An Empire of Their Own: in which we receive some basically redemptive message about human goodness I'm used to trusting movies. The film industry is mostly made up of Jewish liberals, and so when I go see a film, I trust -- often with a note of boredom -- that what I'm going to see has been politically approved by the mainstream left. Unless it's an indie flick, it won't be too radical. But it'll be comfortably liberal, with some basically redemptive message about human goodness, seizing the day instead of selling out, living with your heart more than your head. This is what Hollywood sells and, as described in Neal Gabler's fascinating An Empire of Their Own, it's an ideology that secular Jewish Americans deliberately created.

Well, the Right has gotten wise. After spending two decades whining about the liberal Hollywood elite, they've gone and created an evil empire of their own. Mel Gibson was just the beginning; now there's tycoon-funded Walden Films, devoted to Christian-friendly entertainment and/or brainwashing, and a dozen other outlets that seek to reverse the tide of secular-liberal culture. Watch out, rock & roll!

The Narnia series is Walden's first major undertaking, and it is major: seven multi-million dollar blockbusters based on C.S. Lewis's beloved tales. I liked The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I liked Prince Caspian even more. It's more focused, more fun, and darker. It's a war movie, basically, but it's also wistful where Lion was innocent, and it's got more cute guys in it.

It's well known that C.S. Lewis incorporated Christian religious themes in the Narnia series. What's debated is how intentional that was. Lewis himself, a convert to the Church of England who wrote several nonfiction books on religion, claimed that whatever symbols appear in the books crept in almost by accident. He didn't set out to teach Christian theology, he says; these were just the symbols floating about in his imagination.

Well, fair enough, but it was also Lewis who said that we moderns had to relearn religion from scratch, and that myths were the way to do it. And it was also Lewis who said that the best myths to teach the basics of religious instruction were pagan myths, fairy tales... stories just like those of Narnia.

So, at the very least, it's a tidy coincidence that the same man who said that we need new myths to teach the Christian religion also wrote new myths which happen to teach the Christian religion. No?

Prince Caspian is above all a tale of faith. The four adolescent heroes of the first book/film return to Narnia after a year away, only to find that many hundreds of years have passed in Narnia-time. Narnia itself has been conquered by the evil human Telmarines, and the children's exploits are now the stuff of myth. Some believe, and others do not.

Even once the children return as prophesied, the real hero, Aslan, does not. In the first film, Aslan is obviously Christ. He sacrifices himself for the good of others, is killed, and then rises from the dead. The film, in case it wasn't obvious, sets the scene on a kind of otherworldly Golgotha. Now, hundreds of years later, Aslan is the Christ not of the Passion story but of the Christian faith. He is absent from the stage, and all but the few faithful doubt he even exists anymore. Even three of the four children doubt, with only little Lucy still remaining entirely faithful.

But this is a Christian film: the good guys' dependence on Aslan is absolute. Their plans, from their foolish first assault to their clever second effort, are doomed to failure. Nor do they hasten Aslan's arrival by their efforts at tikkun olam. Not Peter's swordsmanship, and not Susan's archery, but only Lucy's faith brings the true Savior.

C.S. Lewis: claimed that his religious symbolism happened by accident Not just a Christian film, but a Catholic one. At perhaps the most exciting moment in the film, Peter is tempted by the White Witch, the Satanic villain of the first film. Aslan is absent, but the White Witch is summoned in a Satanic ritual, and offers her help. Peter knows she can save Narnia. He is sorely tempted. Evil is real, and powerful. Even if you probably know how this test turns out.

And not just a Catholic film, but a pagan-Catholic one as well. Prince Caspian threw me off at times, because the faith that must be maintained is not just faith in Aslan, but faith in magic as well: in centaurs, gryphons, talking animals, and fauns. Some have complained that the swarthy, accented Telmarines are typically ethnic baddies, but to me they resembled no one so much as corrupt churchmen stamping out the memory of pagan religion. They cut down trees, they work with machines; the heroes are the Earth-people.

