Common Prayers Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year Trade cloth - 2001

Details

• Title Common Prayers Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year
• Author Cox, Harvey
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 305
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date September 20, 2001
• ISBN 9780618067435

Introduction

For my house shall be called A house of prayer for all peoples.
-- Isaiah 56:7

In keeping with the vision of their prophets, the builders of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem designed it to be a house of prayer for all peoples. There was an inner area where only Jews were admitted. Here stood the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest was permitted to enter, and that only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. There was also a section explicitly named “the Court of the Gentiles.” Throughout the ancient world, many gentiles worshiped with Jews without ever converting to Judaism. The Jews welcomed them as “God-fearers,” and their presence in the Temple reflected the age- old Jewish hope that one day all nations and peoples, including “strangers and sojourners,” would join in praise of the One who created them all.
The word “gentile” is not synonymous with the word “Christian.” Our English “gentile” is derived from the Latin term for “nation,” and in Jewish usage it means anyone who is not a Jew. (I sometimes enjoy informing my Jewish friends that among Mormons, “gentile” refers to anyone who is not a Mormon, including Jews.) Of course, the distinction between gentile and Christian meant nothing during the years of Herod’s temple, since the newborn Christian movement was still a sect, among many others, within Judaism. But this changed after 70 C.E. when, during the reign of the emperor Titus, the Roman legions razed the Temple and expelled the Jews, including those Jews who were followers of Jesus, from Jerusalem. It was only after that catastrophe that the division between what we now call Judaism and Christianity began to set in. Decades passed before it became a complete rupture.
Today, only the famous Western Wall of the Temple remains. But I sometimes think of myself as one of those strangers or “sojourners” mentioned by the Jewish prophets. For a decade and a half, in addition to following my own spiritual tradition as a Protestant Christian, I have also lived and prayed with Jews. I have a special reason for doing so. Fifteen years ago I married a Jewish woman. Nina had been raised in a family of largely nonobservant Jews in New York City. As a teenager, partially (she now concedes) in a display of adolescent rebellion, she began attending activities at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. But when she left home for college and graduate school, she also became nonobservant. Later in life, however, after some painful personal experiences, she began to reclaim her Jewish heritage. She was still engaged in this quest when we met. Today her Jewish faith is deeply, and increasingly, important to her.
I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania. My own parents were quite casual about churchgoing, but they dutifully dispatched my two brothers, my sister, and myself to the Baptist Sunday school next door. My grandparents attended it also but were not at all what I would call devout. Our family never said grace before meals, and as children we were never taught to say prayers before bedtime as some of our friends were. Nonetheless, as I grew older I became more involved in the church, first through the youth group and choir. I joined the church at thirteen; by then I was already fascinated with reading books about religion and theology. When I left for college I had decided I wanted to explore these fields further, perhaps even to become a minister. My parents did not disapprove but were somewhat less than enraptured. They advised, quite rightly, that a career in accounting would yield more financial security. As the decades passed, however, they reconciled themselves and eventually even seemed pleased with the direction my life had taken.
When Nina and I met we were both professors, she at Wellesley and I at Harvard. We had each suffered through the dissolution of a marriage and were slowly mending. I had three children, all grown. She had none. We had been introduced by mutual friends who thought we were well suited to each other, and we soon discovered we were. We recognized right away, of course, that our different religious paths constituted a factor we could not ignore. This led to many spirited discussions which made it clear that neither of us wanted either to convert to the other’s faith or to find some in-between solution. Finally we both decided to stay what we were, to try to learn as much as we could about the other’s religion, and to honor it and participate in it as far as our convictions would permit.
We have one child, Nicholas, who at the time of this writing is fourteen. We both agreed, before he was born, that we wanted him to grow up with some spiritual anchorage. But we also agreeed that trying to raise a child in two religious traditions is almost always confusing and counterproductive. I am altogether satisfied with the deciiiiision we made. Since I recognize that Jews consider the child of a Jewish mother to be Jewish, that is the faith in which we are both nurturing Nicholas. We had also agreed, however, that this would not mean that I would delegate his spiritual tutelage to her. We have both shared in the process, and some of what the reader will find in this book consists of what I have learned in the fifteen years of study I have undertaken in order to equip myself to appreciate my wife’s faith and to do my part in the guidance of our son. For me, indeed for all of us, it has been an intensely satisfying experience.
