Every year people come into the Church from all sorts of backgrounds and the Church, being Catholic and all, welcomes them into the Big Block Party of Cultures and Ethnicities that is the Church and does all she can to honor the wild mixture of peoples who call themselves \u201cCatholic\u201d.\u00a0 The Church is big on honoring your father and mother, whether Bantu, French, or Kiwi.\u00a0 So wherever it goes, it tends to incorporate local customs and culture into its life.\u00a0 So we get the Knights of Columbus honoring an Italian, St. Patrick\u2019s Day to cheer on the Irish, special Masses on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate America\u2019s culture and so forth.<\/p>\n
One of the phenomena we see more and more these days is a number of people from the Jewish tradition becoming Catholic.\u00a0 And in exactly the spirit of celebration of one\u2019s roots above, many people, both Jew and Gentile, will sometimes do things like celebrate a Seder meal in their homes, or make merry at Hannukah as well as at Christmas.\u00a0 When they do, other Catholics will sometimes get nervous and ask if this is permissible for Catholics, or even go so far as to say that celebrating such customs is forbidden by the Church or even an act of idolatry.<\/p>\n
So who\u2019s right?\u00a0 Can Christians celebrate Jewish customs?\u00a0 The short answer is \u201cYes.\u201d\u00a0 The longer answer is, \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n
The complicating factor is that unlike the mere human customs of other nationalities and peoples, the Jewish heritage includes feasts, fasts, and rites which are divinely inspired foreshadows of the One whom Israel was specifically chosen to bring into the world: Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The mission of Israel was essentially ordered toward bringing Messiah into the world.\u00a0 Once that mission was accomplished, the feasts, fasts, and rites of Israel fulfilled their purpose by pointing us to Christ. As Jesus said, he came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them (Matthew 5:18).<\/p>\n
So, as Paul points out, circumcision referred us to the need for true \u201ccircumcision of the heart\u201d which is given in Baptism (Romans 2:28-29).\u00a0 The New Testament likewise points to a host of Old Testament types that find fulfillment in him.\u00a0 Jesus, not a cute woolly quadruped sacrificed at Passover, is the real Lamb of God (John 1:29).\u00a0 Jesus, and not a stone building in Jerusalem, is the true Temple (John 2:19).\u00a0 Jesus, not the Passover bread or the manna, is the Bread of Life (John 6).<\/p>\n
So as a road sign points us to our destination and does not invite us to camp at the road sign forever, likewise the feasts, fasts and rites of Israel urge us on to the destination, who is Christ.\u00a0 The danger is that people can (and have) made idols out of the road sign as they make idols out of every other creature, instead of going where the sign points.\u00a0 That\u2019s what happened in Acts 15, when some Jewish Christians from Jerusalem started telling Gentiles interested in Jesus that they needed to be circumcised, keep kosher and do all the other ceremonial stuff the law required in order to be really truly Christian.<\/p>\n
It was a natural enough mistake.\u00a0 After all, Jesus was a Jew.\u00a0 Jesus kept the ceremonial laws.\u00a0 He even said that \u201cnot one jot or tittle\u201d of the law would pass away till all was fulfilled (Matthew 5:18).\u00a0 So some Jewish Christians figured that the way to be really<\/em> extra super duper Christian was to become a Jew first (with the sly self-congratulating suggestion that there were second-class Gentile wannabe Christians and then \u201creal\u201d Jewish Christians).<\/p>\n As we know, the Church rejected this, with Peter declaring in Acts 15 (and Paul thundering it in books like Romans, Galatians, and Philippians) that we are saved, not by \u201cworks of the law\u201d (i.e., the feasts, fasts, rites, and rituals of the old law) but by the grace of Jesus Christ received by faith and poured out on us through the sacraments and the common life, worship, and teaching of the Church.\u00a0 So Paul is adamant that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile because all are made one in Christ.\u00a0 The whole nonsense of asking who is \u201cmore\u201d Christian, Jew or Gentile, is like asking which patient in the cancer ward is least terminal.\u00a0 The only thing the Law does for us is a) diagnose the particular way that the cancer of sin is eating away at our souls and b) point us, by means of signs, to Doctor Jesus.\u00a0 It\u2019s like an x-ray machine for the soul.\u00a0 But once the x-ray has shown us the cancer or broken bone, its utility is exhausted.