This was surely Lewis's intention. In an interview he said that it was necessary "first to make people good pagans, and after that to make them Christians." The grammar of belief is first and foremost, not the object of it. First get children to see that faith is important, that the old stories are true, and that you must hold onto your beliefs no matter what people say. Then apply those lessons to Christian religion. Or, as the contemporary Kabbalist Ohad Ezrachi put it to me, first you have to see that there is a spirit in the tree, the lake, and the sky -- then you can understand they are all one spirit.

This is a fascinating strategy, and I wonder if it works. These days, a lot of people believe in weird myths that have nothing to do with Christianity -- the Secret, Qabalah, gnosticism, the Nation of Islam, Scientology -- and there's no sign that the New Agers are becoming baalei tshuvah for Jesus. Perhaps what these and other movements are tapping into is the unmet desire to believe in myth. Not just spirituality, but gnosticism, in its modern form: occultism, the notion that somewhere out there is indeed a secret power (or powers) that really does exist.

If belief is the Christian mode of myth-making, then interpretation is the dominant Jewish one. Kabbalah (the real, not the marketed, one) is largely about learning how to read texts and the text of the world. Allegory is central, as is allusion, symbol, and multivocality. They believe, but we read deeply.

If so, then perhaps Prince Caspian is a Jewish film, as well as a pagan-Catholic-Christian one. It is, of course, wholly enjoyable just as a fantasy film, and many critics have observed that you have to be eagle-eyed to even get the Christian references. (I may even be looking too closely; at one point, a warrior-mouse discovers that his tail has been cut off, and his fellow mice say they will cut their tails for Aslan. I whispered to my friend Tovah that this was an obvious circumcision reference, but Tovah said I was nuts.)

Lewis's Lucy Might Have Demanded More of Her God: if she had been jewish But the Jewish way is to read deeper. This is why we get accused of lacking organic genius: because we like to take things apart, analyze them, and read into their symbols. From Joseph to Freud, we love to interpret dreams, stories, and myths. Rabbis, mystics, and commentators alike delight in multiple levels of meaning. For better or for worse, we like to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, to see how the magic is done.

At its core, beneath the many layers of meaning which delight this critic, Prince Caspian finally refuses the effort of interpretation. The ultimate question, asked by several characters in the film, is why Aslan waited. Why, given the centuries of suffering and carnage, did he wait for the four English children to come back? If he's omnipotent and loving, why didn't he hear the cries of the faithful, like God heard the cries of the slaves in Egypt?

Aslan does not answer this question. In Liam Neeson's magisterial voice, he simply says that "things do not happen the same way as before." No explanation. God works in mysterious ways. That is all. If Lucy were Jewish, she would demand more of her God. She would bargain for the last ten souls in Sodom, plead for the unfaithful Israelites, and perhaps abandon God if he failed to save the innocent -- in Narnia, or in her own Europe of 1944. But Lucy is not Jewish.

As for me, I find myself caught in the crack between wanting to believe, with her emunah shleimah, her perfect faith, and being unable to accept into my heart an Aslan who consigns thousands of Narnians to death. I believe in the magic of the wood. I love the God that is with me now. But I cannot take the next step and embrace the myths of religion which Lewis thought were so central. If there is an Aslan, I hope that he can forgive me.

Like far too many of us, I know a woman who was sexually abused as a child. A Catholic then, when she confessed to her Midwestern family priest, in his way he abused her even more. She was in part responsible, he told her. She was guilty. This, apparently, is what the Church had taught him, and taught him to teach her. She, like all of us, was a sinner.

She was a child.

I’ve been a Catholic my entire life. I’ve sung in the choirs. I’ve taught Catechism to children. I’ve volunteered. I’ve had the honor of delivering a wedding sermon. (And the dishonor of having a priest make a pass at me.)

