Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  STRANGERS AND NEIGHBORS

  Copyright © 2006 Maria Poggi Johnson

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Published by W Publishing Group, a division of Thomas Nelson, Inc., P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee 37214.

  W Publishing Group books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible (NRSV), copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Editorial Staff: Kate Etue, acquisitions editor, Thom Chittom, managing editor

  Cover Design: David Drummond

  Page Design:Walter Petrie

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson,Maria Poggi.

  Strangers and neighbors / Maria Poggi Johnson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0-8499-1151-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8499-1151-4

  1. Johnson, Maria Poggi. 2. Christian biography. 3. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 4. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. I. Title.

  BR1725.J622A3 2006

  261.2’6092—dc22

  2006005932

  Printed in the United States of America

  06 07 08 09 10 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Preface

  1. And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?

  2. People of the Book

  3. Kosher Cake

  4. The Holy God and His Stiff-Necked People

  5. Good Shabbos

  6. Why Is this Night Unlike All Other Nights?

  7. Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go

  8. Not a Jot nor a Tittle

  9. Darkness and the Triumph of Light

  10. God Shows No Partiality

  11. Us and Them

  12. One Is Hashem

  Glossary

  Notes

  About the Author

  Preface

  The subject of this book is not Judaism, nor Orthodox Judaism in contemporary America, nor even the particular brand of Orthodox Judaism practiced in my neighborhood. These are books I would like to read but am unqualified to write. The subject of this book is my own experience, and that of my family, living as Catholic Christians in proximity to a community of strictly observant Orthodox Jews and in friendship with a handful of families in that community. The only point of view I represent with any consistency is my own. Names of individuals have been changed. (Thanks for the list of names,Menucha!)

  A minimum of background may be useful. We live in a small city in northeastern Pennsylvania—a former mining community—where there is a community of some sixty or seventy families of Orthodox Jews, mostly clustered in the Hill Section where we live. The Jews in our neighborhood are from the stricter end of the Orthodox spectrum: what are popularly called “ultra-Orthodox” or “black hatters.” (For the most part, they do not belong to the various Hasidic groups, although there are a number of Lubavitcher families.)

  There is a saying: “Two Jews, three opinions.” Judaism is a very diverse and wonderfully argumentative tradition. So when I say “Jews do x” or “Jews believe y,” I do so for the sake of brevity. The opinions I cite here are those of the person who happened to be nearest when I thought of the question. Maybe if I had turned to the person on my left instead of to the person on my right, I would have come away with quite a different picture. Although the kind of Judaism represented by my friends and neighbors is the fastest-growing form in the world today, the considerable majority of American Jews do not live at all like my neighbors. My neighbors, by and large, would say that their form of observance is the authentic one and that all Jews should live like them. Most Jews from the Reform and Conservative traditions, and even from the more liberal end of Orthodoxy, would disagree.

  But these are questions internal to Judaism, and it is no business of mine to have opinions on what Jews should or should not believe or do, or how Judaism ought to be practiced. My business is simply to communicate some of what I have learned from living here, in daily contact with a vibrant Jewish life and in conversation and friendship with individuals and families. I have done my best to represent what people have told me as accurately as possible and to make clear the distinction between their perspectives and my own. Any errors are due to my own, inadvertent, misunderstanding. Of course,my understanding of Judaism is that of a Christian and thus is very different from theirs. In particular, my interpretations of Scripture are entirely my own and are often quite different from traditional Jewish understandings of the same passages.

  I have many people to thank. For practical support, I am indebted to my colleagues at the University of Scranton: in particular, Joe Dreisbach, Brigid Frein, Charlie Pinches, Marc Shapiro, and Marie Gaughan. Damon Linker at First Things published a short essay I wrote on this subject. Kate Etue approached me with the idea for this book and has been most generous with guidance, understanding, and encouragement from the beginning. Thom Chittom steered me through the final stages of the process. Crystal Lee gave me many tranquil child-free hours to write. Sarah Farrimond, Bill Maughan, Barbara Gaynor, and Detra Damskov have kindly read and commented on sections.

  My principle debt, of course, is to our Jewish friends and neighbors. Many people, including some whose names I don’t know, have been kind and helped to put me at ease in situations in which it would be easy for a Gentile to feel very much out of place. I need to thank in particular, for their hospitality and patience with my interminable and often muddle-headed questions, Mazal Minkoff, Devorah Leah Selincourt, the Weinreb and Davidson families, and most especially Shanie Davidson, for friendship and guidance.

  Many people have educated me, encouraged me, listened to me, advised me, and supported me. My husband, Glen Johnson, has done all of this and much,much more. He has done most of the laundry, the cooking, the shopping, and the diapers for months on end and never once complained. He has also read everything in this book about a dozen times, and although he will never admit to it, he must be heartily sick of it by now. Nonetheless, it is dedicated to him with much love.

  1

  And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?

  One evening at sundown, several years ago now, I stood transfixed and watched as the Sabbath came and was greeted by her own as a queen.

