Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  Our kids already live in a rather larger world than their Jewish friends, and the difference between their lives will grow greater as they grow older. For the Orthodox, the teen years represent the phase between childhood and marriage. For our children they will represent the warm-up to the extended adolescence of higher education. In ten years Yaffa will be thinking seriously about choosing a husband, and Catherine will be thinking seriously about choosing a college. Yaffa will be going on dates and asking young men with fuzzy beards and big hats about their views on family life. Catherine will be going on campus tours and asking admissions staff about library hours and majors. A couple of years after that, Yaffa will be preparing for her first baby—boy or girl? Catherine will be preparing for junior year abroad—Paris or Tokyo? I am acutely aware that it is one thing to expect your children to keep all the mitzvahs when everybody around them is doing it, and to shomrei negiyah until they are eighteen or nineteen and ready for marriage. It is quite another to expect them to read the Bible and pray when they are in Bhutan for a year with the Peace Corps, and to be chaste and continent through their midtwenties while they are too busy studying and traveling and having adventures to think about marriage. Glen and I are asking a lot.

  So, as we think hard about how we can best prepare our children to live good, happy lives, we watch the cohesiveness of the community around us somewhat wistfully. They have resources that are simply not available to us. But while the cohesiveness of the sort of Orthodox Judaism practiced by our neighbors is its great strength, and a strength that we cannot reproduce in our own family, it is a liability as well because it comes as a package. Either our friends’ children will follow in the footsteps of their parents and live lives ordered in almost every detail by obedience to the mitzvahs they took on at the cusp of the teenage years, or else they will kick over the traces and go do something altogether different. Most things about Orthodoxy are nonnegotiable; it is an all-or-nothing proposition.

  So, in its own way, is Christianity, but it does not come with a ready-made, all-enveloping culture. The nonnegotiable element in Christianity is fidelity to Christ. Of course, everybody needs a culture—humans cannot be human without culture and symbols and companions. But Christ can be—has been—at the center of many different cultures, and our children, as they move into the big wide world, will have the freedom to choose whether to follow Christ in suburban kitchens or monasteries or corner offices, whether to worship him with Latin masses and rosary novenas or with tongues and tambourines, whether to lead lives of fertility and domesticity or austere lives dedicated to prayer and contemplation,whether to stand in solidarity with the oppressed against the great ones of the earth or to be quiet witnesses for justice within the system, whether to wear business suits or overalls or uniforms or tie-dye. The freedom of the children of God may be glorious, but it is also a little dizzying.

  The job of Jewish parents is to raise children who will embrace a Torah life in all its dimensions. Our job as Christian parents is to raise our children to follow Christ. So we take them to Church and to Sunday school and to prayer groups, and we read the Bible and pray at home. But it is also our job to prepare them for the glorious and dizzying freedom of Christianity: to teach them how to discern the difference between what is negotiable and what isn’t. So we read books with them and watch movies and visit museums and spend time with friends, and talk and talk and listen and listen and talk some more about good and evil, beauty and ugliness, choices and character, and habit and virtues and stories. When puberty hits our household like a hurricane—about five years and counting—we will encourage hobbies and sports and homework, make sensible rules about clothes and dates and sleepovers and curfews, and pretend to shrug it off when we are accused of being vile tyrants: all the things that sensible middle-class American parents do to steer their children through the shoals of adolescence. But we will try to remember that Jesus was not a sensible middle-class American and that they don’t have to be either. And we hope that when they are in the throes of their teen years, they will still be as close to Yaffa and Ester as they are now, if only so that when they wail, “But everybody else is doing it,”we will be able to say,“No, they’re not, and you know it!”

