Who Is a Jew?
To the Editor:
I appreciate Meir Soloveichik’s sensitive discussion of my memoir, Girl Meets God, but I am slightly puzzled by his professed puzzlement about whether I—as a convert to Judaism who was subsequently baptized—remain halakhically Jewish [“How Not to Become a Jew,” January]. So unambiguous is my halakhic status that I can only conclude that Rabbi Solovei-chik’s perplexity is a mere literary conceit; I myself have never for a moment doubted that, according to Jewish law, I am both Jewish and an apostate.
If I concur with Rabbi Soloveichik about my halakhic status, I take issue with his claim that I “regard rabbinic Judaism as a stepping stone to the higher truth of Christianity.” I am not sure what this means exactly, but insofar as it implies a certain supersessionism—that Judaism is the static backdrop to Christianity—I would dissent from it.
To be sure, life in an Orthodox Jewish community shaped by the rhythms of rabbinic Judaism is part of my spiritual autobiography, and my own understanding of Jesus and the New Testament has been unavoidably shaped by my study of Torah in the years prior to my baptism. But I certainly do not view rabbinic Judaism as a “stepping stone” to anything other than (perhaps) a faithful halakhic life. Indeed, insofar as rabbinic Judaism developed over the same centuries as did the early Church, it would be logically incoherent to regard the former as a stepping stone. Rabbinic Judaism is one response by some of God’s children to life in a covenantal relationship with Him.
I also wish to comment on Rabbi Soloveichik’s discussion of the meaning of private baptism. The community of the Trinity ensures that nothing in Christianity is truly private—even the hermit alone in the desert participates in the community of Triune life. While baptisms can be performed without witnesses, most churches today frown on the practice. Instead, by having baptisms performed in the presence of the local church body, they seek to underscore the communal nature of the baptismal covenant.
This is something I touch on in a chapter of Girl Meets God that reflects upon the symbolism of infant baptism: a baby cannot possibly hope to live out the promises being made on his behalf in the baptismal ceremony, and so infant baptisms are, for many adults who witness them, a profound reminder that Christianity is communal; that it is next to impossible for any of us to live a life of faithful Christian discipleship without the support, blessing, and admonishment of our brothers and sisters in Christ; that, as William Willimon once wrote, faith commitments “that are not reinforced and reformed by the community tend to be short-lived.”
Rabbi Soloveichik is right to point out the different understandings of nationhood that inhere in Christianity and Judaism. Unlike the Jewish gerut ritual, baptism does not mark one’s joining a nation. But it does graft the newly baptized person into a people—the people of God.
The moral of Rabbi Soloveichik’s article seems to be that Jewish communities should be careful about whom they convert. That he feels such a warning is necessary demonstrates another difference between Judaism and Christianity.
Lauren F. Winner
Durham, North Carolina
To the Editor:
Meir Soloveichik compares the conversion rituals of Judaism and Christianity in order to illustrate points of difference between the two faiths. As he sees it, “conversion to Judaism is as much a public, legal proceeding as a sacramental one.” It is “at once spiritual and civil—or, indeed, political”; it involves “not only taking on a new faith but also a new nationality.” Baptism to Christianity, by contrast, is a “private,” sacramental matter, in which “nationality is irrelevant.”
A pitfall of writing about Christianity in such general terms is that different types of Christians approach baptism in radically different ways. Generally speaking, evangelicals have no real belief in the efficacy of baptism or any other sacrament, while Catholics believe that the sacraments are avenues by which God’s grace is communicated to mankind. In between these poles are a dizzying variety of views.
Contrary to Rabbi Soloveichik’s sketch, baptism in the Catholic Church—the tradition I know best—is never a private matter between a convert and his priest. The situation he cites in which a non-baptized person can perform the sacrament is limited to cases of conversion or (most commonly) of an infant on its deathbed. This is an exception born of grave necessity, and is not the normative option. Under circumstances in which death is not imminent, the entire process from evangelization to sacrament is the work of the community, both clergy and laity. While such private matters as regeneration and forgiveness of sin are held to be key effects of baptism, the far greater stress, especially in the baptism of infants, is on the individual’s incorporation into the community of believers.