\u00a0 Further x-rays will not help heal you.\u00a0 Likewise the Law cannot save. \u00a0That\u2019s the Divine Physician\u2019s job.<\/p>\n At the time the Church decided that, not everybody was on board with it.\u00a0 Dissent was not invented by Nancy Pelosi.\u00a0 So throughout Paul\u2019s letters, we can see that there were, for want of a better word, reactionaries (called \u201cJudaizers\u201d) who rejected the notion of salvation by grace and who insisted that Gentiles had to keep the Law of Moses in order to be saved. Some of them went so far as to attack Paul on the suspicion that he wasn\u2019t a \u201creal\u201d apostle and were rebutted by him in Galatians with his appeal to the fact that his ministry had been vetted and approved by such figures as Peter, James, and John (cf. Gal 2:1-2).\u00a0 These made an idol of the Law and of Jewish feasts, fasts and rites and insisted that these, not the grace of Christ, saved us. With these hardliners, Paul was adamant and severe, even going so far, in a moment of frustration, as to say he wished the zealots insisting on circumcision would go all the way and castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12). (How much more arresting a papal encyclical might be if the Holy Father chose some of Paul\u2019s rhetorical strategies to get his point across!)<\/p>\n So within the early Church there was that tension between grace and legalism.\u00a0 Eventually, the breach between Church and synagogue reached such a polarized pitch that Jewish Christians were forced to choose between the rites and customs of Judaism or the rites and customs of the Church as it increasingly came to be regarded (on both sides) as a rejection of one to practice the other.\u00a0 So over the decades the habit in Christian circles (which became overwhelmingly Gentile) became to regard all practice of Jewish customs as a deliberate act of subversion of the Church\u2019s teachings and sacraments even as Christians were being kicked out of the synagogues as heretics.\u00a0 This came to create a sort of feedback loop among Christians as the Church ceased to be a mainly Jewish phenomenon and eventually came to see Jews first as oppressors, then as competitors, and finally as subversives within a Christian culture. The feedback loop worked, for instance, in medieval Spain when Jews converted under threat of persecution by Christians but then, with understandable defiance, continued to practice their rites and customs underground.\u00a0 Instead of seeing the threat of persecution as wrong and Jewish persistence in their culture as a perfectly predictable response to it, Christians instead saw Jews trying to cling to their own culture (such as the grandfather of St. Teresa of Avila) as fifth columnists and subversives.<\/p>\n This \u201ceither\/or\u201d approach to the practice of Jewish customs is, then, the result of a lot of bad blood under the bridge, some of it literal blood.\u00a0 But if we go back to the New Testament and the earliest days of the Church we don\u2019t see the Church forbidding Jewish Christians to honor their own culture and traditions.\u00a0 We simply see the Church telling Jewish Christians they can\u2019t impose those traditions and that culture on Gentiles by claiming that salvation stands or falls with the practice of those customs.\u00a0 We further see the Church warning that the practice of those customs does not make you a better Christian, nor does neglect of them make you a worse one.\u00a0 So concerning kosher food, Paul says, \u201cFood will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do\u201d (1 Cor 8:8).<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the thing: Paul also tells Gentiles not to push Jewish Christians around either. Instead, he urges them to respect the ways they honor God, even if the Gentile does not share the custom.<\/p>\n So, for instance, in Paul\u2019s day, some Jewish Christians had a scruple against eating meat because the meat you bought in the marketplace had typically been offered in ritual sacrifice to some pagan god at a local shrine.\u00a0 Some Jews feared that by eating such meat they became a participant in the pagan sacrifice.\u00a0 Paul rejects this and says all food is to be received with thanksgiving to God.\u00a0 He tells his Churches they needn\u2019t sweat this, just as they need not sweat keeping the various feast and fast days or Sabbaths of the Mosaic law.