But most of what I have learned about Judaism during these years has not come from books. As anyone who knows how central family life is to Jews will recognize, our marriage entwined me in a maze of aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins. As one of the family, I have been able to get a close-up of the Jewish world. It is important to me that the Judaism I have discovered is not quite the same as the one I have read about in historical accounts and theological works. It is a hands-on week-by-week and year-by-year Judaism of songs and scents and ups and downs, with both its comeliness and its homeliness clearly on display. Still, as a Christian, I experience Judaism from the perspective of a kind of metaphorical Court of the Gentiles, not as a complete outsider, but not as a full insider either.
Interfaith marriage is hardly unusual nowadays. Every year in America more Jews marry gentiles than marry each other. Despite the efforts of rabbis, priests, ministers, and, often, of parents and friends, the number of such marriages shows no sign of abating. We husbands of Jewish wives are hardly a homogenous group. We are old and young, rich and poor, and in-between. We encompass journalists, policemen, computer engineers, psychiatrists, disc jockeys, and a hundred other professions. Some of us are religious, some are not. Very few of our number are what I am, a Christian theologian, and I realize that this makes our marriage quite unusual (but, then, are not all marriages in some sense sui generis?). We non-Jews who marry Jews, though we may be a mixed company, inevitably get an intensely intimate view of Judaism. This book is a kind of distillation of what I have learned, during fifteen years of marriage, about Judaism, about my own faith, and about myself.
I have at least four reasons for writing this book. First, I want to help my fellow Christians, especially those who might be curious but puzzled about Judaism, to understand it better. Naturally I would hope that anyone with a serious interest in Judaism would read primarily books by Jewish scholars. But in addition, these reflections, written from my perspective of the Court of the Gentiles, might be a helpful supplement for non-Jewish readers, if only because my angle of vision is closer to theirs. As the husband of a Jewish woman I have learned a lot, maybe even more than I originally bargained for, about her tradition. I have now imbibed fifteen years of Jewish holidays, Sabbaths, rituals, Torah studies, klezmer music, prayers, family gatherings, jokes, gossip, and gefilte fish. After several embarrassing faux pas, I now know the difference between mishugonah and mishpochah (an important distinction: the first means “berserk” and the second refers to family), and between kvetching and kvelling (an even more important one: the first means “complaining” and the second means “taking pride in your children”). More seriously, I have fasted on Yom Kippur, shivered at the blast of the shofar, sat shivah (the seven days of mourning) when relatives have died, drunk the Sabbath wine on Friday evenings, and prayed at the Wall in Jerusalem. In short, I write from what I regard as a highly privileged position. I am a participant who is also in some measure an observer; an observer who is also a participant.
I remain, of course, a sojourner in the Court of the Gentiles. My perspective is not that of a full-fledged landsman. It never will be. But neither is it that of a coldly objective analyst. The prayers I pray when I am among Jews are Jewish prayers, but I have learned how to make them my own as well. I have come to share some of the same delights, hopes, and frustrations about Judaism that many Jews do, though I feel them -- as it were -- in a different key. My knowledge of this ancient and complex tradition will never be more than that of a novice. But my unusual position as a Christian theologian who has taken an active part in Jewish life for a decade and a half enables me to draw some comparisons and contrasts most rabbis, priests, and ministers would not be able to make. For this reason, I hope this book can also serve, to quote the great Jewish sage Maimonides, as a kind of “guide for the perplexed” -- in this case, perplexed gentiles.
My second purpose for the book is more personal. I want to explain how I have come to understand my own Christian faith better because of my marriage to a Jewish woman and my participation in the life of her faith community. Christians sometimes say that we need to understand Judaism because, after all, our religion is “rooted in the faith of ancient Israel.” This is true as far as it goes. But what it overlooks is that there have been nearly two thousand years of Jewish history since Christianity came to birth. Little by little I have become quite uneasy with the “roots” metaphor. Thinking of Judaism in this way consigns it to the past. It makes living Judaism invisible. After all, we do not see the roots of a tree. They are hidden underground while the leaves blossom and the fruit ripens in full view. The roots analogy may even inadvertently contribute to the mistaken idea that Christianity has somehow superseded Judaism, a notion I completely reject. I want to understand Judaism, not just because of what it was, but because of what it is. Judaism is the tradition that sustains fourteen million human beings (many of them, it would seem, my relatives). And it is also a luxuriant repository of a spiritual wisdom available to anyone.
But Christians also have a special reason for understanding Judaism. Someone once defined Christians as gentiles who worship the God of Israel. I think this is correct, and therefore I also reject the dangerously deluded idea -- still harbored by some Christians -- that the two religions worship a different God. The fallacious platitude that the Jewish God is one of legalism and vengeance while the Christian one is a God of grace and love is both historically and theologically insupportable. It is the product of ignorance, not only of the Bible itself, but of the subsequent history of the two faiths, and results in a warped picture of both. I will return to this later because I am convinced that appreciating Judaism, both its history and its present manifestation, is essential to a full understanding of Christianity. It lends depth and resonance to all the ideas that are central to my faith: how I understand the nature of God, the purpose of human life, the significance of Jesus, and the meaning of faith.
