secrets.  It makes them feel they are special and smart.  They especially love to possess secret information that very few other people have access to or understand.  They like to be in on the know.  Along with the love of secrets, there is a fear motivated by insecurity, someone is out to get us.  The conspiracy says, ‘Listen, we know that is a secret group meeting” with the intention to hurt us.  Insecure people hate to be fooled. They want the truth, the “real truth.”  This desire makes them susceptible to conspiracy rumors and theories. 

Conspiracy believers are usually not in the know but they are curious to know. There are people who want to believe Elvis is alive, we never landed on the moon, President Kennedy was assassinated by our own government, there are aliens among us and the government is keeping us in the dark, it was the Israelis who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, there’s a worldwide conspiracy of Jews to control our economies, all homosexuals are pedophiles and on and on it goes. 

When you tell conspiracy believers that there is no evidence to support their beliefs, they say, “Of course not, the evidence has been hidden.”  The fact that there is no evidence is a sure sign for the “true believers” the conspiracy is true. There is an arrogance among conspiracy believers.  They think they are so important they have been given this secret information; the masses cannot or will not believe. 

Conspiracy is about blind faith, deluded interpretations, and believing without having much evidence. It is not easy to argue with conspiracy believers.  They believe what they believe. 

The solution to conspiracy craziness is to ask for concrete support.   Where are the facts that support the conspiratorial assertion?  Do not just believe something because you think it sounds true to you.  Do the facts you have come from a reputable source?  Don’t be taken in by ideas that feel right.  Investigate, ask questions, and then ask more questions.  This is true in politics, in science, in religion and in life.

Choices

Where you stand determines what you see.  What you do determines who you are.  We have choices to make every day.  The choices can be simple.  They can be hard.  Even the smallest and unconscious choices have religious significance.  You decide to hold the door for someone at the store.  You kiss your spouse and say “good morning.”  You let someone in a rush get ahead of you in traffic.  You give someone you care about the benefit of the doubt.  You care about a neighbor in pain.  Or you don’t.

In the Gospel of Mark, there’s a story about a woman who is prepared to anoint Jesus before his death.  Jesus’ disciples are critical of her and declare the perfume she is about to use should be sold and the money given to the poor.  But Jesus says, “Let her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a good work for Me. She has done what she could do.” (Mark 14:3-9.)

Jewish tradition teaches, when you choose what is right in the smallest things, you are likely to choose what is right in the larger significant choices.  It’s a matter of habit.  The more you do what is right, the more you will do what is right.  That is the purpose of all the commandments in the Bible, to train us to be human beings.  God and Aristotle were right.  Habituation works.  If you want to be a kind person, act kindly.  If you want to be loving person, act lovingly.  If you want to be more caring, then act caringly.  Choices matter.

Joseph Epstein has a great quote about choices.  “We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live, courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life.  But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed.”