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| Research at the Saul Brodsky Library in St. Louis |
When Rabbi Barry
Friedman told my cohort at Aquinas Institute of Theology that he wanted us to
take our “Christian lenses” off for our upcoming Hebrew Scriptures class and
put “Jewish lenses” on instead, I was quietly cavalier. “Not a problem,” I thought: I’m a child of Vatican II, I was born 20
years after the Catholic Church stopped calling for the eventual conversion of
the Jewish people, and I grew up watching Fiddler on the Roof, so Jewish lenses were probably much like the
ones I already had—piece of cake.
However, as you’ve probably heard, “Pride goes before ruin, arrogance,
before failure.”[1] Life, fate, Karma, the Divine, or whatever it
might be called (depending on your lenses) probably had a good chuckle, when, a
few weeks later, I saw our local rabbi in a coffee shop and told him excitedly
that I was taking Old Testament this
semester for my masters program. My
faced flushed three shades of red, as I mentally kicked myself. How could I have possibly made such a gaffe
the same day I’d read in our text book, How
to Read the Jewish Bible, “Jews . . . view the original covenant as still
operative. For this reason, Jews have
tended to reject the term ‘Old Testament’”?[2]
Perhaps my
Christian lenses were glued on a little tighter than I was willing to
admit. And this makes sense. Brains are funny and stubborn organs, whose
pathways are littered with deeply entrenched imagery. And so as soon as my cradle-Catholic imagination
hears, “The Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah and Jonah remained in
the fish’s belly for three days and three nights,”[3]
I’m not immediately taken by the fact that the text never mentions “a whale,”
instead I’m reeling with the foreshadowing of Jesus’ time in the tomb (three
days and three nights) with Jonah’s sojourn in the fish. This is one of the first courses I’ve ever
taken where I grew used to immediately distrusting my first impression, because
it was undoubtedly coming from the Christian lenses I wear everyday and not the
Jewish lenses I had agreed to wear for the duration of our course.
When Rabbi Friedman
first spoke of taking off our Christian lenses a few months before our course
with him commenced, he was careful to point out that he wasn’t asking for us to
remove them because they were bad or faulty.
No, we were being asked to put them aside so as to fully enter into the
Bible, the Tanakh, in a new way, one
that didn’t read back into the sacred scriptures what our Christian reading of
the Gospels and Epistles had told us about these texts. And this question became a challenge and a
puzzle for me and my cohort-mates: Could
we really read the second and third chapters of Genesis and not let centuries
and centuries of Christian connections in liturgy, Tradition and scripture
between Adam and Jesus, Eve and the Church, the Tree of the knowledge of Good
and Evil and the wood of the cross, not affect our interpretation of it? Could we delve into the Passover without
thinking of the Last Supper?
Rabbi Friedman’s
invitation to don Jewish lenses did not erase our (Christian) knowledge or
understanding of the world, but it did allow us a way to challenge our own
preconceived ideas in a safe and constructive way. I think some religious leaders and lay people
of all religions, would question this approach.
Is it really wise and worthwhile to ask a group of devout believers of
any religious denomination to set aside their most precious religious belief
(in our case, Jesus as the climax of God’s self-revelation to humanity), in
order to look at the world from the viewpoint of a religion that does not
subscribe to it?
Yes, I think it
is wise. More than that though, I think
it is necessary. Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel, an advisor to the Second Vatican Council, told the assembled cardinals
when he heard that the first draft of Nostra
Aetate (Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian
Religions) still called for the eventual conversion of the Jews: “I would rather go to Auschwitz than give up
my faith.”[4] The call for conversion was removed and the
final document encouraged Jews and Christians to engage in “biblical and
theological enquiry” in a spirit of “mutual understanding and appreciation.”[5] And this call for collegiality in theological
and biblical inquiry is what I experienced firsthand this past semester. It is an experience that I want to take
forward in my vocation as a catechist in the Catholic Church.
Every week,
throughout the school year, I have the privilege of reading the sacred
scriptures in the Atrium with 9 to 12 year-old children. Their brains are expanding at an astounding
rate, and often I think I can’t keep up with the connections and revelations
that come out of our shared Bible study.
In my work with the children, I hope to model what I’ve learned from
Rabbi Friedman this semester—to trust the questions that are asked, to know
that it is “possible to disagree without being disagreeable,” and to promote
the awareness of the lenses we wear, and the wisdom to be gained from taking
them off from time-to-time.
Michael S.
Kogan, a Jewish scholar of Christianity, proclaims in his book, Opening the Covenant:
We
[Jews and Christians] cannot assume that we posses all truth. Where our understanding is weak, the other’s
may be strong, and vice versa. We really
do have much to teach each other. Such
mutual learning is one of the blessings of the Jewish-Christian dialogue. It forces us to delve into our own tradition
while simultaneously investigating the other’s wisdom. The ultimate purpose is for Jews to be become
better Jews and for Christians to become better Christians and for both to
become better and wiser human beings.[6]
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| Our CGS Cohort this Fall in St. Louis with Rabbi Friedman |
Thank you, Rabbi
Friedman, for the opportunity to look at the scriptures through Jewish lenses,
and in so doing become a better Christian.
[1] Proverbs 16:18
[2] Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Jewish Bible (Oxford: University Press, 2005),
8.
[3] Jonah 2:1
[4] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Essential Writings (Maryknoll:
Orbis Books, 2012), 33.
[5] Nostra Aetate, #4.
[6] Michael S. Kogan, Opening
the Covenant: A Jewish Theology of Christianity (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 32.
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