Can one lose membership in this community, as Rabbi Soloveichik claims, contrasting it with immutable Jewishness? On a functional level I suppose so, but beyond that I am not so sure. The early Church struggled over what to do with those who had denounced the faith in order to avoid martyrdom at the hands of the Romans but who later repented. It was decided to allow them to be readmitted to communion without the need for a second baptism. This would suggest that although a person might denounce his or her Catholicism, the indelible mark left by the sacraments of initiation endures.
Reverend Thomas M. Provenzano
Chicago, Illinois
To the Editor:
In his wonderful article, Meir Soloveichik misses two small points about Christian conversion. One runs somewhat counter to his thesis, while the other supports it.
He asserts that a baptized Christian who does not believe in Christian dogma is no longer a Christian. But, at least for the Catholic Church, this is not the case. As the new catechism states, “Baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark of his belonging to Christ. No sin can erase this mark, even if sin prevents baptism from bearing the fruits of salvation.” Ideally, the attitude of the Church toward the apostate Christian is very similar to the attitude of the halakha toward the apostate Jew that Rabbi Soloveichik describes. For Catholics, baptism is the circumcision of the soul, binding the Christian to God and Christ “once for all.”
Second, to emphasize the private, spiritual nature of baptism, Rabbi Soloveichik notes that in the absence of a priest, even a non-baptized person can perform a baptism. In fact, even a baptizer need not be present. The catechism states that one can be “baptized by blood” by dying for the sake of the faith, and “baptized by desire” by wishing to be baptized when prevented from doing so. In this light, baptism may be seen even more to concern the relationship between the individual, God, and the world to come.
Craig Bruney
Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
Meir Soloveichik is certainly correct to maintain that, despite the fact that Lauren Winner came to Judaism by way of conversion, her status as an apostate Jew is no different from that of any born Jew who has forsaken Judaism. But contrary to what he suggests, it is not so clear that a “betrayal” like apostasy does not affect one’s status as a member of the Jewish people.
A few decades ago, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the claim of the monk Brother Daniel, a born Jew who had committed apostasy to Christianity and then demanded that the state of Israel continue to recognize him as a Jew. Writing about the case, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein (a different article of whose is cited approvingly by Rabbi Solovei-chik) demonstrated that rabbinic law, no less than Israeli civil law, “recognize[s] the fatal fallacy of the notion that, ad aeternitatem, the crown of Jewry can never fall off, no matter how ill it is worn.”
Regardless of whether Winner herself has crossed over the line marking the boundaries of Jewish identity, we should be aware of Rabbi Lichtenstein’s conclusion: “the halakhic principle [is] that an apostate can become a Gentile, and that Jewishness is not an absolutely irrevocable status.”
Joel B. Wolowelsky
Yeshivah of Flatbush
Brooklyn, New York
To the Editor:
Meir Soloveichik asserts that as a convert to Judaism, Lauren Winner remains a Jew despite her later conversion to Christianity. At the same time, he writes that “women serve as the foundation of the Jewish family by instinct,” and that “one whose mother is Jewish is considered a member of the Jewish family by birth.” This raises a troubling question: will Winner’s daughters and their own daughters, raised entirely as Christians, still be considered Jewish?
Two concepts of Jewish identity may be relevant here. The concept of Judaism as a family, which Rabbi Soloveichik and others before him have espoused, may be traced back to Abraham’s covenant with God, which was to be transmitted through his seed (zera)—that is, through Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants. Zera denotes a family bond, a tradition passed down from generation to generation that combines the physical and the concrete with the divine. Accordingly, as Rabbi Soloveichik notes, a convert somehow leaps the physical barrier and becomes a son or daughter of Abraham.
But zera alone is not enough. The Jewish family is different from other groups with mere hereditary ties. No one would say that every group of descendants from a single common ancestor forms a family or a people in any meaningful sense. They have not sustained the memory of their shared past, nor do they have any kind of shared customs or sense of purpose. Only “seed” together with a compelling imaginative tradition (zera u’berit) makes Judaism a family—and something more than a family.
