On Being Hebrew And Christian

LINCOLN SQUARE SYNAGOGUE
On Being Hebrew And Christian
by Shlomoh Sherman

The author is an active congregant: this article has appeared in Massorah.

You are a teenager or a young adult. You are alienated from your background, from your family, and even from those peers who claim friendship with you and you with them. You are somewhat shy with girls and you have an active fantasy life. Although you have not been exposed to day-to-day religious life, you believe, in retrospect, that you have always had a "religious nature." You are able to remember back to your childhood to a time when your parents' Yiddish accent made you feel ashamed and embarrassed, to a time when you resented not being able to fully share in the Joy of your country's great winter festival, to a time when you felt the helplessness and powerlessness that only a child of a minority, excluded from the national mainstream, can feel. And then, one day, as a high school senior, a classmate of yours offers you a solution so simple and plausible as to allow to assuage your guilt in accepting it, a solution which will allow you to have your cake and eat it; hence a false solution.

Is the winter of 1953, a high school classmate, a junior missionary, offered me such a solution. Nearly twenty years before the advent of the phenomenon of Jesus freakery, I became a teenage Hebrew Christian

The argumentation appeared so perfect, yet so simple, to an unsophisticated young man. Was not Jesus a Jew? Were not his Immediate fallowers Jews - all Jews?

Did not all the Jewish prophets foretell his appearance on earth? I was shown in the hook of Isaiah's prophecies how the saviors of the world would be born to a Jewish virgin Bethlehem, and I was asked, and somewhat irate, that this had never been pointed out to me by any rabbi. I was thereupon told that the reason for this is that traditional Jews were incapable of correctly reading or interpreting the Bible since they did not have the clear vision necessary for this since they lacked the light of Christ. I was told that the only "true" Jews were those who had that light. I was further surprised to learn that there were "many" Jews who had accepted Jesus and that these "Christian-Jews were the vanguard of the chosen people who would ultimately recognize the error of having rejected their true messiah and that when the time of the gentiles had been fulfilled, these "Jews for Jesus" would take their rightful place as world's religious leaders. But most wonderful of all, I was told, was the fact that anyone who accepts Jesus as his messiah is assured of not going to hell when he dies.

After having "Stood up for Christ" I was told of the existence of a "church" where I would find others, Jews, who like myself had found their messiah, a mission on West 72nd Street called the Beth Sar Shalom. Each Sunday I would go there to pray and receive communion consisting of matzah and TREYF wine. As the time of the Jewish holidays approached, we were encouraged to participate in them, and their "true", that is, their Christological meaning as explained to us.

One strange thing about the Beth Sar Shalom. which I kept trying to push out of my mind all the while that I was attending meetings there, was that there were never more than one or two other Jews there, elderly and like myself, lonely . The others all appeared to be run-of-the-mill fundamentalist evangelical Christians, non-Jewish.

A year passed, then two. All the while, Jesus proved himself entirely incapable of freeing me from my existential loneliness. Moreover, he wasn't able to free me from the feeling that I was really allowing myself to be deluded by the belief that ane could be a Jew and a Christian simultaneously. In effect, preconsciously I began to realize that my "conversion" had been a failure. This was made salient when my Christian "friends" began to indicate that it was time for me to be baptized and join a "real" church. I ought to be spending time with other Christians, they said. Perhaps 1 could End a Christian girl with whom I could be serious. My young mind tried to follow these suggestions out to their last logical conclusions. The suggestions meant, in reality, a complete break with my past, abandoning old friends and family and suppression of my identity as a Jew. I saw now clearly, for the first time. It would have to be one or the other. The choice was Christianity or Jewishness. There was no other true alternative, never had been. At last the real light of Christ entered into my consciousness. The mirage of the "vanguard" dematerialized. In its place there appeared another vision illuminated so well by the glow cast by the light of Christ, that Christ who would no longer be the Jewish messiah but rather the god of the Christians, the god of the GOYIM, one of whom I would become, one of whom I would of necessity have to become. I became really frightened for the first time about this discovery of what being a Christian meant. The vision continued to unfold before me. I was becoming one of THEM! They who had murdered and maimed under the sign of the cross, they who had roasted human beings in the name of the Jew on the cross, they who continued to make the word "Jew" a profanity.

I bolted. The fear made me run. I ran through a world of books. There it was in front of me: the 6 million, the Inquisition, forced conversions, the ancient Germanic gods, Olympus, Hades, Adonis, Osiris, Isis, neolithic horned deities, witches. A world of illusions which had wrought a world of pain and death. And so they too, the Christians as well as the Jews had lied to me. Neither Jesus nor Moses was the answer. What need had I of gods or ethnos when I could have all of humanity? From now on my commitment would be to humanity which really meant no responsible commitment to anything at all. So I bowed down to humanity and made a PESEL out of it. Not until nearly two decades later would I find my way back to my people, and my God. But that is a story for another time.