  8

  Not a Jot nor a Tittle

  Fifty days after Pesach comes Shavuos, when Jews remember the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the Torah that seals the covenant between them and the God who chose them. When God first made the covenant, he promised Abraham more descendants than there are stars in the sky, and now at Sinai Abraham’s descendants gather at the foot of the mountain. God promises them a land of their own, and then they are free and on their way to the Promised Land. God told Abraham that he would make of him a great nation. Thus, the greatness to which Israel is called is bound to the Torah; by obedience to the Law, they will make manifest to the world knowledge of the one true God.

  The Torah remains the center of Jewish identity. Without the shape it gives to their lives, the Jews could not possibly have survived what history has thrust on them. When the Temple was destroyed and they were thrown out of Jerusalem, it became the anchor of Jewish life. Wherever the bereaved, scattered Jews went then and in the centuries to come—to Spain and Ethiopia and Poland and Iraq—the Torah went. It is a vital, active presence in the lives of our Orthodox neighbors: modern people with camera-phones and minivans and jobs as hairdressers, accountants, doctors, and caterers. They study it constantly; they obey it; they shape every day, every hour, almost every word and action, around it.

  When God promised Abraham descendants, land, and greatness, he also said that through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Christians understand this to mean that while God, through the Torah, was shaping the sons of Abraham into a great and holy nation, he was preparing a place where he himself would come into the world, into time and space and history, into human birth and life and death, and draw humans with him into what lies beyond death.

  Fifty days after Jesus’s shattered, shattering Seder, after he ordered his disciples to drink the blood of the new covenant and then went out to his death, Jerusalem was again full of pilgrims come from far and wide to celebrate Shavuos. The day must have had special resonances for the disciples. Like their ancestors, they had recently passed through the waters of terror and triumph and watched their God demolish the powers of death and darkness. Like their ancestors, they were facing a hostile and uncertain world. And, like their ancestors, they were the bearers of promises they did not fully understand. Jesus had told them that he had to leave them, that a helper would come, that they held the keys to the kingdom of heaven, that they must go to the end of the earth and baptize and make disciples, and that they would stand before emperors and he would give them the words to say. But as of yet no help had come, and they were as inadequate to the task they had been given as the newly escaped slaves at the foot of Mount Sinai were to the job of building a great nation. They huddled together, prayed, and waited.

  What happened next was as strange and frightening as what had happened at Mount Sinai. Back then, Moses had disappeared into a rumbling, flashing cloud on top of the mountain and emerged with the tablets of the Law. Now, fire and roaring wind came to the disciples and rested on them, filled the room, and filled them. The disciples spoke out in words not their own, as Jesus had promised they would, and an astonished crowd quickly gathered. Peter, his lungs swelling with the breath of God, stood up and spoke to the crowd. On that day three thousand people came to faith in Jesus the Messiah and were baptized. On that Shavuos the Church was born. The Greek-speaking Jews present called the festival Pentecost, and this became the Church’s term. Shavuos is the seed of Pentecost in the same way that Pesach is the seed of Good Friday and Easter. On Shavuos God gave the Torah that makes Jews into Jews, and on Pentecost he sent the Spirit that makes Christians into Christians. The Christian festivals soak up meaning and symbol from the rich soil of the past and bring forth strange and wonderful new flowers.
<
br />   The relation between the Torah that Moses brought down from the mountain and the Spirit that descended in tongues of fire becomes a central theme for Christian thought. Paul says that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). He says that to live by the Law is slavery and to live by the Spirit is to live freely as loving children. He even says that those who rely on the works of the Law are under a curse, and that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law. These phrases are deep in the Christian consciousness and have been probably the principal sources for the Church’s ideas about Judaism.

  But what Christians, even those who ought to know better, have too often forgotten is that when Paul said these things, he wasn’t writing to Jews or about Jews. He was writing to and about Gentile Christians who had been argued or bullied into thinking that they had to keep the Law: that before they could be Christians, they had to be Jews.