Whether Lauren Winner is a Jew or not, her descendants—including the matrilineal ones—will be lost from Judaism as the passage of time washes away the memory of their once famously Jewish grandmother.
Kevin Jon Williams
Wynnewood, Pennsylvania
Meir Soloveichik writes:
If Lauren Winner is puzzled by my essay, I am doubly puzzled by her response. From it, one would conclude that she does not believe Christianity offers its adherents a “higher truth” than that proclaimed by the Judaism that she has left behind. Yet in her book she makes clear that believing in Jesus is irreconcilable with living a halakhic life. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot, she tells her readers, “is one of the things I gave up because of Jesus. I gave up [the holiday of] Purim, which I love, and [observance of] kashrut, which I love. . . . All because I was courted by a very determined carpenter from Nazareth.” Lauren Winner also speaks of her obligation, as an evangelical Christian, to bear witness to the truth of Christianity in public. On an Ash Wednesday at Columbia University, she found herself hoping that a young woman’s willingness to “proclaim, at least one day a year, that she is a Christian, will lodge somewhere in some student’s heart.”
The fact is that to be an evangelical Christian is to hope that everyone will embrace the “carpenter from Nazareth”—which, in the case of Jews, means that they will give up practicing rabbinic Judaism. If Winner does not believe this, then she is not an evangelical Christian; and if she truly believes that Jews have no need of becoming Christian, then she should share this conviction not with the readers of Commentary but with her many evangelical readers who regard her as an ideal type of the Jew who has seen the light.
Contrary to Winner’s historical claim, rabbinic Judaism was already in existence when Christianity began; many of the rabbis whose opinions are recorded in the Mishnah were teaching Jewish law at the time of the Church’s birth. Rabbi Gamaliel makes an appearance in the New Testament book of Acts; his forebear Hillel was one of the most influential rabbinic sages. Paul claims to have been raised a rabbinic Jew, but insists that what his fellow Pharisees missed was that the Law was no longer in effect, and that the Torah was nothing more than a stepping stone to the higher truth of the Gospel. “Before faith came,” Paul writes to the Galatians, “we were imprisoned under the law.” Halakha, he informs his readers, “was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith; but now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.”
No faithful Christian can see rabbinic Judaism as merely a path leading to what Winner calls a “faithful halakhic life.” To be a religious Christian is to insist that there is something about Jewish dogma that is profoundly wrong, just as to be an Orthodox Jew is to respond that it is the Christians who are in error. On this, Jews and Christians agree: one of them has embraced a religion that proclaims a “higher truth” than the other.
Lauren Winner has given every indication elsewhere that she knows this to be the case. Thus, in a book review in the New York Times, she has chastised the religion writer Winifred Gallagher for an “uncritical embrace of ecumenism” and for believing that “the world’s religions are different paths to the same truth.” Gallagher, she writes, fails to make room for “the unfashionable belief, shared by the orthodox of most of the world’s faiths, that there is something exclusive about the nature of religious truth claims,” and she suggests that, in her next book, Gallagher “invite pilgrims on a journey that doesn’t require them to surrender particularistic claims in favor of a spiritual smorgasbord.”
Surrendering her own particularistic claims is exactly what Lauren Winner does in the first part of her letter. Then, however, comes her conclusion, where she states that, while Judaism is wary of accepting converts, Christianity is not—a fact that may demonstrate “another difference between Judaism and Christianity.” Here the clear implication seems to be that the universality of the Church’s mission is a distinct virtue, and one that is sadly lacking in Judaism.
It is true that Jews have never focused on converting the world; but then, in stark contrast to Christianity, neither have they ever insisted that joining their faith is necessary for salvation. At a time when Augustine was declaring that most of the world’s people, including unbaptized infants, were destined for eternal damnation, the rabbis were ruling that “the righteous of the nations of the world have a portion in the world to come.” Need one add that Christians’ insistence on their responsibility to save the world led historically to unpleasant consequences known all too well to most Jews, including, one would assume, some of Lauren Winner’s father’s ancestors, or that the Christian penchant for mission has in the past forced considerable numbers of Jews to choose between conversion and death?
