I am, and will remain, a Christian; but I am a rather different Christian now than I was before.
2
People of the Book
A few weeks ago, Ahuva called me from her cell phone. There was a lot of noise in the background: “They’re finishing a new Torah scroll for the shul,” she said. “Did you see it in the paper? They’re in the Jewish Home now writing the last few words. They’ll be leaving in a few minutes and dancing it across the street. The kids are all here—you guys want to come see?”
I had indeed seen the story in the paper a few days earlier. Torah scrolls are hand-lettered by highly trained scribes, beautifully decorated, and encased in rich covers. The completion of one is a big event, and this was likely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us. It was a nice day, so we called the kids, hunted around for sandals, scooped the baby into the stroller, and set off walking. When we arrived we found a police car blocking the street and a policeman surrounded by boys in yarmulkes and tzitzis squabbling over whose turn it was to hold the handcuffs next. Catherine and Elisabeth spotted Yaffa, Dovid, Nechama, and Moshe and raced off to join them. We pushed the stroller round to the door and found Ahuva and Chana in the crowd of women and little children hanging around waiting for the action.
After a few minutes the back door opened, letting out first a confused rush of sound and then, in slow waves, a crush of men and boys in black suits and broad hats singing, jumping, and jostling around a swaying fringed canopy, under which Rabbi Rubin, our neighbor from three doors down, was clutching the scroll in its case. I felt the thrill of the timeless and immediate mystery that had captivated me in Jerusalem years before—until a young man in a yarmulke and baggy jeans began accompanying the singing with a battered-looking synthesizer, which rather took the edge off the atmosphere. It was, I suppose, an odd scene to come across in a neighborhood first established by WASP managers and accountants from the anthracite mines, but none of it strikes me as odd anymore. The only anomaly that day was me, in jeans with my hair uncovered.
It took about twenty minutes for the scroll to travel the two hundred yards from the home to the shul, advancing by fits and starts in the midst of an exuberant, swaying, bouncing, singing crowd. As they passed us, Ahuva— long acquainted with my intense curiosity about all things Orthodox—told me that the canopy carried over the Torah was the chuppah under which Jewish marriages take place, because, she said, “It’s the Torah that marries us to God.”
Oddly enough, it is in part my contact with Judaism that has, if not married me to the Bible, at least helped to heal what had for some time been a troubled relationship. It’s a long story and is best cut short. I was raised in an entirely secular home and came to faith as a teenager, attracted by the warm, bright life of a group of Christians I stumbled across on the winding road through adolescence. I learned from them, and from the Christians who formed much of my social world most of the way through college, to read the Bible as a treatise in systematic theology: a series of closely interlocking propositions. Scripture was often disguised, for reasons that were never clear to me, as history, poetry, legal codes, and the like, but it was really a collection of theological statements to be discovered and believed. In the literature I studied and loved in college, truth presented itself in rich and varied forms, but when it came to the Bible, I had learned, the only kind of truth worth its salt was literal truth. To suggest that the Bible “worked” in some other way was tantamount to claiming that it was not the Word of God after all.
I did my best, but I could never manage to see in the Bible what my friends told me I should see. I always felt bullied by it. As much as I loved and respected the people whose friendship brought me first and always to God, I was frustrated that, while we talked and talked and talked endlessly and passionately about doctrine and truth and interpretation and Scripture, we never seemed to talk much about God himself. And it was God I was really curious about.
My graduate studies in church history and hermeneutics convinced me that the way I had been trying and failing to understand the Bible just wasn’t going to work. But I didn’t know any other way to read it, and at the time (what with falling in love, writing a dissertation, and looking for a job), I had enough on my plate without trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with the Bible too. The whole thing made me anxious and unhappy, and the simplest expedient seemed to be just to stop reading it altogether. For several years I did just that.
I got married, finished my dissertation, and stepped into the notoriously bleak academic job market. My grad school mentors,who groomed me for the ritualized torture of interviews and who were well aware of my British tendency to self-deprecation, told me over and over, “When they ask you whether you can teach such and such a course, the correct answer is yes. You understand,Maria? Say yes. If you get the job, you can worry about it then.”
I did as I was told and, to my amazement, got the first job I interviewed for: at a Jesuit university with a downtown campus three blocks from where, now, the scroll was slowly progressing across the street. In my first semester the department chair assigned me to teach a freshman class on the Bible.Well, why wouldn’t he? Hadn’t I said, in my interview, “Sure, I could teach ‘Introduction to the Bible.’ No problem”? Obedient to my mentors’ instructions, I had omitted to mention that I regarded the Bible with a mixture of suspicion and guilt, had barely picked it up in several years, and had never, at all, even a little bit, studied it as an academic subject. It was, all in all, a rather wobbly foundation on which to construct a college syllabus, but that is what I had to do.
I buckled down, read a lot of books, asked a lot of questions, and got a dizzying but invigorating amount of advice. The bit I liked best came from a colleague who said simply, “I try to get the students to see it as an unfolding narrative.” This appealed to me because I like narratives, stories. I like them a great deal. Most of my youth (I never really learned to talk to people my own age until I got to college) had been spent devouring huge Victorian novels at a rate of about a thousand pages a week. I thought if I could approach the Bible as another big novel, I might get on with it better than I had previously. So I took courage and put together a syllabus on the sophisticated scholarly principle of starting at the beginning, going on from there, and seeing what happened.
