October 21, 2008 | 2:45 pm

A Christian at High Holy Day services

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Creator’s Note: I never republish entire stories but ... two weeks ago I took the plunge and attended Yom Kippur services. What follows is the first-person piece I wrote for the Journal about my experience.

My first mistake was arriving when the Yom Kippur morning service at Valley Beth Shalom was scheduled to begin. The flier said 7:45 a.m. and, this being my virgin voyage, I didn’t want to be late.

Naive? Certainly. I didn’t realize Jews attend High Holy Days services like Dodgers fans frequent Chavez Ravine: arriving in the third inning and leaving in the seventh.

The first hint of my folly came when, after poking my head into a nearly empty Niznick Sanctuary, I returned to my car, parked a half-mile away, and bumped into one of the temple’s main rabbis.

The morning rush, it turned out, was about two hours away.

It may be surprising that a reporter at The Jewish Journal named Greenberg wouldn’t know the standard practices of synagogue attendance on the holiest day of the Jewish year, but this ignorance hints at a more complex story of guilt, confusion and married identities.

I wasn’t raised Jewish. Both my grandmothers were, and so too was my paternal grandfather. But my mother was raised Catholic down south and my father as a non-religious Jew here in Los Angeles. (You may know a few like him.)

When I was young—6 or 7—my parents both began attending a non-denominational Protestant church. Soon they were baptized, and, as a teenager, so was I.

My sister and I identified as Jewish in name only, or, more aptly, by our name: When it comes to anti-Semitism, it’s not about whether you consider yourself Jewish but whether others do—and others did.

I still go to church most Sundays, but though I’m not with Jews for Jesus or a Messianic—that’s worth emphasizing—I’ve become increasingly interested in my Jewish cultural history. Yom Kippur, it seemed, was something I should experience.

So I selected three synagogues where I thought I would feel comfortable and find something meaningful to take home: IKAR, where Rabbi Sharon Brous has been recognized for her alternative, spiritually engaging community; Valley Beth Shalom (VBS), to hear Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, one of the leading voices of Jewish conscience from the last half century; and Temple Israel of Hollywood because, well, I have a screenplay to sell.

I didn’t anticipate a problem blending in.

“The High Holy Days,” a friend had remarked before Rosh Hashanah, “is the time of the year when secular Jews pretend to believe in God and religious Jews pretend to believe them.”

The High Holy Days draw the biggest crowds of the year, and, just like Christmas and Easter services, you can hear the outreach from the bimah.

“To the privatized Jew, hell is other people,” Schulweis said during his morning sermon, paraphrasing the philosopher Sartre.

Yes, he said, huddling close causes pricks and pain, but so does remaining alone outside of a community.

“This is the porcupine’s dilemma. This is the human condition,” Schulweis said, soon adding, “Judaism depends on Jews being Jewish…. In Judaism, believing means belonging. For we are a family.”

At that moment, I felt a part of this family, the Tribe. I was praying and singing in Hebrew, wearing tallit and a kippah, and at 5:30 p.m. on erev Yom Kippur I had begun my fast, which I might have completed had I not driven past Pita Kitchen en route from VBS to Temple Israel of Hollywood. (They make a ridiculous lamb shawarma.)

Guilty? Maybe a little. But the day before I read on Ynet that only 63 percent of Israeli Jews planned to fast. And, besides, I’d already achieved a greater level of observance than at any point in my life.

Temple Israel hammered home what Schulweis had spoken of. I had been bored at VBS; tired from little sleep, with falling blood sugar, and, most importantly, no one to chat with in the surprisingly social hallways. But at Temple Israel I recognized people from the moment I walked into an afternoon breakout session on the presidential election—friends, sources, current and former colleagues.

As the time, spent in community and talking about shared concerns, passed quickly by, I several times reflected on my experience the night before, when I celebrated Kol Nidre at IKAR.

I felt strikingly comfortable in a packed gym at the Westside JCC. It might have been a shvitz because of a broken air conditioner, but when I looked around I saw a packed, spiritually moved house of Jews, many who looked a lot like me: Chuck Taylor sneakers, thick plastic glasses, the curly hair that always has reminded me of my family’s story.

When we prayed, I told myself the room was praying to my God, that I was praying to my God. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The God of the Exodus. The God of all creation.

Of course, there was no mention of Jesus, but the sermon was one I have heard in one form or another in churches all my life:

  God is good. People are not. But we can do good, we can fulfill God’s will on Earth by stepping outside ourselves, by feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless and helping the helpless—by, in two words, tikkun olam.