A number of my Christian correspondents point out that baptism can be communal in nature, and that the church embodies a community. But I explicitly acknowledged this, though I also noted that the Church sees itself as a spiritual fellowship, not a political one, whereas the Jewish people sees itself also as a national entity. The difference is evident in the fact that baptism in private is considered valid while conversion to Judaism without a “citizenship court” of three is never valid.
As for whether baptism is “indelible” or, on the contrary, irrelevant to one’s status as a Christian, a joint statement by the group “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” signed by many of America’s most prominent Catholic and evangelical theologians, says the following:
The communio sanctorum [“community of the saints”] embraces all Christians, including those whose lives are not notably marked by holiness. In the New Testament, the term “saints” generally refers to all who are baptized and confess Christ as Lord. [emphasis added]
Catholics may believe baptism is an indelible mark, and some evangelicals may not see baptism in the same way; but one who does not believe in Jesus is not a Christian, and baptism, for a very wide swath of the Christian world, plays a special role in defining one as a Christian.
In his letter, Joel B. Wolowelsky cites an article about the Brother Daniel case by Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. But his brief quotations from a lengthy and complex essay are misleading. Rabbi Lichtenstein’s thesis is built on a discussion in the Talmud of the ten lost tribes of Israel, who were exiled by the king of Assyria before the destruction of the northern kingdom in the 8th century b.c.e. So assimilated did those tribes become, the rabbis postulated, that a marriage between a descendant of one of them and a Jew could not be considered valid. So, too, Rabbi Lichtenstein suggests, a born Jew who experiences “total alienation from the Jewish people” can lose his “Jewish sanctity.” As such, his marriage to a Jewess would be invalid.
At the same time, however, Rabbi Lichtenstein notes that such an individual should not be regarded in the same light as a non-Jew. By way of analogy, he cites the halakhic abrogation, during the time of the Babylonian exile, of the agricultural tithing laws that applied to Jews in the Holy Land. “What,” he asks, “was the status of the land during the Babylonian exile? Was it simply identical with Iceland’s or Manchuria’s?” His answer: “we recoil from these possibilities instinctively, and our instincts are right.” So, too, with an apostate. On the one hand, having abandoned any sense of allegiance to the Jewish people, he is “a Jew without Jewishness,” and lacks the “sacredness of the Jewish personality.” On the other hand, if “we ask, in purely descriptive terms, whether anyone born of Jewish parents is a Jew, the answer must be yes.” Moreover, should such apostates “return to the fold, they would represent reformed prodigal children, rather than fresh converts.”
One may interpret the rabbinic injunction suspending marriage with members of the ten lost tribes as Rabbi Lichtenstein does, or one may follow other commentators who confine themselves to the talmudic point at hand, suggesting no further implications. But it is agreed that, in some sense, anyone born a Jew is a Jew—and that no matter how far a Jew has strayed from his people, Judaism always welcomes his return, just as it has dreamed of the return of the ten lost tribes of Israel from the four corners of the earth. Such is the strength of the blood bonds invoked by the theologian Franz Rosenzweig, whom I quoted in my article.
This brings us to the question of Lauren Winner’s descendants. Kevin Jon Williams writes that they will be “lost from Judaism with the passage of time.” He may be right; the statistics these days are on his side. But I, for one, cannot rule out their return. As I noted in my essay, the writer Stephen Dubner found his way back to Judaism after being raised by two Catholic-Jewish parents with no sense of his Jewishness. A child of Abraham remains a child of Abraham, and, no matter how lost, might just find his way back to the covenant of Abraham. However high the odds against this happening, surely they are no higher than the odds against the children of one man from Mesopotamia surviving, as a family and as a nation, the ravages of the centuries, and transforming the world in the process.
