Now, “habits of mind” listed in my goals? What does that mean? I live in the Midwest where encounter with Jewish practice and culture is a rare thing for most Christians. It’s not impossible, of course. You can visit any local synagogue or temple, inquire into the community’s beliefs and practices. You can choose to participate in your community’s civic activities, some of which may include a “tri-alogue” or intentional dialogues between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. But you can just as easily live an entire life here and never talk with a Jewish person. Or know you’re talking with a Jewish person, if they’ve had to fit into a more rural, vaguely anti-Semitic civic life.
As a result, my habits of mind about liturgy, the ritual actions shared in traditional sanctuaries, are all public and communal, with high doses of privatized, individualistic emphases on personal beliefs. Liturgy for most Christians in my communities is a public affair, encountered in Christian sanctuaries, imagined to be accessible to all. There’s often a not-so-faint universalism-of-Christ about it all, tinged with complete ignorance of living or thinking differently (whether that means other religious traditions or atheism, for that matter).
The last several years, however, have involved me in deep and sustaining encounters with Jewish practitioners and observance, mostly in NYC or urban settings, but some with Orthodox practice in local Midwestern settings. One event, which has led to significant “comparative theological” examination,[1] involved a Christian liturgy, a rabbinic teaching of Shabbat table practices, followed by a meal of shared table fellowship. Awareness of the Holy overwhelmed many of us in the room, and I became fascinated with Kiddush (Shabbat eve, not Great), Communion, and the lively intersections of meaning surrounding “a cup filled with the fruit of the vine.” The more I engaged (Jewish) halakhic discourse, the more I realized I knew nothing about Jewish observance or the habits of mind that come with such discipline. How could I or why would I? I learned that Jewish observance, while perhaps analogous in some views of Christian practice, is irreparably distinct from Christian liturgy. It’s centered in the home and family, not in public in a sanctuary. It’s guided by intricate rabbinic and communal traditions, not arguably individualistic theological arguments. In rigorous terms, Jewish observance can never (really) be likened to Christian worship.
So I found myself asking: What would it mean to surrender to Jewish observance, for a short time, in order to have such observance shape my own habits of mind in ways I could never anticipate? What might I learn about my own tradition and its public/communal life, if I followed Jewish wisdom and “brought it in” to the most intimate table-fellowship habits of my family? How might I re-encounter “the table”—both at home and in the Christian sanctuary—if I sat at the feet of rabbinic traditions for a time? What might I learn about my own family’s eating practices and their relation to the broader culture’s practices of food production and consumption? Finally, what would it be like to be a Christian, keeping kosher, amongst other Christians?
Surrender. That’s the key, I think. Surrender and its intimate companion, devotion. Christians, many of whom proclaim a fundamental value of kenosis or ‘self-emptying,’ yet live in a world where surrender is foreign. Especially if the tradition is evangelical or tinged with a missionary zeal. What might it mean to voluntarily release what or whom you value in order to love an ‘other,’ to receive and welcome a larger, lived wisdom offered in love? What is the experience of submitting to another’s lived tradition, allowing it to shape you and transform what (and who) you thought you knew? Is y/our God large enough and expansive enough to sustain such an invitation? Some may describe such an invitation as a loss of faith, but again and again, I have found the path only strengthening relationship with God, creation, all those around me. Life abundant comes this way, even if the road surprises you, requires commitment of you, changes who you thought you were as a child of God.
So today we begin, me alongside a slightly anxious but dearly beloved and willing husband. I can’t write about a project like this without due nod to A.J. Jacob’s Year of Living Biblically, nor to the movie “Julie and Julia,” I suppose. I’ve not read Jacob’s book thoroughly, though the parts I’ve read and heard on NPR made me smile, even laugh aloud. I am glad for his impish tone. I hope for a little less flippancy in my prose here, however. For my purposes, maintaining a kosher home for a short time at the start of Lent is a Christian act of curious surrender and faithful devotion. Surrender to Jewish wisdom—that there is something integral to kashrut for life abundant, when engaged with honest intention and desire to learn—and devotion to Jewish faith companions who have welcomed me into their homes, into the sacred center(s) of their lives. My hope is to continue to learn from them, perhaps to receive experience(s) and awareness whereby I may educate more of my own community about the intimate yet irreconcilably different Life which is available to and abundant for us all.
[1] Lisa M. Hess, “A Liturgical Hospitality Project: an Experiment in Comparative Theology,” paper offered to AAR/Luce Summer Seminar in Theologies of Religious Pluralism and Comparative Theology, Cohort One, Catholic Theological Union, May/June 2010. Available upon request.
Lisa M. Hess listens, teaches, and writes as a Presbyterian minister (PCUSA) and practical theology professor at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. She understands herself best as a friend, wife, teacher, occasional preacher, poet, and contemplative. Author of Artisanal Theology: Intentional Formation in Radically Covenantal Companionships (Cascade, 2009), she is an artisanal theologian, which means her primary work is the articulation, modeling, and fostering of an expressive theological delight, able to companion the suffering of self and others. Visit her Expert Site at Patheos here.
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