  For these Gentile followers of Jesus to submit themselves to the stringent demands of a covenant not their own would indeed have been slavery. But for Jews, living a Torah life is, well, something else—something that I don’t really understand. My Orthodox friends approach the Torah, to be sure, with a deep sense of obligation, responsibility, and awe. But they also love it, deeply. They obey it because they love it, and they make time in crowded lives to read books and take classes and look for ways to hew more closely to the Law, to shape their lives more minutely by its precepts, to be more authentically Jewish as they obey more intimately. For observant Jews Torah is not a historical relic nor a dry and oppressive code but a living reality, and to observe it is to enter into a vital, dynamic, all-demanding relationship with God. As Ahuva told me that day outside the shul, the Torah marries Jews to God; it binds them in fidelity to the covenant that makes them who they are.

  The second main place where Christians get their image of the Law is straight from the Gospels and particularly from the bitter accusations that Jesus makes when he clashes with the Pharisees, the teachers of the Torah and the forerunners of the rabbis. He calls them hypocrites. He calls them whitewashed tombs. He accuses them of straining at gnats and swallowing camels, of seeking status and power by bullying people about the tiniest details of the Law while themselves sinning gravely against kindness and generosity and humility, against the love of God and neighbor.

  Because these are attacks on the keepers of the Law, it is not surprising that many Christians, unfamiliar with Jewish life, come away thinking that obedience to the Law is in itself sterile, superficial, cold. Here again a shallow or uninformed reading is misleading and has been terribly harmful.

  Jesus was not criticizing the Torah itself, those who strove to follow it diligently, or those who dutifully led and taught them; it was his Father, after all, who had given the Torah and ordered his people to obey it. What he was criticizing was hypocrisy, self-righteousness, insincerity, and the manipulation of religious practice and culture in the service of selfish agendas. In doing so Jesus stood in a long tradition of Jews who attacked their fellow Jews every bit as fiercely for the same thing: for failing to recognize that it is not slavish adherence to ritual but the love of God and neighbor that stands at the heart of Torah. The prophets are full of scalding diatribes against superficial piety that masks deep indifference to God himself. In Isaiah God angrily rejects the extravagant religiosity of a violent, greedy, and corrupt society. “Your sacrifices make me sick,” he tells them. “Get out of the Temple and leave me alone. Don’t bother praying; I’m not listening. Go clean up your act: cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Then we’ll talk” (see Isa. 1:12–17). Nor is Jesus alone in calling some Pharisees to account for hypocrisy. The rabbis of the Talmud have a term, tzevuin, that means “painted ones”—not unlike Jesus’s “whited sepulchers”— and warn against those who ape the Pharisees, who assume an appearance of righteousness out of love for power and prestige rather than love for God.

  The Law is from God; it is good. It does not create hypocrisy any more than the doctrine of justification by faith creates complacency or the doctrine of transubstantiation creates superstition. Sinful humans create sins and nourish or justify them with whatever religious materials we have on hand. I’m sure there are plenty of hypocritical Jews—I know there are plenty of complacent and superstitious Christians—but the Law at the core of Jewish life is not an empty relic but a living mystery.

  I won’t deny that often, to an outsider like me, it all looks a bit peculiar. Sometimes it looks plain nuts. If my friend Chana is making chicken soup and she’s running late and the noodles are boiling over and the toddler is screaming and she accidentally grabs a milk spoon and stirs, she has to stop everything and call Rabbi Goldfarb. He will ask her a string of questions—what the spoon is made of, what temperature everything was, and other things that are halakhically significant for reasons I don’t begin to understand—and then he will tell her what to do. As Rabbi Goldfarb is a nice chap, he is on Chana’s side and will do his best to find a favorable interpretation of the situation so that she doesn’t have to throw out the dinner and start again. However accustomed to Jewish life I become, I am sure there will always be things like this that make me think, Oh, come on. It’s a spoon. You can’t be serious.

