Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  Several factors have made our unusual situation possible. First, this isn’t a big city. Many of the Jewish families are transplants from New York (you can buy a six-bedroom house with a garden here for the cost of a closet in Brooklyn, which is useful if you have eight children), and they come here knowing that they will be mingling with a more diverse world. The community is thriving and growing, but it is too small—about sixty or seventy families—to be self-contained like the big Hasidic neighborhoods in New York,where shop signs are in Yiddish and a woman with her hair uncovered would stand out as much as a woman walking down the street in her underwear.

  Second, thanks to our education and profession, when we moved into the neighborhood we had a knowledge of Scripture, theology, and history well above the average, as well as a basic familiarity with the notion of strict Jewish observance. This meant that we could talk to our neighbors without their having to explain themselves from the ground up. I knew what Torah meant, and kosher and halakha and mitzvah and minyan, and why everyone walked down the street in their best clothes at dusk on Friday. The first time Yaffa asked her mum if she could come and play at our house, I knew enough to say,“Don’t worry, I won’t let her eat anything. Is tap water okay? Paper cup? Got it.” It only took one brief moment of embarrassment for me to learn not to attempt to shake hands with an Orthodox man. I ask an awful lot of questions, but they are usually reasonably well-informed questions, not the sort to elicit a “Gosh . . . er . . . I don’t really know where to begin . . .You see, we’re Jewish, and we have a lot of rules . . .” response. I’m sure our ignorance, coupled with our curiosity, is tedious at times, but it was never colossal enough to make it simply too much effort for our neighbors to talk to us about anything other than the weather.

  Third,we got lucky with our neighbors. All the Orthodox we have met have been pleasant and friendly and are at least as happy to pass the time of day with us as the neighborhood Catholics and Pentecostals and secular humanists are, but we probably never would have got beyond passing the time of day were it not that, about a year after we moved in, the Gindoffs bought the house four doors down. We have all kinds of things in common: their younger children are the same ages as ours and have the same soft hearts and quirky, eccentric little minds; their house, like ours, is cheerfully chaotic, reassuringly messy, and perpetually cluttered with books; we all, adults included, share a geeky obsession with Harry Potter and Star Wars; we can all talk the hind leg off a donkey. We quickly became friends. Our kids are inseparable. Ahuva visits my classes to talk about living a Torah life; Zevi drops round regularly to talk politics and check that Glen’s fifteen-year-old single-malt scotch is still kosher. They find it entertaining to see themselves through our eyes: “Hey, Maria, guess what? If you slaughter a cow then find out it had milk in its udders, the milk counts as meat . . . Cool, huh? Not that I’ve ever heard of it happening—I mean, you don’t kill dairy cows for meat, do you? But still, you never know.” They also know absolutely everybody—she is the only kosher caterer in town, and he is the chair of B’nai B’rith—and are widely acknowledged to be probably the nicest people on the planet. “Friends of the Gindoffs” is an instant password to a welcome in situations in which non-Jews do not normally find themselves.

  In the main, our experiences here have been important personally, for reasons only indirectly connected with religion. This is a really wonderful neighborhood in which to raise a family. It’s not fancy by any means—there’s a lot of peeling paint and cars with missing hubcaps and broken toys on porches—but it’s a real community. People know each other and look out for each other. Plus there are loads of nice kids around; kids who, like ours, inhabit a world without video games or cable television, kids who can be relied on never to set undesirable examples with regard to skimpy T-shirts or permissive curfews. I doubt the same could be said for many ritzy, SUV-lined suburbs in America today.

  We have also learned some things about being friends with people who are different from ourselves. Learning these things is not only fun and interesting; it also might be quite important in a small way. The big world outside our happily diverse little neighborhood is shrinking rapidly, and we—the human family, long-lost cousins all—are bumping up against and getting entangled with people who are very different from ourselves. It is, by and large, a difficult business to live in close proximity with people who are different: always has been, always will be. But we have to learn to do it, or we may not make it into the next century. We cannot afford to retreat into bigotry and suspicion and triumphal-ism. On the other hand, we can’t afford simply to jettison whatever convictions and commitments might clash with the convictions and commitments of others, because when the going gets tough—and it will—we’re going to need our convictions and commitments.