On the day of my first class, feeling rather ill with nerves and very self-conscious in proper grown-up clothes (for me, anything that isn’t jeans), I walked past the shul, past the Hebrew Day School, past the library, into St. Thomas Hall and, before going to my new office, stopped in at the little chapel in the basement. I knelt by the tabernacle where the candle was burning and, for about the thousandth time that summer, thanked God for bringing me there and giving me the opportunity to teach. I said the sort of things I thought I should about giving my work over to God for his glory, but I didn’t really know what I meant by it. Before I left I said what was really on my mind: “Look, if I do this all wrong, if I teach nonsense or falsehood, please don’t let it mess my students up. Just make them forget anything I say that won’t be good for them.”
What my students would have thought that semester if they knew that ten minutes before the start of every class their theology professor was on her knees asking God to make them forget everything she taught them, I don’t know. Nor, for that matter, do I know to what extent God found it necessary to take me at my word and routinely erase my students’ memories as soon as they were out of my clutches. But that daily prayer, as perverse and neurotic as it may seem, did at least help to erase many of my anxieties. I more or less grabbed my students by the hand and plunged into the text with them, and to my delight I found it both exhilarating and peaceful to let myself be washed around by the great rolling waves of salvation history. The students didn’t seem to mind how many times I answered their questions with a cheerful, “Hmm, you know, I really can’t tell you. I’ll look it up. In the meantime let’s go on and see what happens next.”
What hap
pened at first was that a people came, through a series of extraordinary experiences, to understand themselves to be chosen: set apart, claimed in a unique way by a God who was unlike all other gods, and who made extraordinary demands of them. They rejoiced in this, and they fought against it. They built a society worthy of their high calling, and they fell into the basest of sins. They loved and praised God in words and acts of timeless beauty, and they defied and neglected him in acts of rebellion and indifference. They made manifest to the nations the holiness of the Most High, and they broke his heart. They destroyed themselves, and they rediscovered themselves and their God in the midst of their destruction. It was a very good story indeed.
I was having so much fun with the story that I might very easily have stayed there and simply made my peace with the Bible as “great literature.” Certainly there’s more than enough in the Bible to keep the lover of great literature busy and happy for a lifetime. But on my way to class, that first seat-of-my-pants year, I walked past groups of men in black hats emerging from the shul, and past the Hebrew Day School where raucous Hebrew songs were spilling out of the windows and little boys in skullcaps were playing baseball in the yard. My students and I would read about God calling Abraham, about Jacob wrestling with God, about the people of Israel walking through the midst of the Red Sea, about Moses coming down from Mount Sinai bearing the tablets of the Law, about David repenting brokenhearted before God, about Solomon dedicating the Temple, about Isaiah pleading with the people to turn and be healed, about angels telling terrified shepherds that a king was born in Israel, about Jesus in the Temple telling his mother,“Didn’t you know I’d be in my Father’s house?” And then I would walk home and the Day School would be letting out and women in long skirts, their hair hidden under snoods, would be calling, “Tzipporah, over here, honey,” or “Put that down, Yosef!”
The surprise and the strangeness of it—of living down the road from descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, from blood relatives of Moses, Aaron, and David, of Hosea,Hezekiah, and Nehemiah, of Mary, Caiaphas, Peter, and Paul—jolted me out of my Bible-as-great-literature phase before I’d really had time to settle in and kept me from taking a Jesus-as-great-moral-teacher approach to the New Testament. The story, very obviously, was alive and well. You don’t run into the descendants of Oliver Twist or find yourself living down the road from people who trace their ancestry back to Anna Karenina or Huck Finn. The Bible was a wonderful story, great literature to be sure, but it was a lot more besides. When I asked God to protect my students from my mistakes, it seems I might have been the one most in need of help, and he used my Jewish neighbors to help me.
So there we were, following those neighbors as the scrolls were danced into the shul (Glen reached into his pocket for the yarmulke he keeps for such occasions) and were put into their place in the Aron Kodesh at the front. By this time the baby was getting squirmy and hungry, so we made sure the other kids were in the keeping of people who would get them home safely, and we walked home, leaving the scroll still surrounded by a surging, singing crowd. It will be taken out and read on Mondays and Thursdays and Saturdays. On the other days of the week, at all hours, the study rooms in the shul will house men, young and old, in pairs or groups, “sitting and learning” as the phrase goes: studying heavy, leather-bound Hebrew books. Studying Torah (although, strictly speaking, the Torah is the five books of Moses, the word is often used more generally to refer to the whole of Jewish law and life) is central to Orthodox life: an activity worth doing entirely for its own sake, and one that benefits all Jews everywhere.