  My friends cheerfully admit that it is an odd way to live. Once, very hesitantly for fear of giving offense, I asked Ahuva whether maybe, just maybe in rare cases, a high level of observance might possibly become a teeny bit neurotic. “Are you kidding?” she cackled and launched into a string of disturbing and hilarious anecdotes about weird nuttiness she has come across in the name of Torah observance. But then, anyone who has been a Christian for more than a week and hasn’t collected a tidy little store of anecdotes about loony behavior in the name of Christ is either a saint or has absolutely no sense of humor.

  I know that many of my non-religious friends and relatives find my faith considerably loopier than I find scrupulous Torah observance. From where they are standing, it’s quite bad enough for an intelligent, educated person who has read and traveled and knows what the world is like to believe that there is an all-powerful benign intelligence behind it all. But to believe that the brutal death of a carpenter is, eventually, going to fix everything? And that getting up on Sunday mornings to sit through some preposterous ritual with wine and a wafer is going to help me have a relationship with this carpenter-God? Oh, come on. I can’t be serious. But as much as it confounds them, here I am, giving reasonably good signs of being sane. And there are my neighbors, with their milk spoons and meat pots and rabbis, and they look for all the world like warm, cheerful, sensible, witty, perfectly normal people. Go figure.

  It is clear to me that their strange vigilance about light-switches and spoons and the like has brought many of my friends to a faith in, a surrender to, and a relationship with God that is at least as vital, full, and intimate as anything I can claim to have experienced myself. But how it works remains a mystery to me and probably always will. When I try to ask about the connection between observance and spirituality, the conversation invariably founders— probably because to them the answer to my question is so self-evident, something they take so entirely for granted, that it is hard to put it into words. For an Orthodox Jew, the acts of loving God, being a good person, and faithfully striving to obey all the mitzvahs of the Torah are all one big thing—what Ahuva calls “living a Torah life”—and when I demand that my friends chop a Torah life into artificial chunks and then tell me how they all fit together, they are at first puzzled and eventually, despite their best attempts to hide it, exasperated. My questions must sound arbitrary and pointless to them. They must feel rather like I would if I found myself buttonholed by a curious and persistent Hindu or Taoist who was firmly convinced that the key to understanding Christianity lay in knowing Jesus’s shoe size and who resisted all my attempts to steer him onto more interesting topics.

  As I cannot persuade my Jewish friends to disse
ct their religious lives to fit into my Christian categories, I have to make my own guesses. On the one hand, of course, the Law “works” because it is from God. He commanded his people to obey the mitzvahs and promised to reward those who did. Things have changed since then, but God’s nature doesn’t change, and he will keep his promises. Psalm 1 speaks of the man who keeps aloof from the ways of the wicked and buries himself day and night in the Torah. He will be like a tree by a stream, its roots deep in good soil, growing and flourishing and bringing forth fruit. A human life rooted in Torah will bear fruit the way a tree does—not grudgingly because it has to, nor pridefully to win admiration, but simply because it is its deepest nature to do so. Paul uses the same image of fruitfulness when he writes to the Gentile Christians in Galatia, warning them not to be misled by those who are demanding that they be circumcised. In Christ, he tells them, circumcision and uncircumcision don’t matter. Your righteousness is through the Spirit by faith, and if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the Law. If you are led by the Spirit, you will bring forth the fruits of the Spirit. Different covenants, same God, same fruits. Whether you draw your life from lungs filled with the breath of God or from roots deep in the Torah, you will bear fruit, and the fruit is from God.

  I love the metaphor of fruit. The image of peaceful and generous abundance is different from the restlessness and tedium and anxiety that too often characterize my spiritual life, but its beauty gives me hope. I want to be like a tree. As part of the process of being received into the Roman Catholic Church—a process based on the practices of the very first Christian centuries—catechumens are asked by the bishop: “What do you seek from God’s Church?” My answer was “To live fruitfully,” and I have found, in the Church’s rich tradition of spiritual disciplines, hints as to how the Torah might “work” in thee lives of my friends.