Faith is not bad, Rabbi Brous said, specifically taking aim at anti-god avenger Bill Maher, whose new movie “Religulous” ridicules godly observance. Yes, man has used God for his own selfish gain, Brous said, but we can change the course.

“It’s nice to see you here,” a friend said to me as I digested Brous’ sermon. “You should come for Shabbat.”

I wondered: Could I? Could I be part of a religious Jewish community without practicing Judaism, with—and there’s no other way to put this—believing in something that was a heretical outgrowth of Judaism?

Probably not.

Maybe I could just come around on the High Holy Days. I hear people do that.

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July 9, 2008 | 3:45 pm

Crypto-Jews who believe in Jesus

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Orlando Sentinel published a story today about Aliyah Sefarad International (no Web site), an organization reaching out to Latinos who may have had Jewish ancestry. The goal of the program, run by Rabbi Gary Fernandez, is to get descendants of Maranos to reconnect with their ancestral Jewishness and make aliyah to Israel.

“God promised the Negev [southern Israel] to the people of Sepharad [believed to be the name given to the Iberian Peninsula],” said Fernandez, citing a prophecy from the biblical book of Obadiah. “We are working toward making that a reality.”

Fernandez said he went to Israel to discuss his plans with a manager there who told the rabbi he was the first person to ever approach him about relocating Hispanic Jews.

But Fernandez, a native of Puerto Rico who grew up Christian, will first have to overcome a few hurdles. Under the law of return, the Israeli government assists with housing and other needs for those wanting to go back to the land of their ancestors. But to be allowed in, the law requires evidence that at least one grandparent was a practicing Jew. Descending from Jews alone is not enough, Katz said.

The alternative is to convert to Judaism, as many in Fernandez’s group have done. But because they also believe in Jesus, this could complicate matters.

Wow. That final bit is the understatement of the last 2,000 years.

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June 12, 2008 | 4:43 pm

Does military service make an Israeli a Jew?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The ultra-Orthodox, who often opt out of compulsory service in the Israel Defense Forces, better hope not. A survey published yesterday in Ynet found that most Israelis thought military service was a greater show of a sincere conversion to Judaism than religious observance.

This is shocking because for a few thousand years, aside from being God’s chosen, the most important element of being Jewish was practicing Judaism. Who is a Jew? That’s a tough question to answer. But how a Jew lives? Until maybe two centuries ago, that was a lot clearer. (Think “Fiddler on the Roof” before “Fiddler on the Roof” and the subsequent “Jewish Century.”)

Of course, times have changed. For the first time in almost 2,000 years, Jews have political sovereignty in Israel, something they have handled less than stellarly. Jews no longer wear kippot and peyot (sidelocks) en masse, davening every day, avoiding treyf and keeping Shabbat. They are Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and, yes, Orthodox. In Israel, many aren’t religious at all. Living Jewish is as much about social values and cultural appreciation and social affiliation as it is about practicing Judaism. And I guess now we can add to that list of defining characteristics the silly notion Michael Chabon fictionalized in “Gentlemen of the Road” (nee: “Jews With Swords”).

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May 6, 2008 | 11:24 am

Messianic Jew causes boycott call from Bible Quiz

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

And you thought Jeopardy! was dramatic:

A group of religious Zionist rabbis have called for a boycott of this year’s International Bible Quiz after discovering that one of the four finalists from Israel is a Messianic Jew who believes Jesus is the true Messiah.

“Messianics are missionaries who proselytize in very sophisticated ways,” said Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of the rabbis calling to boycott the quiz.

“It is forbidden to give them legitimacy by allowing them to take part in the quiz.”

Other rabbis that have called to boycott the quiz include Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed, Ya’acov Yosef, son of Shas mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Tzvi Tau, head of Har Hamor Yeshiva.

The call to boycott the quiz came after Yad L’Achim, a haredi anti-missionary organization, discovered that one of the finalists, Bat-El Levi, an 11th grader from a high school in Pisgat Ze’ev, was a Messianic Jew.

Levi won this year’s national bible quiz for state schools and will be one of four finalists from Israel competing for the International Bible Quiz Championship on Independence Day.

The Education Ministry said in response to a query from The Jerusalem Post that the “Global Bible Quiz for Jewish Youth” was open only to Jewish pupils. Regarding Messianic Jews, the pupil in question was Jewish, and therefore, according to the ministry’s legal department, was not disqualified from participating.

That is an interesting argument made by the Education Ministry, because my understanding has been that most Jews consider Messianics to be Christians, not Jews. Messianics, generally, consider themselves to be Jews who believe in the divinity of and salvation offered by Yeshua; I’ve attended a few services and rarely heard the words “Jesus,” “Christ,” or “Christian.”