  Most of what enables our Orthodox friends and us to get on smoothly around our differences is just a matter of common courtesy and common sense. It’s common courtesy to shut up and listen while other people tell you who they are, rather than deciding that you know already. It’s common sense that sometimes being around people who see things very differently can be awkward and that you need to tolerate a bit of awkwardness and not take yourself too seriously. We feel comfortable around the very different world our neighbors inhabit because nobody pretends that the worlds aren’t different. The boundaries between us and our Orthodox neighbors are unequivocally clear, and nobody tries to hide them or gloss over them. Nobody acts as if they are silly or embarrassing or as if they are superficial or don’t really matter. They do matter, and everybody knows it. We know they think our food is gross. They know we think some of the mitzvahs are weird and some of their traditions a bit nutty. We know that a marriage between one of their children and one of ours would constitute a major family crisis for them. They know that we wouldn’t be too keen on it either. We can all make jokes about it.

  Of course, I know that we are merely dipping our toes in the shallows of diversity. While our Orthodox neighbors are really quite different in many ways, we are very similar in many, many others. We’re all middle-class urban Americans with minivans and snow shovels and cell phones and library cards and jobs. It would be absurd to suggest that our experience here offers an easy solution to the challenges of our moment in history. There are terrible injustices and cruelties in the world, and terrible anger and pain that are not going to be healed by the courtesy and common sense and humor that make our relationships here work. If we—the human family—are to learn to live in peace, we will need love (which drives out fear) and humility (which dissolves pride). But love and humility are deep mysteries; they demand that we give ourselves up, and that is a terrifying prospect. Courtesy and common sense and humor are within reach of more of us and are probably not a bad place to start.

  Ironically, it may actually be the differences between ourselves and our Orthodox friends that make it possible for us to be friends in the first place. If they were Christians or we were Jews, I don’t think the friendship would work. If the Gindoffs, say, were Christians, they would still be kind, warm, friendly people; but I probably wouldn’t notice, because I would be driven beside myself with frustration by some things about them: a conviction that the universe is about 5,700 years old; a fascination with colorfully detailed apocalyptic scenarios; a cheerful assumption that they share with Abraham and Solomon and Habakkuk and Paul a single coherent philosophy called a “biblical worldview.”

  I expect it would work the other way too. If we were the sort of Jews that we are Christians, we would keep kosher at home but not bother about it too much when eating out; we would make a sincere attempt to make Shabbos a special day but wouldn’t think twice about driving to the store if we were out of milk; we would prefer our kids to marry Jews but would suck it up and go to our grandchildren’s baptisms if that’s the way things worked out. Our neighbors don’t have much patience with that sort of Judaism.

  I imagine that if we belonged to the same religion, we would probably keep each
other at a polite but faintly disdainful distance. But as their religion is not our business and our religion is not theirs, our friendships are not derailed by our cherished prejudices and irritations and opinions. It does make one wonder why we so easily allow our prejudices and irritations and opinions to make such a splintered mess of the Church, of Christ’s body, when he told us so clearly not to. But that’s a whole other issue.

  For Glen and me, the experience of crossing in friendship boundaries that are not usually crossed has been a fascinating and enlightening adventure. For our children, it is simply the way life is. That some people are Christians and believe in Jesus and some are Jews and don’t, and that Christians and Jews do things differently, is something they absorbed along with the fact that if they want ice cream, they have to say please. They know, without having to think about it, which coloring books, which movies, and even which episodes of VeggieTales are okay when their friends are round on a rainy afternoon. They don’t think it at all odd that they can have lunch at Yitzy’s house but Yitzy can’t even have an apple out of our fruit bowl. Navigating smoothly around those differences, without letting them interfere with the serious business of fun, is second nature to them:

  “We’ve got to have lunch now, so you’d better go home, but can we come to yours after?”