I have a third purpose for writing these pages. I want to question the idea that a Jewish-Christian marriage necessarily dilutes the substance of either or both spouses’ faiths. The fact is that Nina and I have come to the opposite conclusion. We have no way of knowing what might have happened in our separate faith journeys if we had never met or married. Still, I think I am probably a better Christian and she believes she may be a better Jew not in spite of but because of our marriage. We both recognize that making any marriage work is a difficult and demanding enterprise and that marrying a person of another faith does not make it any easier. But we have also come to believe that a mixed marriage can be a spiritual venture that sharpens and strengthens the faith of each partner. We think we have found some ways to help this maturation happen and to steer around the hazards that often assail marriages like ours. Both the Jew and the Christian who make this decision quickly discover -- if they had not noticed before -- that such a marriage is not just interfaith. It also entails the complicated cluster of ethnic and cultural qualities that make Jews different from Christians. But we believe these can make such marriages both more daunting and more satisfying. We hope this book can provide some hints for other couples who are either already involved in a religiously mixed marriage or may be contemplating one.1 Finally, I also hope that Jewish readers will profit from reading about my experience of their religion. To “see ourselves as others see us” can often help us to see ourselves in a new light. I have gained fresh insights into my own tradition by reading comments and reflections about it, and even criticisms, made by thoughtful non- Christians.2 Sometimes what they say at first seems annoying, but it always makes me think. Discovering what there is in my own tradition that seems attractive or strange or opaque to someone who tries seriously to comprehend it from the outside often enables me to appreciate it in a new way. Today many more people are learning things about their own religions from the affectionate close observations of friends and spouses, and this has been a positive development. If, in perusing this book, Jewish readers come to apprehend something about their faith they had not recognized before, I will be gratified.
Despite our many differences, we thousands of non-Jews -- men and women -- who have married Jews have something important in common. But for some reason we do not talk to one another about it much. We are members of a club that never meets. Is it because talking openly about how we handle both the problems and the opportunities of such marriages is still a bit taboo? I don’t know. But I do not believe marriages like ours need to be veiled in secrecy.
I write, of course, in my own voice, as the Christian husband of a Jewish wife. Nina and I have discussed all the questions I write about here at length, and the book has emerged from these conversations. But the perspective must necessarily be my own. No husband or wife in any marriage, whether mixed or not, has identical interpretations of the marriage. Also, it is vital to remember that I write not just as the non-Jewish spouse but as the man and the father. I can imagine that a book by the Christian wife of a Jewish husband would be quite different. Still, I believe that my own voice makes the book more valuable. I am not writing about a consensus already achieved but about an expedition that is still under way. Telling the story from my own point of view has allowed me to be more frank about those issues in our particular interfaith marriage, and there are some, that still remain to be sorted out.
My pilgrimage through Judaism is arranged here as a journey through the Jewish year, from one Rosh ha-Shanah -- New Year’s Day -- to the next. Although this may puzzle some Christian readers, who might first want to know what Jews believe, it will come as no surprise to Jews. The first thing a Christian spouse notices about Judaism is that it is not about creed, it is about calendar. The backbone of Jewish faith is of course Torah, the written and oral law. But for most Jews the way Torah manifests itself is not with a set of beliefs. It is through a recurring series of holy days and sacred seasons. What binds Jews is not a confessional statement like the Apostles’ Creed. It is the sounding of the shofar, the lighting of the menorah, the same four questions posed by the youngest child year after year at the Seder. It is the annual return of Rosh ha- Shanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover, and the weekly arrival of the Sabbath. Most Jews sense that the holidays carry an especially intense spiritual quality, and I have noticed that this calendrical core still seems to hold for those Jews who may not observe the holidays strictly or at all.
But life itself does not always unfold according to a calendar. Births, marriages, deaths, and once-in-a-lifetime events add another dimension. Therefore I have included in this Christian pilgrim’s progress through the Jewish year an occasional exception -- for funerals, a bar mitzvah, and trips to Israel, all hugely important to Jews. I have also added a chapter on our wedding and have described how being married to a Jewish woman, and the father of a Jewish son, has deepened my understanding of the two most important Christian seasons, Christmas and Holy Week.
One of the last great rabbis in the Polish Hasidic tradition died in 1905. A mystic and a scholar, he was known to his followers as the Sefat Emet, which means “the language of truth.” He once wrote that it is during the festivals that the “inner life-force of God that exists in all creatures is revealed.” Even though the Bible teaches that “the whole earth is filled with God’s glory,” he recognized that “in this world God remains hidden, but on the festivals, God is revealed.” Commenting on this passage, Rabbi Arthur Green, a respected student of the Jewish mystical tradition, writes, “The festival is a time of inner light, a moment of special opportunity . . . such special moments are rare gifts in the spiritual quest, special opportunities that the seeker dares not allow to pass by.”3 My hope is that some small part of this light will filter through to the reader who follows one grateful sojourner’s trek through the festivals of a Jewish year.

