I visited a friend’s synagogue this Saturday. She was delivering the Jewish equivalent of a sermon as part of the service that morning, and she invited me to attend. I’m glad I did. I had never participated in a Jewish religious service before, and it was an eye-opening experience for me as a Christian to be in the midst of the people from whom my Messiah emerged.
Before I say more, I feel I need to acknowledge that I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to modern Judaism. Like many Christians, I’ve read the Old Testament – the Torah, Writings and Prophets – as an integral part of my Christian faith, but my tradition has radically reinterpreted the ancient Hebrew scriptures. To read the Torah as a practitioner of Judaism must be a very different thing from my own experience of the text as a follower of Jesus Messiah.
That being said, from my perspective as a Christian, attending this Jewish service made me feel in touch with the Old Testament heritage in an entirely different way than I had experienced before. In a Christian context, we talk about Israel all the time, but we generally mean it in a universal, spiritual sense. For Christians, Israel is the historical and present-day community of those who have put their trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Since the coming of Messiah Jesus, the concept of Israel has been expanded to include all people, regardless of ethnic background, who place their trust in Jesus and live in the power of his resurrection.
For those gathered for worship at the synagogue this weekend, the idea of Israel seemed much more specific. When they prayed for Israel, they seemed to be praying for the ethnically/religiously Jewish people in diaspora and for the modern-day state of Israel. The service included a prayer thanking God for “making me a Jew.” I took this prayer as literal, as in, “thank you, God, for creating me as a member of this holy ethnic group.” This is a far cry from the spiritualized conceptions that I as a Christian have about what Israel means.
This is challenging for me. The Christian tradition emphasizes the universal, multi-ethnic gospel – a revolutionary message that invites people from all languages, cultures and ethnicities to participate as members of the same body in Messiah. As a Quaker, I belong to a subset of Christianity that especially emphasizes the universal saving light of Jesus, God’s power to draw people from any background into the spiritual Israel. For me as a Christian, and especially as a Quaker, it is the living presence of Jesus Messiah within each person, not cultural/ethnic/religious heritage, that makes positive transformation possible.
My very brief encounter with Judaism leads me to wonder what role historical, cultural and ethnic specificity has to play in God’s plan of cosmic redemption. Does God want to act through specific ethnic groups, traditions and nations in particular ways? Do the Jewish people have a different calling in Messiah than, say, the Osage, Welsh or Bantu? What is the value of emphasizing a particular ethnic heritage in our religious life? What are the dangers?
This is all very alive to me right now, since I am increasingly aware of the extent to which Quakerism is itself an ethnic heritage. Jews have been around a lot longer than Quakers, yet Friends take part in many of the same culturally-specific religious practices that Jews do. We retell the stories of our history. We remind ourselves why we do things differently from the peoples around us. We rehearse again and again God’s special purpose for us as a community, a faithful remnant in a world that is often hostile to the witness that God has called us to uphold.
Is there value in preserving the ethnic community of Quakerism? Is there something specific that God wants to do through us that would not be possible if we were simply absorbed into the wider culture? Can we embrace this ethnic specificity while at the same time being radically open to those around us? How can we as Quakers invite others to experience the good news of Jesus without letting Quakerism present a stumbling block? Is it possible to be both a peculiar people as well as an open, inclusive, invitational one?
It feels like there must be a balance in here somewhere. Through the experience of the Hebrew people, culminating in Jesus, we have seen that God loves to use very specific and particular people and communities to bless the world. How can we as Friends be a blessing, neither renouncing the unique heritage that God has given us, nor clinging so tightly to our ways that we fail to allow the whole world to be blessed through us?
As someone who didn’t grow up a Friend the “ethnic community” has been both a source of blessing and frustration for me.
On one hand, the love Quaker’s have for their history and beliefs are what first drew me to them. When I looked for a peace church or for Christians that had acted as abolitionists, the “ethnic community” of Quakers helped me to find a home among Friends.
But at the same time I get tired of people meeting me at Mid-America Yearly Meeting and having them spend minutes trying to place my name. I want to urge Evangelical Friends to return to some of the things that make them unique, but it is hard for me to have a voice because I don’t have a Quaker name and haven’t been around for the transition.
The P’nai Or synagogue in Philadelphia is a good place; our Pendle Hill
‘synoptic gospels’ class was invited there once — And while several of
our group got nothing, several others were weeping with the intensity of
the experience. One rather skeptical classmate was overwhelmed in a way
that she was reluctant to speak of for some time — but when she did
talk about her experience, said that she’d felt that ‘Jesus’ was somehow
involved in it. (Anne & I simply returned whenever we could, for
the remainder of our time at Pendle Hill.)
While I never felt I
was in any sense Jewish, praising God in (simplified) Hebrew chants felt
very right; and anyone willing to participate in that was welcome. The
Torah study, before the main services, appealed more to me — because
this group seemed extremely open to whatever interpretations the Spirit
might lead them to, so that the same text they’d been reading each year
could suddenly take on a whole new light. (Not all synagogues, and few
churches, seem to read the Bible in quite that way, but it’s marvelous
when it happens.)
While my own reading of the Bible tells me
clearly that human knowledge of and acquaintance with God has always
been ‘incomplete’, a developing courtship rather than a collection of
‘systematic knowledge’ — If this book has an overall theme, it is
saying that God has approached the human race to a great extent through
the Jews, with the intention of using them (& particularly a certain
Jew named ‘Jesus’) to introduce God to the rest of us. This
relationship seems not to have gone precisely the way that any human
involved expected; so it seems pointless to figure out precisely what
role any person, or any people, is destined to play in future. But
having multiple ways to look at scriptural passages, well, is like being
binocular: Sometimes one sees more depth that way.
I myself have
so far found Alan Lew, a Zen-trained Conservative rabbi, the best of
many rich sources of insights from rabbinic Judaism… _One God
Clapping_, his autobiography, being a good book to try first…
The question that speaks most profoundly to me, true Friend, regarding the Israelites and their journey to the Promised Land(present-day Syria), is why Moses was prevented from entering it? In short, and not supported by Zionist propagation, “The Prophet” was not to settle for anything but his reward/relief in heaven. Whether primitive Christianity, with Paul’s missionary journeys, or Quakerism, with Fox’s trips to West Indies and America, prophets are not to settle for anything(ethnic, territorial, or even religious-heritage) but the everlasting reward for propagating the Good News.
“Is there something specific that God wants to do through us that would not be possible if we were simply absorbed into the wider culture?”–I have a strong sense that the way of faithfulness does involve living an alternative to the wider culture, to the culture of consumption. I keep struggling with the tension between living under the new covenant by reducing the harm done and the unfaithfulness expressed by my own life, and remaining open and intelligible to people from a variety of backgrounds. I see the danger of co-optation or of a We the Pure mentality, and I can usually tell afterward when I’ve fallen into either error.
So far my experience is that I share this awkward balance, this struggle for an open, rigorous, consistent and loving practice of faith, with some people from assorted traditions, and not necessarily with any one whole body.