\u00a0 But then he adds this caveat both to those who feel no qualms about incurring ritual impurity and to those who do:<\/p>\n Let not him who eats despise him who abstains, and let not him who abstains pass judgment on him who eats; for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Master is able to make him stand. One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. He also who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God; while he who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. (Romans 14:3-6)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So in addition to Paul telling Jews not to impose their customs on Gentiles as if they were salvific, Paul also tells Gentiles not to reject or despise Jewish Christians who honor their culture\u2019s notions of purity.<\/p>\n More than this, we find that the apostles, being Jews, themselves continued to observe Jewish customs after Pentecost, particularly so as not to give scandal to fellow Jews of tender conscience.\u00a0 So they pray in the Temple (Acts 2:46).\u00a0 They go to synagogue (Acts 17:1-2) (indeed Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, always went first to the synagogue whenever he came to a new town).\u00a0 They observe Sabbath day prayers at consecrated locations (Acts 16:13).\u00a0 Paul makes a temporary Nazirite vow (like Samson) and, at the conclusion of it, signifies fulfillment of this Old Testament rite by shaving his head (Acts 18:18). (Paul does something similar in Acts 21:23, so as to avoid offending the Jews in Jerusalem and persuade them he is not the enemy of the Law of Moses).\u00a0 And Paul even asks Timothy to undergo circumcision, not because he regards it as salvific, but also in order to not give offense to his fellow Jews (Acts 16:1-3).\u00a0 Paul\u2019s rule of thumb, which passes into the life of the Catholic Church is, \u201cIn essential things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to the baptized, what matters for Paul is not so much the observance of the rites and customs of Judaism as the attitude with which we approach them.\u00a0 If we approach them as ways for asserting our spiritual superiority over our brothers and sisters, as though keeping kosher scores you extra brownie points with God, we are doing it wrong, according to Paul.\u00a0 Food does not commend us to God.\u00a0 Circumcision profits nothing.\u00a0 Observing new moons and Sabbaths does not save.\u00a0 Neither does any of the rest of the ceremonial law of Moses.<\/p>\n This is as true today as it was in Paul\u2019s day.\u00a0 For the temptation to feel spiritually superior is a constant throughout the Church\u2019s history.\u00a0 What we feel superior about<\/em> can vary widely, of course.\u00a0 Sundry subcultures in Christian circles get enthused about all sorts of things ranging from speaking in tongues<\/a> to the theology of the body to the Latin Mass to peace n\u2019justice to some favorite apparition. Some make their particular object of enthusiasm a litmus test for \u201ctrue\u201d Christianity.\u00a0 And in certain non-denominational circles (and even, on rare occasions in Catholic circles) you can find people enthused about the Jewish roots of the faith.\u00a0 They can, within reason, prize special knowledge about knowing Hebrew or various Jewish cultural practices or kosher food preparation and how to celebrate a Passover.\u00a0 And if they get carried away and out of balance about that enthusiasm, they can likewise start to idolize Jewish culture, customs, feasts, fasts, and rites as the thing that separates the \u201creal\u201d Christian from the supposedly \u201csecond-class\u201d Christian.\u00a0 If the idol becomes a law so powerful that a believer seriously asserts that failure to worship the idol\u2014be it speaking in tongues, or worshipping in Latin, or observing a Seder\u2014bars us from salvation, they (as Paul warns) \u201cnullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose\u201d (Galatians 2:21).<\/p>\n But (and here is the point), if a believer celebrates a Seder, or honors the custom of kissing a mezuzah (a small fixture near the door with a bit of parchment bearing the Shema prayer), or honors some other tradition from Jewish culture, not in order to feel superior to Gentile believers, nor to assert that the grace of Christ in the sacraments is inadequate, but in order to honor that cultural heritage or to contemplate the ways in which Christ is prefigured in the Old Law, he no more sins than the apostles did in meeting to pray in the Temple or in keeping other aspects of the law.\u00a0 He is simply honoring the Jewish culture at the root of the Christian revelation and meditating on how the revelation hidden in the Old Testament is fully revealed in the New.\u00a0 He is not trying to be extra-super-duper more<\/em> saved, nor denying in the slightest that Christ is the savior.\u00a0 He\u2019s just being grateful for that culture, as we all should be\u2014particularly since that culture was the one God chose to prepare for the revelation of Christ.<\/p>\n