  I was on a study tour with a group of colleagues: professors from the theology department of the Jesuit university where I teach. Our wonderfully well-funded Judaic Studies program had offered to send us to Israel for ten days, and my husband, blessed be he, had more or less pushed me onto the plane, insisting that, of course, he could manage the baby (our first, weaned just in time) perfectly well by himself and that I couldn’t miss this chance and that he’d get to go some other time, not to worry, and would you just leave, already? So there I was. We had spent the previous five days in the north, looking out from Mount Carmel where Elijah faced down the prophets of Baal, visiting Jesus’s synagogue at Capernaeum, hearing Mass on the beach where he fed five thousand hungry souls with a few loaves and fishes—and it had all been thrilling.

  That day—Friday—we got up before the sun to leave Galilee and head south. We had to be on the road indecently early to be sure we would make it to Jerusalem by sundown; my colleague Marc is an observant Orthodox Jew and can’t be in a
car after sundown on Friday, when the Sabbath begins. So we yawned our way through a bleary pre-dawn breakfast and hit the road. We drove through the lovely and intimidating Judaean desert, where the rocks, uncomplicated by vegetation, are bleached and polished by the sun in a thousand delicate shades. We stopped for lunch at an all-you-can-eat buffet overlooking the Mount of the Temptation (I promise, there really is one), trekked down a blazing gully to a fifteen-hundred-year-old monastery set into the side of a cliff, and arrived, dusty and tired, at a Sheraton in a Jerusalem suburb.

  The more sensible ones among us showered, ate dinner, and went to their rooms to write in their journals and rest; but four of us, each drawn by the same impulse, threw our bags down and met back in the lobby five minutes later. We were in Jerusalem—Jerusalem!—and as tired as we were, the thought of hanging around in hotel rooms that might well have been in New Jersey was intolerable.

  The sun was nearing the horizon. We jumped in a taxi, which took us to one of the gates of the ancient walled city. Marc couldn’t touch money for the next twenty-four hours, so he hung back while we paid the driver, and then he led us to the Wall. The Wall is the western face of the Temple Mount. It is all that is left of the Temple and the only physical remainder of the days when Jews were safe in their own land, masters of the entire region. It is often called the Wailing Wall—faithful Jews, battered by the horrors of the past and the bitterness of the present, go there to mourn the destruction of the Temple and the passing of the days when the Ark of the Covenant was in the Holy of Holies and the name of the God of Israel was revered everywhere. The Wall is ancient; it has absorbed history, soaking it in through its pores, and it exudes the ancient, sacred, lost past into the air of the modern square with its metal detectors and lounging teenage soldiers.

  I am usually one to be impressed by old things, but this evening the present was intensely more interesting than the past. The mood among the Jews who crowded the plaza to welcome the Sabbath was one not of lamentation, nostalgia, loss, or bitterness, but of joy: deep and serious and exultant joy. Mature men with full beards and long black coats, men exuding gravitas as the Wall exuded antiquity, were dancing and singing with abandon. It was alien and intense and thrilling.

  And it was important.

  I’m a scholar, trained to keep a rein on my personal responses and to regard everything from a safe, analytical distance, but there was no question of my coolly observing the scene as an interesting cultural-religious phenomenon. I found myself quite certain that something really was happening as the sun slipped behind the rooftops of Jerusalem; that the whirling, singing crowds were responding to a reality greater than any culture. It mattered, deeply, that they were there, spinning and rejoicing and praying and welcoming Shabbos Malka, the Queen of Sabbath.

  From that moment, although we saw all kinds of things—the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the garden of Gethsemane, the Via Dolorosa, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher—that put flesh and rock and color on the stories of the Bible, I was more interested in the present. I kept coming back to the Wall. Whenever we had a minute free, I’d go there and watch the people who came to pray: not the hordes of tourists who would shuffle to the front for a minute and turn back again, but the strange people in strange clothes who stood for hours in the sun rocking back and forth over open books. (I was particularly intrigued by the Satmar, a Hasidic group who wear black satin dressing gowns with huge cylindrical fur hats.) I pored over the religious posters and polemical flyers that were all across Jerusalem, and I interrogated Marc relentlessly about the varieties of Orthodoxy. My colleagues, knowing my story—my thoroughly secular childhood,my adolescent conversion, my wanderings through various corners of Christianity, my recent coming to rest in the Roman Catholic Church—pretended to worry that I might convert yet again. Once, we came out of a café and ran into a bizarre group of Americans, who had taken over the square and were dancing, waving flags, handing out leaflets, whooping, “Yeshua is Lord! Alleluia!” and talking with near-hysterical enthusiasm to anyone would listen. As far as I could make out, I think they were Judaizers: twentieth-century descendants of the people whom Paul scolded the Galatians for following. (They were Gentile Christians who considered themselves to have converted to Judaism while remaining Christian, or some such.) But I never did quite figure out exactly what their thing was, because the others hauled me off: “Get Maria out of here, and quick! What are we going to tell Glen if she runs off with them?”

