Community and Society
Welcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today. What are the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century? Every other week you will find a new article here.
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How I Got Converted
By Janet
Kirchheimer
I was walking
home with my groceries on a muggy New York City evening in July when a Jew for Jesus tried
to hand me a brochure. It’s a common
occurrence during the summer. Lots of Jews
for Jesus giving out literature, trying to convert folks like me. Usually I walk right
past, but this time I stopped. I told the guy
I would take a brochure if he would come back to shul. He smiled and asked if he could talk to me.
So there I was
on 74th Street and Broadway talking with Brian about the New Testament. He asked me if I’d read it, and I told him
I’d read parts of it for a college class on religion.
He asked if I believed Jesus was a man and a Jew, and I told him yes. And then he
went on to describe how Jesus was the Messiah and asked if I believed it. I told him no, but that didn’t stop Brian
from continuing.
“Did you
know the rabbis changed Judaism after the Temple was destroyed?” he asked me. “Yes,” I responded. Apparently, he hadn’t heard of Rabbi Yitz
Greenberg, CLAL’s founder, who has been teaching for over 25 years that the rabbis
saved Judaism by changing it. Brian began to
talk about how the word of God is forever and that the rabbis had no right to change the
“Old Testament.” We went back and
forth about this for a while and about why I believed that the changes instituted by the
rabbis had saved Judaism.
Moving on,
Brian declared that Jesus was sent here by God to atone and die for people’s sins and
that only God could fix the world. Brian then
told me about the kind of world in which he wanted to live -- a world characterized by
God’s justice and perfection, a world in which a just and perfect God punished all
who were unjust and imperfect. “But
God’s justice is outweighed by God’s mercy.
That’s the Jewish understanding of God’s ways, and that’s the kind
of world I want to live in,” I told him. I
asked Brian whether he understood the kind of world he was choosing to live in, and he
said he did; and, as if to underscore his point, he told me, “Just look at the
Holocaust. Would God have punished the Jews
if they were perfect?”
Up to that
point, the conversation had been pretty casual with each of us staking out our territory,
but when Brian told me about the world of his dreams, the tone of the conversation
changed. It became serious. We talked a bit longer, and he assured me that we
weren’t very far apart in our thinking. But
it felt as if we were worlds apart, and then I left.
Afterwards, I
started thinking about Brian and the conversation, and all the things I wished I had said. He didn’t look older than 23 or so, and I
suppose I wanted to “save him.” I
wanted to tell him that he was choosing the wrong path, that the world was harsh enough
without his upping the ante. I wanted to tell
him about Rosh HaShanah and about the ten days of repentance before Yom Kippur; about how
being forgiven for your sins enables you to start over and about the prophet Isaiah who
says “though your sins are scarlet, they will be made white as snow”; about
Maimonides’ laws of teshuvah (repentance),
and about how in Judaism you are given a chance each day to start over.
I was also
struck by how, in the course of our discussion, it seemed that Brian and I had exchanged
roles. It was me, the Jew, not Brian the
Christian, who was going on about God’s love and mercy, while Brian was arguing for
what most Christians regard as the Jewish position -- for a God of justice.
Also, after a certain point, the conversation had become a bit too
personal. I am the daughter of Holocaust
survivors and have struggled all my life with the problem of theodicy, deeply perplexed
that God’s mercy didn’t save more of my family.
It’s something for which I know I won’t ever come up with an
answer. Trying to reconcile the Holocaust with God’s mercy has only led me into
theological mazes that I have been unable to find my way out of. It’s not an easy place to go, and I certainly
didn’t want to go there with Brian. But
I still believe in and wrestle with the God of mercy, even though there are times when I
am disappointed by God’s seemingly interminable silence.
And as I
thought about my encounter with Brian even more, I realized that I did get converted that
evening. I was trying to do to Brian what he
was trying to do to me. I had become a
proselytizer, but for the other side. I had
been taught that Jews don’t try to convert others and, before that evening, I’d
never gone any further than explaining my beliefs to my non-Jewish friends. While I admit that I enjoyed playing the
missionary for a few minutes, it lost its appeal very quickly.
But in the end
what intrigues me most, even today, about a shopping trip that turned into a conversation
with a Jew for Jesus about God’s mercy is that we can never know what effect our
words will have on others. While I know that
Brian’s words didn’t really convert me, his words certainly did have an effect
on me, and I wonder if my words had any effect on him.
Who knows, but maybe one of these days I’ll see Brian at shul.
To view other articles by Janet Kirchheimer, click here.
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