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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.

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