Stranger, you know me even if you don’t. (My friends, I’m sorry if this is how you’ll learn.) You know me because I am your classmate; I am an acquaintance, your neighbor or brother. There is a possibility that we have spent thirteen years in the same school, or have seen each other every Shabbat for longer. But, to quote the Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin in Border Lines, his classic study of Jewish and Christian identities in the first few centuries: “Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, or personal history to be drawn to Christianity.” I am one of these.
What I mean to say is that we exist. We are people you know. Or at least I mean to embody what I consider an unrecognized, an unacknowledged segment of the Jewish population. Boyarin later admits that he’s afraid his admission will isolate him from his community, his friends and colleagues; certainly if what he’s saying is misinterpreted. And it’s true, the fear is present. Candor breeds insecurity for us.
Yet, we are nevertheless drawn to Grünewald, to Graham Greene, to the cantatas of Bach. And it’s not solely the clambering magnitude of Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral – not art alone – but also ritual and theology that captivate us. The buried history of Jewish antinomianism, whether manifesting itself in the Sabbatean movement, the Frankists, or even early Ḥasidut, testifies to some deep, abiding attraction to, if not Christianity, at least certain strands of heterodox thought connected to Philo and Neo-Platonism in the Hebraic world. The Lurianic Kabbalists, for example, knew that to a great extent, the question of transcendence must become the problem of immanence if pursued.
But it is what Boyarin writes later that addresses me most urgently, and it is here that I become myself alone and divest myself of the responsibility of representing others: “Some Jews who are absorbed by Christianity have been induced by that affection to convert and become Christians. I have not, held back by an even more powerful libidinal commitment to the religion…of diasporic rabbinic Judaism as practiced for nearly the last two millennia.” This is where I must speak, while Boyarin remains silent.
Neither a Jew for Jesus, nor a Christian Jew; I am simply Catholic. Or at least that’s how I’d identify if you’d asked me. But when your curiosity is piqued by some expression that I use, or my familiarity with some tradition (my part in a Pesach Seder this year comes to mind), and you ask further—then identity, identification, becomes a difficult business.
To give the facts as plainly and briefly as possible: I received an Orthodox Jewish education from Middle through High School; acted as Regional Board member of an international organization of (Modern) Orthodox youth; eventually came to identify myself as an observant Jew, despite having no family members who could say the same; went to Israel for a Summer Program of religious study; worked as a Counselor at an Orthodox camp in Pennsylvania; and got to Shul as often as teenage laziness and religiosity allowed. Now, I am Catholic—a convert.
From my Junior year on, I found that I was reading and perpetually re-reading the work of three Catholic writers: Simone Weil, Czesław Miłosz, and G. M. Hopkins. I had encountered some quality of speech in them so profound and comforting it terrified me. It terrified me because I recognized the unabashedly religious dimension of what I’d been moved and comforted by. And so my Senior year was spent in bitter condemnation of myself. Who was I to be reading this? What defect, what abyss of learning did I carry which made their thoughts and expressions beautiful to me? Why could I find nothing similar in the words of Jewish thinkers and artists?
In retrospect, I can see I had found those words, but they were so few and far between that relief could not be drawn from them; I still felt alien and confused and alone. Two memories in particular return to me, both involving Rabbis of such integrity, erudition, and stature that I refuse to name them out of grave respect (though suffice it to say they are names any Orthodox Jew would recognize). The first consists of hearing one of these Rabbis quote C. S. Lewis on the subject of Temple Sacrifice and actually incorporate the quotation into his discussion. The second, of a Rabbi telling me that Rambam and his writings met with resistance not only because of the revolutionary content and application of the Mishneh Torah, but also because he dared to make a statute of Jewish theology the idea that God was completely incorporeal. Needless to say, the second of these memories still resounds in me to this very hour. It has taken me years to recognize this, though.
Nowadays, I notice the subtle trends everywhere. That Rabbi Shalom Carmy can write, in his essay “The Long Winding Road,” “The discounting of Jewish thinkers who are ‘soft on anthropopathism’ on the grounds of Christian affinity is old hat in modern Jewish thought,” and then intelligently engage not only Christian theology, but, in the essay “‘Tell Them I’ve Had a Good Enough Life’,” the thoughts of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and the aforementioned Greene, as well; it is an indication for me now that these are viewpoints that require investigation and analysis, that Christian thought does trouble Jewish thinkers.