  “Leave Avi’s tzitzis alone, Adam. I know they’re nice, but you’re Catholic, and you can’t have them.”

  “It’s time for me to go for my bath. I’ll try to come back later, but I’ll have my Shabbos clothes on, so we’ll have to play inside.”

  “I’d better be Piglet, because he’s not kosher. Do you want to be Tigger or Pooh?”

  It will get more complicated as they get older, as the differences between their lives become more apparent and friendships between boys and girls start to come under closer parental scrutiny. I confidently anticipate broken hearts that will take, oh, days to mend. But however complex the questions and answers will become, they will arise among friends for whom the differences between Jewish and Christian worlds cause less friction than burning questions about who pushed whom first, or whose turn it is for the sparkly shoes or the green light saber. As an elementary preparation for civilized participation in the global village, it’s hard to beat.

  12

  One Is Hashem

  It’s been six years now since I was in Jerusalem when Shabbos arrived. There’s been a lot of gefilte fish and knishes and kosher wine in those years; chilly dinners in sukkahs and giggly, blurry drinks at Purim. Above all there have been countless hours kibitzing on doorsteps and pestering my immensely patient neighbors with endless questions about the ritual of the mikveh and kabbalah and why you have to eat cheese on Shavuos. But my Jewish friends never ask me,“So how does this Trinity idea work?” or “Do you speak English in Church?” or “What’s the deal with the pope and contraception anyway?” or expressed any curiosity about what we believe or do as Christians.

  Nor have I ever raised the subject. When I was new to the neighborhood, I mentioned to a Jewish colleague that I was getting to know some of my Orthodox neighbors, and he told me that I should never talk about religion. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as an attempt at proselytism would bring budding friendships to a screeching halt. There are strong reasons for this: both historical reasons—the forced conversion of Jews under the Spanish Inquisition, the medieval practice of compelling rabbis to participate in humiliating and heavily rigged public debates with Christian theologians—and more recent reasons. The enemies of the Jews (and there have been many) have been not only those like Haman and Hitler who sought their extermination, but also those like Nebuchadnezzar and Antiochus Epiphanes who tried to force them to assimilate, to melt into history, to worship the gods of the nations, to forget their own story, and to be lost. It made sense, and I took his advice.

  Of course, by now our neighborhood friendships are well established. Everybody who knows us knows we are Christians—we certainly don’t hide it—and nobody is going to think I’m anti-Semitic if I venture an explanation of what happens at Mass or what Paul says about Abraham or try to make it clear that, despite appearances, Christians really do believe in only one God. Glen and Zevi occasionally pull out the Talmud and the New Testament and compare passages. But, by and large, they don’t ask and we don’t tell.

  If I did—if I pointed out to my friends all the ways in which the coming of Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the Scriptures that we share, if I read them Isaiah on the Suffering Servant and then Mark’s account of the Passion, if I showed them the first few chapters of Matthew, or Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, or (if I were feeling particularly pushy) Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin—I imagine they would coolly turn to Isaiah 2, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (v. 4b), or Isaiah 11, where it says that when the new David, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, comes, he will take the side of the meek of the earth and put an end to the wickedness of the wicked, and wolves and lambs and babies and snakes will live in peace in a world without hurt or destruction. They would say, “This is what will happen when Moshiach comes. Look around you. Does this honestly look like the history of the last couple of thousand years from where you’re standing? Because, let me tell you, from where we’re standing, it really, really doesn’t.”And I imagine that they would be singularly unimpressed by my arguments about the Second Coming and the intricacies of Christian eschatology and the hope that the Church has been holding aloft since Paul wrote to reassure the Thessalonians that Christ would return as he had promised, although no one knew the day or the hour.

