Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  10

  God Shows No Partiality

  The story in Acts 10–15, from the conversion of Cornelius to the Jerusalem Conference, is probably my very favorite bit of the Bible. All semester I look forward to sharing with my students the intense drama of these chapters. And of all the ways in which my friendship with Jews and my experience of Judaism have influenced me as a Christian, the way I respond to these chapters is possibly the most powerful.

  The story begins with Peter and with an odd little incident, which makes little sense at the time but will have unimaginable repercussions later. It’s getting on for dinnertime and Peter is hungry. While he’s waiting, he goes up to the roof of the house to pray. There he has a vision; animals of all sorts are lowered down from heaven in front of him, and a voice says, “You’re hungry? Here, take one of these and make yourself something to eat.”

  Now, a lot has happened to Peter since, terror stricken, he denied Jesus. He has seen his friend burst the bonds of death, and he has stood up and said so, repeatedly, in front of thousands. He has faced down the Sanhedrin; he has been broken out of prison by an angel; he has been so filled with the power of God that the lame and the sick have crowded around him hoping that his shadow would fall on them. But he doesn’t know what to make of this vision. His best guess is that it is a test of his obedience to the Torah. Many in the Jewish hierarchy are increasingly suspicious of those who believe in Jesus; they fear that this wild new movement could undermine the stubborn “neither to the right nor to the left” religious fidelity on which Israel’s survival depends. Maybe, Peter thinks, God is suspicious too and wants to know if Peter is getting sloppy. Peter is nettled. “Of course I won’t eat that stuff; it’s treif!” he protests.“Don’t you know me better than that, Lord, after all this time?”

  I can quite see why he would be put out. I know if I were to offer my neighbors a ham sandwich, they would be offended and hurt. I know their rules; do I think so little of them that I imagine they would brush off one of the central precepts of the Torah for the sake of a snack? It would be rude and disrespectful of me to suggest it.

  Is God being rude and disrespectful? He’s certainly being persistent—the vision repeats itself, not once but twice, and the voice again urges Peter to kill and eat. It makes me shudder to think of myself repeatedly pushing treif food on Ahuva, Chana, and Adina, pressuring them to break faith with God and their whole people. But this is what God is doing. No wonder Peter is perplexed.

  While he is still scratching his head, wondering what on earth Jesus means this time, he is called downstairs to meet visitors, who ask him to accompany them to the house of their master, a Roman centurion who was told in a vision to send for Peter. Peter has to think fast. Of course, a centurion can summon someone like Peter anytime he wants, but Cornelius’s servants are being extremely polite—this is very clearly not a summons from a military commander; it is an invitation. Strictly speaking, it is an invitation Peter ought to refuse. He is not supposed to associate with Gentiles any more than he is supposed to eat treif food. Romans were not only the conquerors and enemies of the Jews; they were also pagans, their houses full of graven images of false gods. Jews can’t go near that stuff. My friends can’t set foot in a Church, and I would no more invite them to come to midnight Mass, or even to our Easter egg hunt, than I would invite them over for cheeseburgers. And now Peter has just had this bizarre vision in which God insisted that he throw Torah and tradition to the wind and make himself a nice cheeseburger. Could it be connected to this invitation? Perhaps it was not a test but a hint: God’s way of telling Peter to go with these strangers. If so, it was an obscure hint, but it’s all he has to go on, so he sets out with Cornelius’s servants.

  When he arrives at Cornelius’s house, the situation is tense and awkward in the extreme. There is Peter, a fisherman from the provinces, in an elegant villa surrounded by Romans. Cornelius has gathered all his friends, and they are looking at Peter expectantly. Their friend Cornelius had always been a bit,well, odd about religion, and it looks as if he has really lost it this time. Visions of angels? Is he kidding? What are we doing here? And who is this Jew? He looks like a peasant, for crying out loud. Worse still is Cornelius himself. He doesn’t know what to expect either—who indeed is this Jew whom angels talk about? All he knows is that years of prayer are being answered; he is in such a state of high excitement that when he sees Peter, he throws himself at his feet as if to worship him. Peter, shocked and mortified, has to tell him to get up.

  Peter’s mind must be working frantically by now. Plunged into a bizarre situation, with nothing to go on but a cryptic clue, he has to make a decision. He clutches at the clue and tells Cornelius, “You know that my people have always regarded yours as profane, unclean. Our laws tell me that I cannot come to you like this. But God has told me not to think of anyone as profane any longer. So here I am. What do you want of me?”When Cornelius tells him his side of the story—his prayers, his vision—Peter says, “Now I truly understand that God shows no partiality.”

  On the one hand, this is a simple, rather touching exchange between two men from different worlds who find themselves drawn together by a power beyond either of them. It is also a watershed moment in the history of the Church, which up to this day has been composed entirely of Jews who have never considered for a moment that they might ever be anything other than Jews. And for a Jew to say what Peter says—“God has shown me that I must not call anything unclean . . . God shows no partial-ity”—is astonishing, outrageous. The words of Moses and Nehemiah and the voices of his parents and teachers and friends must have been reverberating in his head as he stood in front of the Roman soldier: “Remember who you are! Remember whose you are! Love the Lord your God and love his Law and meditate on it day and night and never depart from it. He is holy and you must be holy too. Separate yourselves from all that is unholy.” And yet, on the strength of a hint tossed to him in a dream, Peter looks Cornelius in the eye and tells him that God makes no difference between them. His daring is breathtaking.