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January 3, 2008 | 1:57 pm

Israel’s ‘non-Jewish Jews’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In Israel, the “non-Jewish Jews,” as some Israelis call them, are everywhere. They drive buses, teach university classes, patrol in army jeeps and follow the latest Israeli reality TV shows as avidly as their Jewish counterparts.

For these people—mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not Jews according to Israeli law—the question of where they fit into the Jewish state remains unanswered nearly two decades after they began coming to Israel.

At an estimated 320,000 people and with their ranks growing due to childbirth, the question is growing ever more acute.

“They are not going to be religious but want to be part of what is called the Jewish secular population,” said Asher Cohen, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, who has written a book on the subject.

“Thousands are being born here, and they are no longer immigrants,” he said. “They are raised just like their secular neighbors, and these children want to know why they are not Jewish because their mother is not Jewish. The problem is just getting worse.”

This story raises serious questions about identity and affiliation that reminds me of the plight of half-Jews. Tough not mentioned in this article from this week’s Jewish Journal, the disenfranchisement of this population of Israelis has had more negative consequences than simply a sense of outsiderness. Remember the case of those Israeli neo-Nazis?

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November 1, 2007 | 3:02 pm

The study of ‘Jewgenics’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A regular topic on The God Blog is my quest to balance my Jewish heritage with my Christian beliefs. This has played out in posts about Jewish exceptionalism and that unanswerable question: Who is a Jew? Well, Slate takes on both those topics in this story about “Jewgenics”:

Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?

If these notions make you cringe, you’re not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don’t even want to talk about it.

Actually, a bunch of us did talk about it, three days ago at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. He was joined by fellow AEI scholar Charles Murray and by Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn’t but talks as though he wishes he were. “One of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew,” he announced proudly, turning the old “some of my best friends” cliché upside down.

Entine laid out the data. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100. This gap and the genetic theories surrounding it stirred discomfort in the room. Zoloth, speaking for many liberals, recalled a family member’s revulsion at the idea of a Jewish race. Judaism is about faith and values, she argued. To reduce it to biology is to make it exclusive, denying its openness to all. Worse, to suggest that Jews are genetically smart is to imply that non-Jews are inherently inferior, in violation of Jewish commitments to equality and compassion. My friend Dana Milbank, who’s a better (if I may use that word) Jew than I am, watched the discussion, went back to his office, and wrote a column in the Washington Post poking fun at all the talk of superior Jewish intellect. The column, as usual, was really smart.

But what if Judaism as a genetic inheritance is compatible with Judaism as a cultural inheritance? And what if the genes that make Jews smart also make them sick? If one kind of superiority comes at the price of another kind of inferiority, and if the transmission of Jewish values drives the transmission of Jewish genes, does that make the genetics and the superiority easier to swallow?

Apparently so.

 

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August 21, 2007 | 4:17 pm

Me and Christianity Today’s quote of the day

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I began freelancing for Christianity Today two years ago after news director Ted Olsen read an article I wrote about a pastor forgotten by his church and Olsen responded with this post on the widely read Weblog he writes for the magazine.

Today, I made it onto Ted’s blog as a newsmake, sort of. He liked my interview with The Forward, particularly this line—“This is a thousands-year-old problem, the question of who is a Jew. I don’t anticipate being the answer”—which he deemed the quote of the day.

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August 16, 2007 | 5:11 pm

‘Funny,’ The Forward says, ‘Brad Greenberg Doesn’t Look Christian’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve been looking forward to this afternoon, for the moment when I would join the fold of recent Q&As on The Forward‘s Web site. I didn’t get the Luke Ford treatment (not that I deserved it), but The Forward has posted that Q&A/profile with yours truly.

It’s pretty odd to be on the opposite side of the looking glass. I was certain I would say something that would culminate with me packing my desk—my wife is in PR, but I’ve had little media-training, except, of course, being a member of the MSM . But I think I survived.

Here’s the article’s lede, followed by three portions of the Q&A:

It’s not surprising that a major Jewish newspaper would have its own “God Blog.” One might be surprised, however, upon learning that a Jewish newspaper’s “God blogger” is a church-going Christian. And one certainly wouldn’t expect said Christian to have a last name that starts with “Green” and ends with “berg.”

...

            You describe yourself on your blog as a “God-fearing Christian.” What does that mean?

To me that means that I’m somebody who believes in the Bible as the word of God and somebody who believes specifically in the divinity of Jesus and that Jesus was the Christ. It’s something I am upfront about because I don’t want it to be some kind of secret that comes out in forms of rumor or innuendo. I put it out there because I think it’s important that people know that this is what I believe, and that it’s no something that affects me as a journalist.