  That’s what I imagine would happen if we had the conversation. I wish we could. There’s nothing I like better than a heated discussion about religion with good friends. We have an ardently agnostic colleague who finds religion absurd but fascinating, and who shares our taste for staying up late, arguing, and brandishing colorful and good-humored insults. We have spent many a night in ferocious debate with him, having a grand old time and getting absolutely nowhere before realizing that the bottle is empty and the children will wake up in about four hours. All things being equal, we could do the same with our Orthodox friends, cheerfully slinging Bible verses back and forth. “Aha! But in 1 Peter it says . . .Whaddya say to that, then?” But all things aren’t equal, and I very much doubt that we ever will.

  Our children know that they are not to say too much about Jesus and Church to their Jewish friends. Of course, it is no secret that we are different from them: our food is treif, for a start, and there are rosaries and icons and crosses around rather than mezuzahs, not to mention that splendid sparkly tree we get around Hanukkah, with the baby and the angels, and all the camels. But I discourage them from getting into it too much. I am tickled pink if my children teach me bits of Yiddish or the proper berakha to say before eating fruit or after using the bathroom, but I don’t think Ahuva would feel the same if Yaffa were to teach her the Our Father or sing “Jesus Loves Me” at bedtime.

  Our children have as good an understanding of the situation as anybody could at their age; they can explain that Jews are different from Christians because they knew God before anybody else did and he gave them special rules. The mitzvahs are how they are friends with God, and now Jesus is how we and everybody else can be his friends.“But,” they ask quite reasonably, “if we are all God’s friends, and if Jesus really is God’s Son, then why can’t we make them Christmas cards, and why can’t we invite them to baptisms or first communions or Easter egg hunts?”

  “Well,” we tell them, “they would think it was rude.”

  “But why would they think it was rude? We think it’s a big treat to go over for Sukkot or Purim, and we don’t think it’s rude when they talk about mitzvahs or make us Hanukkah cards. We like it. Besides, Jesus was Jewish, so why can’t we tell them about him?”

  To this we answer that people wh
o said they were Christians used to be horrible to Jews, and lots of Jews are still really sad about it. God’s really sad about it too,we say, and the best thing we can do for now is just be good friends and let him take care of everybody and fix the bad stuff, because he’s the only one who understands how. It’s not sophisticated, I know, and there are holes in it. But after all, we’re talking about seven-year-olds here, and for the moment, it will do.

  I am largely in the dark on a subject I am intensely curious about: what my Orthodox friends know and understand and think about Christianity and what they say to their children about us. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d imagine they say what I’d say to my children if the nice family down the block were Mormons. I’d say,“They’re great kids, and I’m really glad you’re friends. You’ve probably noticed that they go to kind of a funny Church and they have some odd ideas about God. If they tell you stories about an angel called Moroni or somebody called Joseph Smith and some tablets, you can just tell them that we’re Catholic and we don’t believe in that. Don’t argue with them; it’s really important to them and we don’t want to hurt their feelings, but just between us, it’s pretty silly.”

  That’s just a guess. Maybe they say nothing of the sort. But Christians do, in one sense, stand in the same relation to Jews as Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses stand in relation to traditional Christianity. From the point of view of the older religion, in each case, the younger looks like a strange twist that, for some reason, seized the imagination of a group of followers, took on a life of its own, and became a whole new religion, while claiming to be the legitimate fulfillment of the parent religion. Mormons think of themselves as Christians, but most Christians don’t feel obliged to take Mormonism particularly seriously. In the same way, Christians can never forget or turn their backs on Judaism; in fact, we call the Church “the new Israel.” But at this point in history it would be foolish to expect Jews to take seriously our claim to be children of Abraham just like them. So I don’t. (Of course, the analogy is thrown off by the fact that Mormons don’t outnumber Christians by more than a hundred to one. If they did, I am sure I would not take kindly to their knocking on the door trying to convert the few of us still stubbornly keeping the faith. As it is, I always invite them in.)