  He tells Cornelius and his guests the good news about Jesus. The Holy Spirit descends on them, just as he had descended on Peter and his companions at Pentecost. Now Peter has no more doubts; God is clearly in charge, and Peter has to follow his lead. He baptizes Cornelius and his entire household, and from that moment onwards, the Church is no longer a small group within Judaism but something very different, something that nobody has contemplated before: a family that includes both Jews and Gentiles.

  In one afternoon everything has changed. The implications are too huge to contemplate calmly, so the Church does what Peter did—they catch the hint that God tossed them and play it by ear. A pattern quickly establishes itself. When Paul or Barnabas or Luke arrives in a new town to spread the word, they go first to the synagogue and speak to the Jews. Some of them believe and join the disciples, but many, probably most, do not. For generation after generation, the Word of the Lord, backed by bitter experience, has told them to walk in the way that Moses showed them and never to deviate from it, however intense the pressure. It is not surprising that to many Jews, the message about the crucified Messiah and the invitation to be baptized into a new covenant that includes Roman soldiers sounds like a temptation to the kind of infidelity that has nearly destroyed Israel in the past.

  There are painful scenes in which Paul and Barnabas are driven from town by hostile congregations of their fellow Jews. They shake the dust of the synagogues off their shoes and strike out into the world of the Gentiles (with their pagan philosophies and their mystery religions and their idols and their treif food and their temple prostitutes and their imperial cults), and they tell them about the Jewish carpenter who died and rose again, and who, it seems, came not only to the Jews but to the whole world to forgive sins. And lots and lots of these Gentiles, these pagans, in Antioch and Iconium and Athens and Corinth and Ephesus, believe and turn from their idols to the one true God and are baptized.

  As G
entiles pour into the Church, a rift quickly develops within the leadership. Some Christians, among them many Pharisees, insist that converts be circumcised and taught to keep the Law of Moses. They are horrified by the notion of simply waiving the holy demands of the Torah; if Gentiles are to be Christians, they must become Jews first. It was surely a compelling argument to their fellow Jews, who knew what it was to love Israel and the Torah wholeheartedly. But even more compelling was the evidence of God’s activity, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the signs and wonders that made no distinction between Jews and Gentiles. The argument of Peter and Paul and the others was very simple: “God is at work. We need to get out of his way.”

  The debate between the two sides becomes bitter, and a meeting is called in Jerusalem to talk the problem through and to make some serious decisions about what exactly to do about this new breed of Spirit-filled,Messiah-worshipping Gentiles. The decision comes down to James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church. He listens to both sides and agrees, to a limited degree, with the conservative insistence that certain things are nonnegotiable. Gentiles who turn to Jesus, he says, and seek baptism for the forgiveness of sins must utterly renounce idolatry: no household shrines, no muttered prayers, nothing that reminds them of their old gods. They must not eat meat with blood. And they must turn from the license of their pagan pasts and adopt the high standards of sexual purity that have set the Jews apart from their neighbors. Of the 613 mitzvahs of the Torah, these three remain. As regards the other 610, James agrees with Paul’s party that “we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God” (Acts 15:19). It is a momentous decision, and with it the future relations of Christianity and Judaism are sealed. It is inevitable that Christianity is going to pull away from Judaism, appeal less and less to Jews in the grand tradition of Nehemiah, and forge a new path.

  The conservative, or “Judaizing,” party does not give up without a fight. They send out missionaries of their own, trying to persuade Gentile converts to be circumcised. Paul fights back; he builds the foundations of Christian theology on the claim that the salvation won by Jesus is received by faith. He says that Gentile Christians have been adopted into the family God began with the election of Abraham, and that Abraham’s righteousness was by faith. He says that circumcision is a sign of God’s covenant, not a condition. He also says, passionately, that it breaks his heart to watch Judaism and Christianity going in separate directions; that at times it is so painful to him he is almost ready to abandon his own salvation, if his salvation requires him to abandon his people; and that he doesn’t understand why God has let this happen but knows God will keep his promises.

