The Lord Our God Is One

Several years ago, I joined about 50 evangelical Christian youth in Israel for a six-week study tour with the Institute of the Holy Land Studies, now renamed Jerusalem University College. Day after day we immersed ourselves in Hebrew history—charting ancient Israel’s battles with the Philistines on overhead maps, learning and reciting the Jewish Shema (Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one), visiting biblical sites with our instructor. We moseyed through Jewish shops along the main drag of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, picking up Jewish prayers shawls or necklaces with Hebrew characters. We exchanged greetings of “Shabbat Shalom” with Jews at the Wailing Wall (the remains of the Temple Mount’s western border), and the men in our group donned kippot (Jewish skullcaps) to offer written prayers in the wall’s crevices.

When our classes came to an end, nearly everyone agreed that the experience had revolutionized the way we read Scripture (a rather typical response for Christians who’ve traveled to Israel). Place names no longer appeared alien to us, we better understood the symbolism hidden in difficult biblical passages, and overall, we evangelicals felt we’d reconnected with the Bible’s Jewish character.

Or had we? Never once did we worship in or even visit a synagogue (if you don’t count wandering around 2,000-year-old ruins). We never stayed with any Jewish hosts, never attended any Jewish festivals or celebrated Jewish holidays, never even took Hebrew 101 or visited any sites with Jewish guides. We were there as a Christian group who studied under Christian professors, read Christian commentaries on biblical archaeology, and attended Christian services—some of them Palestinian.

Not so with Mary Blye Howe. When it comes to rediscovering Jewish roots, this Southern Baptist belle has gone the distance. In her debut book, A Baptist Among the Jews, she writes, “I had read all my life of ancient Jewish rituals and lifestyles, but now I began to realize how uninformed most Christians are of Jewish ritual and tradition.” So over the next few years, Howe set out to visit and worship in synagogues of nearly every Jewish persuasion all over metropolitan Dallas—from liberal Reform to “in-between” Conservative to mystical, orthodox Hasidic. Her investigation was so comprehensive and free-ranging that Jewish Rabbi Lawrence Kushner gave his full blessing to the book.

Howe’s enthusiasm and love for Jewish ritual, study, worship and community is contagious. Her descriptions of Jewish worship and study of the Torah build a picture of a people deeply in love with God. “In Jewish hands, Scripture vibrated and pulsed into life,” she writes. “I felt the passion of the Hebrew God in a fresh way, heard the cry of the prophets with a new force.” Later on she describes ecstatic worship with the Jews as they dance in the synagogue with the Torah scroll. “The Jews speak in hushed whispers, in rousing discussions, in upthrown hands of perplexity and resignation at all there is yet to discover. They pray as though they can bring God crashing through the roof of the synagogue.”

But what about that charge Christians often bring against Jewish legalism? Isn’t it true that most evangelical Christians view their faith in terms of relationship and God’s grace, while Jews understand God as law-giver and judge? That’s too simplistic, Howe argues: “The purpose of Talmud (Judaism’s oral law) wasn’t to put endless nooses of law around the Jewish neck but to protect the defenseless, to ensure that people were treated with respect.” Jews indeed experience God personally through their religious observances. She observes that Christians are plenty thirsty for vigorous spiritual disciplines—perhaps Christians realize they need a bit more law in their experience of grace.

As I read Howe, I wonder just where her spiritual journey is taking her. In her concluding chapter, she admits to coming close to changing her religion. “Judaism fulfills so many needs in me and so utterly fascinates me that it’s often agonizing to me to love it so much without being a complete part of it.” She devotes an entire chapter to interfaith relations, optimistic that Christians are now “reassessing their view of exclusivity.” Does Howe no longer believe in the exclusive claims of Jesus for salvation? Has her immersion in Judaism extinguished (or at least tempered) her passion for Jesus? I, for one, found little in her book to suggest she had anything significant to say to the Jewish community about Jesus.

Enter Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath. In her earlier Girl Meets God, Winner follows quite a different road from Howe, beginning with Reform Judaism, converting to Jewish Orthodoxy, then converting to Christianity, where she’s settled into the Episcopal church. Winner’s in love with Jesus and has no inclination to return to Judaism. But in Mudhouse Sabbath, she remembers wistfully the rhythm of Jewish life and the values of Jewish community: “This is a book about those things I miss. It is about Sabbaths and weddings and burials and prayers, rituals Jews and Christians both observe, but also rituals we observe quite differently. … It is, to be blunt, about spiritual practices Jews do better.”