Ironically, while our Jewish neighbors gave me back the Bible as a living book, they would disapprove thoroughly of the way I read it. I have made my peace, for the most part, with the historical and critical scholarship I was taught in my youth to regard as the primrose path to infidelity. I am quite comfortable, for instance, with the idea that the Pentateuch—the Torah, the five books of Moses—is a patchwork of different sources that probably didn’t reach its final form until Moses had been dead for hundreds of years. I have no problem with the idea that the Ten Commandments reflect the Sinai experience, while the covenant code, in the chapters that follow, grow out of Israel’s attempt to understand God’s will in the details of daily life in the Promised Land. This perspective on the Bible makes sense of all sorts of things that don’t make sense to me otherwise, and it solves all sorts of perplexing problems. However, my Orthodox neighbors would agree with my first Christian friends that this approach is a dangerous and irreverent compromise with secularism. The books of Moses, they say, are precisely what they claim to be: books written by Moses and passed on in their original form. The instructions about property damage by livestock, for instance, or about the proper procedure for preventing the spread of infectious diseases, were given by God to Moses. That’s what happened; some unknown redactor from the era of David and Solomon didn’t just decide that was the best way to organize the material.
On this, we disagree. We agree, however, on another point that I think is more important. We agree that the Bible must be read in company—that, regardless of exactly how it was written, if we are to receive the Bible as the Word of God, we must read it not as individuals but as members of a community.
According to Jewish tradition, Moses received from God not just the five books of the Torah but also a mass of other material expanding on and explaining the stories and laws in the Torah. This material was passed down for centuries by word of mouth—hence its name, the Oral Torah—until it was put down in writing somewhere between two hundred and five hundred years after the destruction of the Temple. These writings, called the Talmud, are the essential companion to the proper study of Torah and are, in their turn, the object of a vast and lively tradition of rabbinic commentary that is still alive. When Jews read Genesis, for example, they do so in the company of the Talmud, of centuries of rabbis, and of their friends, hunched over dining room tables or desks in the study rooms of shuls.
I think this is the way to do it. There are times when I read the Bible alone, but for the most part I do it with others. My partners are different from theirs: the fathers of the first Christian centuries (Irenaeus, Origen,Athanasius, Augustine), the ecclesiastics who put together the lectionary of the Catholic Church and decided which readings from the Old Testament ought to go side by side with ones from the Epistles and the Gospels, scholars in the historical-critical tradition, the evangelicals who brought me to faith, my husband, my fellow parishioners, my pastor, my colleagues, my students, and, now, my Jewish friends. Each of these partners has shed light on different aspects of the text and has raised different questions or pointed to different sets of possibilities. (I’ve made occasional brief attempts to read the Bible in company with the Talmud, but very quickly realized why devout Jews spend their whole lives learning it; it’s quite impenetrably dense and difficult, really not the sort of stuff you can figure out without years of practice.)
Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, [not ‘one jot or one tittle’ says the King James version, rather more memorably] will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:17–18). Christians believe that in Christ we have the true key to understanding the spirit of the Torah: that the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New. But while we believe that the fulfillment, the ending of the story, has been revealed, we are very obviously not there yet. Jews and Christians are both still waiting. Every letter, every stroke of every letter, every jot and tittle in the new scroll that lives in the Aron Kodesh down the road from us, is lovingly transcribed and preserved. And every nuance, every possible interpretation of every stroke, is pored over by a great cloud of witnesses: by the sages of the Talmud, by the great medieval scholars Maimonides and Nachmanides, and by our neighbors—Dr. Schwartz from across the road, Zevi from four doors down, and
Mr. Cohen from the next block. They will not stop doing so until every stroke of every letter is fulfilled in plain sight of all.
3
Kosher Cake
It is the day before our son’s second birthday, and his sisters, sensing that the grown-ups do not have the situation fully in hand, have decided that it is up to them to make him a cake. They have assembled quantities of mixing bowls, wooden spoons, oven gloves, rolling pins, and cookbooks in the middle of the kitchen floor and only need one thing from me before getting to work: “It has to be a kosher cake,” they tell me, “so that Yaffa-Dovid-Ester can come over and have a party. Where is the kosher food to make it with?”
It’s not going to happen. There is nothing, but nothing, that we can make for our Jewish neighbors to eat. As practiced by the Orthodox, the Jewish food laws of kashruth are not just a matter of avoiding bacon cheeseburgers. Meat has to come from certain animals, which have to be slaughtered in a very particular way, and the meat then rinsed and salted and rinsed again to remove all the blood, all under proper supervision.
The most complicated cluster of regulations comes from Exodus 23:19b,“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” The original purpose of the prohibition is obscure, but through centuries of Jewish life and experience and reflection, it has developed into an absolute prohibition of the mixing of meat and dairy. As practiced by my neighbors, this involves two sets of plates and knives and forks and pots and pans (three in some households—actually twice as many—because come Pesach everything in the kitchen has to be boxed up and put away). Milk dishes and meat dishes have to be kept in separate cupboards, washed with different sponges in different sinks, and, for the very strictest families, cooked in separate ovens. Everything in our kitchen is hopelessly contaminated, and short of inviting a rabbi in with a blowtorch to kasher my entire kitchen, there’s not a thing I can do about it.
Strangers and Neighbors Page 2