  This story, the story of how Christianity and Judaism came to be two separate religions, has been transformed for me since I have lived in close proximity to Judaism. Before I came here, I respected Judaism as a noble and ancient tradition, the bedrock of my own, but had no sense of how one might love it as a vibrant, living reality. Now that I do,my response to this story is intense and full of conflict. Of course, I still read it as a Christian; and of course, it is thrilling. On the roof in Joppa, God shows an uncomprehending Peter that he meant what he said when he told Abraham that through him all the nations of the world would be blessed. In Cornelius’s villa the knowledge of the Lord and the message about Jesus and the forgiveness of sins are thrown open to the whole world. At the Jerusalem Conference, the Church puts its trust in God, reaches out to people it had been taught to avoid, and steps into a future it could not imagine or comprehend. I love and admire Peter and Paul and James for their fearless, selfless, openhearted trust. But I have also come to appreciate the determination and fidelity of the Jews who held out, disputed with Paul and Barnabas, and rejected their message of a new covenant—they are the ancestors of my neighbors, the people who have kept Judaism alive. I have learned to sympathize also with the conservative party at the Jerusalem Conference. I used to think of them as grouchy, unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud, but now I see them as motivated by the deep love for Torah that characterizes the lives of my friends. I can understand their horror at the idea that the Gentiles should be accepted as worshipers of God without being required to keep God’s holy Law in its entirety. And I can feel, acutely, Paul’s anguish as he watches Israel and the Church inexorably pull apart, forget their deep kinship, and prepare to forge separate paths through history. I know what that history is going to be like.

  It is God’s story, and it is not for me to wish it otherwise. But I am torn in all directions when I read these chapters. It is not a shallow, triumphalistic account of “how we shook off the shackles of tradition,” but a tense story of faithful Jews struggling to understand God’s will and to make a decision that will have huge implications for all of God’s people. The stakes are high, and there is tragedy among the triumph. The world was won for Christ, but the cost was very high. The daring decisions of the story’s heroes, Peter and James and Paul, are noble in part because, as these men steered the fledgling Church into uncharted waters, they must have known how much would be lost.

  11

  Us and Them

  So here we are, cheek by jowl with the life that we might have been leading had Peter and James sided with the conservatives in Jerusalem and decided that Christians did, indeed, need to be Jews first. My husband has his own yarmulke for those occasions when one needs a yarmulke. Our kids draw stars with six rather than five points and tell us jokes with Hebrew punch lines. If we get invited to a shalom zachor, we know, without being told, the day and time we should show up. We know all kinds of random halakhic trivia: Jews eat cheese on Shavuos and fruit on Tu B’Shevat, they don’t listen to music during Tisha b’Av, and they throw bits of bread into running water at Rosh Hashanah.

  It’s lots of fun, but there have been some excruciating moments. Once, on vacation, we found ourselves in a museum elevator with an Orthodox family. Fearing what might happen, I jabbered merrily about the dinosaurs but to no avail—Catherine and Elisabeth chirped in unison “Oh, hello! You’re Jews!” The doors opened before I had time to stammer out an explanation. Then there was the time at the park when Catherine was playing with a little boy while I chatted to his very pleasant father. Catherine’s little friend mentioned, apropos of I can’t remember what, that he was Jewish, whereupon Catherine looked him up and down—no yarmulke, no tzitzis—and said coolly, “Hmm, you must be one of those Jews who don’t know their mitzvahs.”

  Sometimes, like Catherine, I start to feel smugly that I’m an insider, that I “get it,” that I really understand Orthodox life. Of course, I don’t: far from it. When we’re invited to an “event”—a party, a bris, somewhere there is a large group—and I am on the fringes of conversations that are not organized around including me and making allowances for my ignorance, I realize how weirdly, bewilderingly different than our world is the world my friends inhabit. Like Catherine, I’ve made more than my fair share of klutzy faux pas. In the shul just the other week, at the end of a bris, I actually began to genuflect on my way out of the sanctuary: religious event, ceremonial space, force of habit. I don’t think anybody noticed. At the dinner afterwards I found myself at a table with strangers—the children had vanished with their friends, and Glen, of course, resplendent in his yarmulke, was sitting with the men on the other side of the room. A table full of strangers makes me a little shy—it probably makes most everybody a little shy—so I fell back on the usual vocabulary of female small talk: “How many children do you have?” and so on. After I had asked this for the third time and received an odd answer, the woman beside me gently explained that you’re not supposed to ask “how many” questions about people. Next time I’ll know. But for every mitzvah, and every halakhic gloss on a mitzvah, and every custom, tradition, legend, or belief that I stumble across, there are hundreds, probably thousands, I have no idea about.

  At parties, when not actively making a fool of myself, I am interrupting. All conversations, whatever the topic, switch back and forth between English and Heb
rew and Yiddish; there is no aspect of life—absolutely none—that is not touched by Torah and sprinkled with foreign words. I have become quite shameless about butting in: “Hey, hang on! So ten seconds ago we were talking about the sale at Penney’s and now we’re talking Hebrew. What is going on, and what is Jewish about Penney’s?” And they’ll grin and explain that there is a mitzvah about the kinds of fibers that can and can’t be mixed in the same garment, and that if you buy something made of wool, before you can wear it you have to send it for testing to make sure there is no linen anywhere in it. That’s what is Jewish about Penney’s.

  There’s nothing unusual about my making a fool of myself. I don’t need to go to a bris for that; I can do it anywhere. But what is really quite unusual is for a Catholic to be even very partially at home in the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. It is, by and large, a world that keeps to itself. There are any number of reasons for this: theological—God commanded the Jews to keep themselves apart from the nations; historical—they’ve been brutalized for centuries; practical—because once you start inviting Gentiles to your parties, you can’t get through half a sentence without having to stop and launch into complicated explanations of something or other.