That might depend on which Christians Winner is comparing Jews to. One could argue that Eastern Orthodox or Catholic religious orders do a much better job observing spiritual disciplines than your typical Protestant. But Winner’s observations are compelling—she notes, for example, that God intended his people to honor him by resting on the Sabbath; if Western Christians observe the Sabbath at all, they usually treat it like a day off. Or take God’s command in Scripture to show hospitality to strangers. We ought to not only “invite people into our homes, but also to invite them into our lives,” no matter how small our living space may be.

By its very nature, Mudhouse Sabbath is a book bound up with questions of law and grace. For example, how often does God expect Christians to fast? “Fasting was a central discipline to the early church and on through the Middle Ages,” she notes, “but people fell away from fasting after the Reformation.” And should rote liturgical prayer have a place in her spiritual discipline? “I have sometimes set aside my prayer book for days and weeks on end, and I find, at the end of those days and weeks on end, that I have lapsed into narcissism.”

One of Winner’s most interesting chapters is her description of Jewish wedding celebrations. “I love the solemn dignity of Christian weddings,” she writes, “but Jewish weddings are wonderful in their overt, undeniable joy.” In her opinion,

Jewish marriage strikes the right balance between the couple’s privacy and the obligations to community—newlyweds may consummate the marriage right after the ceremony but then are expected to abstain from sex for the first seven nights, partying instead with friends and family. That’s not to say Winner doesn’t appreciate Christian marriage—she prefers the covenantal emphasis in Christian marriages over the contractual arrangement of Jewish ones.

Athol Dickson’s The Gospel According to Moses adds a whole new spin to this Christian-Jewish relationship. Like Howe, Dickson enters Jewish study and community at “Chever Torah” with fervor and energy, discovering afresh that “decidedly Jewish pastime: wrestling with God.” No discussion or idea is off limits; as their teacher put it, “How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?” One classmate, for example, suggests that God may be limited. Dickson resists that at first, then allows that God may indeed be limited of his own free will.

But unlike Howe, Dickson fills his pages wrestling with what he’s learning at Chever Torah. “Rabbinic Judaism teaches that human evil is caused by something called the yetzer ha-ra, or ‘evil impulse,’ and human goodness is the result of a ‘good impulse,’ or the yezter tov.” Thus there’s no need to believe in original sin. But Dickson doesn’t buy it. He notes, for instance, that Genesis 5 has Adam passing on his sinful state to Seth. “If Judaism is right and Seth was indeed born with a particularly neutral soul like Adam, it seems to me a just and righteous God should have given Seth (and me) a fresh start in the Garden.”

Dickson also hazards an exercise that his Jewish friends would surely disapprove of. He looks for signs of the Trinity in the Hebrew Bible—three mentions of God’s name in the Shema, God speaking as “we,” etc. Noting paradoxes throughout the Old Testament (an omnipresent God “occupying” the Temple, the promise of Israel’s descendants channeled through barren women), Dickson points out just how illogical God is—or better put, how beyond logic he is. “I should expect mere logic to be unequal to the task of understanding the eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnipresent Creator of the Universe,” he writes. “Christianity does not teach the Trinity because it is logical. (We are not such fools as that.) We teach God in three persons because we believe that is what the Bible seems to say.” (Note the hint of dissent there; some of Dickson’s own speculations on the Trinity are not quite orthodox.)

But don’t be misled into thinking Dickson’s all about apologetics. He produces a wonderful chapter on anti-Semitism in the history of the church, cutting apart the common objection that no “true” Christian could have engaged in such hatred. Was Martin Luther no Christian, Dickson asks, when he wrote his infamous tract Against the Jews and Their Lives? “It seems clear that many Christians in the past have succumbed to the allure of this terrible evil,” he observes. “No doubt some have been wolves in sheep’s clothing, but others have been bloodthirsty sheep.” On the other hand, Christian anti-Semitism doesn’t negate the truth of Jesus’ claims. “If the crimes of the church throughout the centuries were proof that Jesus’ teachings are untrue, then the repeated failure of Israel to keep of all of God’s commands would also show the Torah for a lie. But of course, the Torah should not be judged on the behavior of Jews, just as Jesus should not be judged on the conduct of Christians.”

So what has Dickson taken away from his studies at Chever Torah? “Strange as it may seem,” he writes, “the Jewish perspective of Chever Torah had given me a richer, more solid foundation for my own faith.” That’s a perspective evangelicals who’ve had any contact with Judaism or Israel can resonate with.

Steven Gertz is assistant editor at Christian History & Biography.