Copyright © 2001 by Harvey Cox. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

"Warmth, humor, and first-rate scholarship ...[for] those considering intermarraige, and those... who simply would like to learn more about Judaism."--Kirkus Reviews Kirkus Reviews

"An illumination and a challenge, COMMON PRAYERS is a masterpiece of inter-religious meditation....[A] new phase of Jewish-Christian understanding."--James Carroll, author of CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: The Church and the Jews

"What a wonderful book. Every Jew and Christian facing the possibility that a family member will intermarry--which means virtually everyone--must read Harvey Cox's memoir-journey-analysis of what it means to be a committed Christian married to a committed Jew raising a Jewish child....[H]e insists that the children of every Jewish-Christian intermarraige must be raised as Jews. This is truly a book for the future. It helps to define what the relationship between Jews and Christians must become as we increasingly become members of the same family."--Alan Dershowitz, author of SUPREME INJUSTICE: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000

"Can two traditions be fully and equally honored in their distinct differences, and that in a manner that both partners find enriching the life of their family? In this book Harvey Cox affirms that possibility, and it takes a theologian to do so both in a personal and a convincing way. For thinking about God is not a zero sum game."--Bishop Krister Stendahl, former dean Harvard Divinity School

"Cox has taken a closer and more sympathetic look at Judaism as actually lived than any other non-Jewish writer ever."--Rabbi Arthur Green, Brandeis University

"Accessible and engaging, Cox blends stories of his personal journey with humor and a scholar's insight." The Los Angeles Times