  I wasn’t, of course, about to run off and start handing out pamphlets about Yeshua haMoshiach. And perhaps I should say right now that the thought of converting to Judaism has never crossed my mind for a second, ever. In fact, one of the things that fascinated me about the Orthodox was that, while they were passionately, even outlandishly, religious, they had no desire to convince me to be like them. I’d spent plenty of time around people whose Christianity, as far as I could tell, consisted almost exclusively of trying to persuade (and sometimes manipulate or bully) other people to be Christians. In fact, I’d been one of them myself, and my motives had been complex and mixed and had made me very uncomfortable. The Orthodox who prayed at the Wall were certain—so much so that their certainty infected me—that it was crucial, not just to them but to all of creation, that they be there. But it was their job, given to them by God, and they did not ask me to share it.

  My fascination with the compelling strangeness of the Orthodox Judaism I saw at the Wall was all the greater because it was not entirely new to me. A year before the Israel trip, my husband and I had moved into a beautiful but dilapidated Victorian house five blocks from campus. Buying it had been a piece of romantic folly. It had gorgeous pocket doors, a lovely tiled fireplace, stained glass windows, and even a turret; but it also had a crumbling staircase, splintered siding, caved-in ceilings, and lethally archaic wiring, which was why we could afford it. The neighborhood was a bit iffy, but the house was two blocks from one Orthodox synagogue, four blocks from another, and three from the Hebrew Day School that served a healthy and growing Orthodox community. We told ourselves that it surely had to be a safe place to live, signed the contract, and got to work.

  So when I came home to Glen and the baby, it was to a neighborhood with a very visible Jewish life. I wanted to walk up to people in the street and say, “Hello! I just got back from Jerusalem!” in the hope that they would talk to me about it and make me feel connected to a place I missed after being there only five days, but I was restrained by my reluctance to make a complete idiot of myself in front of strangers. My pregnancy had put me on nodding terms with many of the women on my route to work, and I had even ventured a tentative “Good Shabbos” on Saturdays, but I still regarded our Jewish neighbors with a combination of bewilderment, awe, and intense curiosity. If I was on my way home when the Day School was letting out or when the men were leaving the shul (synagogue) after prayers, I would walk slowly—it’s embarrassing to admit it—in hopes of overhearing bits of their conversations. I assumed that such serious people would talk only about weighty matters: I thought I would hear sentences beginning, “When our forefather Abraham sat under the terebinth at Mamre . . .”Of course, when I was successful in my eavesdropping, I invariably heard about the weather forecast or the rudeness of the pediatrician’s receptionist or the clearance at Sears—precisely what Catholics and Baptists, and presumably everybody else talk about when they are hanging around the school doors waiting for their kids.

  That was eight years ago, and the house is very different now. Glen has wired and plumbed and insulated and plastered, knocked down walls and put up walls, rebuilt the stairs, refinished floors, built bookcases, and painted. This is how it works for academic couples: unless one of you is such a star that you can write your own ticket and your spouse’s to boot (we aren’t), or unless you get outrageously lucky and get jobs in the same place (we didn’t), or unless you are prepared to have a commuter marriage (we weren’t), you go to wherever the first person gets a job and the other one p
icks up part-time teaching or translates ancient Greek treatises or changes diapers or restores Victorian houses or somehow manages to do them all at once.

  The house is a good deal fuller too. We have had four children in six years, bringing the total of children on the block to about forty—most of them Orthodox Jews. We are on weather-forecast and pediatrician’s-receptionist terms with all of the Orthodox families on our block, and two of them have become our good friends. The women and I lend each other maternity clothes and go to the gym together; our husbands borrow each other’s snow shovels and power tools and grumble about local politics; our children are in and out of each other’s houses most days. Ours have picked up a smattering of Hebrew: “You have to share, it’s a mitzvah,” my little Catholic daughters tell each other. And they occasionally make vain attempts to reject undesirable foodstuffs on the grounds, “I don’t think celery is kosher.” Our initiation into home ownership and neighborhood life has been rather odd but could not have been better.

  Now, of course, one doesn’t have to be an Orthodox Jew to be a good neighbor or desirable playmate. Most likely we just happened to land among particularly nice, friendly people who would have been every bit as nice and friendly had they been Episcopalians or Hindus or Elvis-worshipers or atheists. But living in daily contact with a vital and vibrant Jewish life has been fascinating and transforming for my family as Christians.

  Before we came here, we knew, as all Christians know, that Christianity is rooted deeply in Judaism. And as my husband and I are trained theologians, we probably had a rather clearer sense than most Christians of exactly what that involves. But while we were able to chart the web of typological connections between the Testaments or explain the relevance of the Jewish sacrificial system to an understanding of the Crucifixion,we had no real sense of Judaism as a living reality.

  It has been six years since I watched in puzzled awe as the Sabbath Queen was welcomed into the plaza by the Western Wall, and since then I have stood with a baby on my hip while she was welcomed into the living room of our neighbors four doors down. I have been to a bris, to a bar mitzvah, and to parties for Hanukkah and Sukkot. Of course, I’m well over my initial silly awe and shyness, but the sense of mystery and significance that held me spellbound at the Wall has not been eroded by ease and familiarity. When I watch the Shabbos candles being lit or stand on the women’s side of the shul while men in striped prayer shawls cluster around a wailing infant, I feel sure that what is going on is of profound importance—and not just subjectively, to the people around me, but objectively, to me and to the world.