            Has your background posed any unique challenges for you in covering the Jewish community?

I know that on it’s face it makes parts of the community queasy. If my name were “Mitch Hennigan,” it wouldn’t really be an issue. But everybody assumes that if my name’s “Greenberg” and I’m Christian, I must have converted out, which isn’t the case. When I started this job, everybody I talked to was like, “So, are you a Jew for Jesus?” And I was very clear: No, I’m not involved in Jews for Jesus. No, they have not slipped a mole into the Jewish Journal. I don’t have a special calling to baptize all of “those pagan Jews.” I think when people understand who I am, when they see the sensitivity of my reporting, and the fact that I am just a really curious journalist who does care about this community and is interested in the stories that are affecting it, I think it breaks down those walls.

            You’re halachically Jewish. When Jews find out that you’re a practicing Christian, do they ever try to bring you “back to the fold?”

I think that may be subtly going on. It hasn’t been anything that overt. I’m sure that a lot of people think that because I’m at the Jewish Journal, I think there is a perception that I’m here because I want to return to the community. And in ways I want to be able to identify with the community. I’m kind of struggling with how that can be done, how I can be Jewish while not adhering to the religion. But this is a thousands-year-old problem, the question of who is a Jew. I don’t anticipate being the answer.

Read the rest here.

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August 3, 2007 | 12:18 pm

Why be Jewish?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Earlier this week, Rob Eshman, The Jewish Journal‘s editor in chief, spent two days in Utah at a conference were leading thinkers of American Jewry tried to answer a seemingly simple question: Why be Jewish?

The answer, obviously, is not so easy.

But Jews like to talk. God talked to Moses and told him to talk to the people. The people talked back, and we really haven’t shut up since.

The Bronfman Foundation, which sponsored the conference last week in Deer Valley, Utah, is set to launch something called the Bronfman Vision Forum that will offer new ways to invigorate and revitalize Jewish life, and this conference was designed to help generate new ideas and programs, and, yes, more conferences. What an endearing and Jewish idea—that talking will save the Jewish people.

But long days of listening provided clarity when Rob listened to Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Westwood.

As he spoke—and as I stared at the back of his head going on hour three—the answer became clear. Why be Jewish? Four words. It’s good for you.

Deep community, spiritual succor, emotional comfort, a challenging intellectual framework for understanding why we’re here, a moral compass to guide you and your children, mental and spiritual discipline, an approach to the Infinite and a shared fate.

It may not always be easy, it may not always feel right, it may not always bring transcendence, it may not be right for everyone at every stage in life, but it’s good for you.

You, of course, may not agree. But we can talk about it.

I’ve offered my thoughts on this before, and I will again. There are varying degrees and ways by which people self-identify as Jewish. (I sipped tea yesterday with Rachel Levin, who has been very involved in addressing this through REBOOT.)

For a Christian named Greenberg, I’m more aware of the way others identify Jews—by their name, appearance, attire, profession. But that doesn’t change the fact that inside the tribe, Jewish paranoia guarantees that every generation will worry about whether the next will care about being Jewish.

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July 13, 2007 | 3:07 am

Who is a half-Jew?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is a really interesting story in today’s Jewish Journal about the growing number of “half-Jews” fighting for acceptance. Jewish denominations differ on conversion requirements and whether the Jewish lineage comes from the mother or father, but each agrees that there is no such thing as a half-Jew—either you are or you aren’t.

You can’t have two identities, they say. But what about Ms. Cohen and the many like her?

Georgiana Cohen, a 27-year-old Web content specialist in Somerville, Mass., was raised by a non-Jewish mother but spent five years at the Donna Klein Jewish Academy in Boca Raton, Fla. That experience, she says, “legitimized a last name I carried around like a fake ID.”

The split between life at home and at school was stark, she recalls.

“My childhood was all Christmas trees and Easter candy,” Cohen says. “Meanwhile, back in Boca, I sang folk songs like ‘Jerusalem of Gold,’ led weekly minyan services with my best friend and captured Hebrew spelling bee trophies.”

She refers to herself now, somewhat flippantly, as “half-Jewish and half ‘fill-in-the-blank.’ “

The broader question—Who is a Jew?—is one of the most vexing for world Jewry and me personally. Both my grandmothers were Jewish and so was one grandfather; I look like a Jew, walk like a Jew and quack like a Jew—must be a duck—but I believe in Christianity, which is anathema to Judaism. So am I a Jew?

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