However, there is a long-established tradition of resistance to these trends. The debate hinges largely on the prodigious influence of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s essay, “Confrontation,” presented at the 1964 Mid-Winter Conference of the Rabbinic Council of America. “Confrontation,” which handles the question of inter-faith dialogue, appears to have been written in response to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s involvement with Cardinal Augustin Bea during the reforms of Vatican II, and specifically his role in the drafting of Nostra Aetate (In Our Age), or the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions”. While admitting the vital necessity of inter-faith dialogue on matters social, cultural, political, and economic, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s view on the subject of theology in such conversation may be summed up in two sentences: “The word of faith reflects the intimate, the private, the paradoxically inexpressible cravings of the individual for and his linking up with his Maker. It reflects the numinous character and the strangeness of the act of faith of a particular community which is totally incomprehensible to the man of a different faith community.” In essence, such conversation is impossible. Rabbi Soloveitchik felt deeply that to give credence to it devalued the incontrovertible uniqueness of Judaism and threatened Jewish autonomy from larger, imperialistic faith traditions (i.e. Catholicism).
The issues Soloveitchik attempted to answer have obviously not disappeared, though his stance on them has been adopted in the Orthodox community as the standard. I am reminded, for instance, of the controversy surrounding the publication in 2002 of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ The Dignity of Difference. Some considered Sacks’ book a gesture towards religious relativism, highlighting in their critiques such sentences as, “No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth.” Rather, I would argue, it is Sacks’ radical approach to non- Jewish religions, as distinctly at odds with Soloveitchik’s sentiments and those of empowered communities of Orthodox thought, which angered his critics.
Rabbi Carmy’s ability to take seriously the theological attitudes of, say, Kierkegaard (as even Soloveitchik had to, to some degree, given his existentialist bent) is not nearly the exception. Although he writes from the position of an unsurprisingly reserved strand of Orthodox Jewish thought, he joins others like Rabbis Heschel and Sacks who were or have been willing to look beyond Rabbi Soloveitchik’s rejectionist ideology. Admittedly, the trend is towards those who have attempted to straightforwardly address the dilemmas of this contemporary world, like (ironically) Professor Boyarin, who has spent much of his career writing on the subject of Late Antiquity.
But in history especially, there resides an honesty on the subject I have begun to cling to. Gillian Rose, the philosopher and sociologist whose deathbed conversion to Anglicanism left “[h]er admirers, particularly her Jewish admirers…dumbfounded,” as Arnold Jacob Wolf wrote in “The Tragedy of Gillian Rose.” Joseph Roth, the prolific and unclassifiable novelist whose funeral arrangements divided his Jewish and Catholic friends, each side claiming that they represented him in his religion. Saint Edith Stein, the philosopher, theologian, and Catholic convert from Orthodox Judaism, murdered in the Holocaust, whose canonization has been interpreted by many as an act of historical repossession. And of course, Franz Rosenzweig, whose near-conversion to Christianity was averted only when he came to Rosh HaShanah services at an Orthodox synagogue, as a last appraisal of what exactly he would be losing on the event of his baptism.
When I watch these lives from the vantage point of their completion, I see again myself, years ago, so desperate that I swore I’d move to Israel and never read another page of Simone Weil’s letters; so convinced that my mother’s conversion to Judaism meant that I was never truly a Jew, that I was tainted and stained by it, though to this day my mother has not left the faith she raised me in. There are times when I suspect that things of which I am now aware could have been for me what the Zohar was for Pinhas of Koretz, who once wrote, “The Zohar has kept me Jewish.” But where Ḥasidut and Kabbalah acted as a salve for a generation in despair after the travesty of the Sabbatean movement and the devastating Chmielnicki pogroms, my Zohar had not yet been found.
***
Why do I write this? Why do I feel compelled to confess? It isn’t out of any triumphal spirit, not even out of satisfaction. In fact, I am distraught and sorrowful. Fatigued by faith, by religion. Each apportioned more or less truth; no body of belief is perfect, neither in theology nor practice. The grass here is greener only in that it is younger, though stripped of the fruit of youth: naivety, innocence, wonder. No, there is nothing appealing, I make no appeal. And yet, something impels or propels; a sense inside.
Perhaps the beginning holds it, the beginning which is little more than a statement of commiseration. Franz Rosenzweig, Saint Edith Stein, Gillian Rose, Joseph Roth. These are my cohorts in misery, in doubt and hope. But I refuse to extend my hand, because these are not invitations, only acknowledgements. All I needed, I believe, was this acknowledgement, that I was not exclusively a stranger; that I was that (as we all are) and more: someone wrestling with an old wise bull, an antagonist and sometimes friend. Like Rosenzweig tracing the strassen of Berlin in search of a synagogue: deep in thought, hands mittened, a kippah under a Homburg, and finding them all closed, or empty; the hidden ones, unnoticed.