Thomas Merton I’d also say I’m a particularly, and peculiar, American Catholic. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a churchgoer who doesn’t actually believe in God. Yet in my way I’ve always been a Catholic apologist. And like those of many liberal Catholics, my apologies hardly ever refer to Rome. Though skeptical of the Utopian impulse behind pacifism, I'm drawn to the active nonviolence of converts Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, who both, for what it’s worth, had complicated sex lives as far as the Church is concerned. As a monk, Merton carried on a love affair with student nurse Margie Smith. Dorothy Day, a single mother, had an abortion before her conversion. Writer Flannery O’Connor shapes my idea of prophecy more than Pope John Paul II ever did (yet it’s true that I was enamored of the robust, yet humble, pope of my childhood). Academic and cultural critic Gary Wills translates the Gospels in a way that clarifies why I am a Catholic by making the radical stories that have shaped my religious life immediately recognizable, yet somehow refreshing and newly inspiring.

Flannery O'Connor Paul Elie, through both his biography of Merton, Day, and O’Connor, and essays in Commonweal and the Atlantic, has shown just how distinct American Catholicism is and argued that “much of what is best in the Catholic tradition has arisen in the shadow” of the papacy, “and much of what is worst has occurred when popes overplayed their role.” In his report on the accession of Benedict, Elie, who suggests the current pope may be too old to “catch up on the work” required to school himself in the American experience, concludes that American Catholics “ought to turn away from the question of what the pope believes and consider just what it is that we believe – turning our attention from Rome at long last and back to the world in which the real religious dramas of our time are taking place.” This is hardly what we’ve seen since Benedict arrived. The religious drama has been entirely about the apologies coming from Rome.

Which brings me back to my friend and her religious drama, undeniably a tragedy. There was a time when I tried to apologize for that priest – and really all of Catholicism – by pointing to my Catholic heroes and the liberal religious life I’d carved out for myself. For every scandal there was a Catholic Workers House of Hospitality feeding and giving shelter to the poor. For every priestly sin, a story by Flannery O’Connor. For every hateful word raised against her gay sister, and every condemnation for the abortions sought by her close friends, I had a translation from the New Testament rebutting it all with Jesus’ radical love. My Jesuit church, which had opposed the war from the beginning, represented all that was good about Catholicism. My priests, like me, hardly ever talked about personal sin. And in opening our doors to gays and lesbians we’d had our back turned on Rome for years.

But none of this means anything to her. She’s not only turned her back on Rome, she’s shut the door angrily on Catholicism. And I cannot blame her. I often wonder why, in her defense, I haven’t done the same thing.

Pope Benedict For, as much as I’d like to believe that Pope Benedict’s current U.S. trip and his apparent shame over the sexual abuse by priests could set things right and heal the kinds of wounds he keeps talking about, so long as the Church affirms the rightness and faithfulness of its position against sex, against women, against gays and lesbians, and so long as the Church defends a shrinking male priesthood, his apologies, like mine, will always be of the wrong kind delivered with the wrong purpose. He wants to bring her back to a Church that refuses to properly value her. (And of course she’s not alone in being undervalued.)

Catholicism teaches that you can’t truly be reconciled with God or your fellow man (or, of course, woman, in this and so many cases), without confessing your sins completely and in good faith. You must commit never to sin again.

Still, it seems sinful simply to apologize and then expect those who have turned away from the Church to return or, for that matter, even to take your apology seriously when the sinning persists. Many of the abused have gathered their strength and moved on and away. And again, I can’t blame them. As for those of us who remain, we have to stop simply apologizing – perhaps even stop accepting apologies as enough – and like Elie suggests, consider just what it is that we believe and then act on it to make American Catholicism better and truly faithful.

Related: Benedict XVI is "Deeply Ashamed" of the Serial-Rapist Priests He Shielded from Justice, Pope Benedict Loves Jewish Pie

Pope Benedict Says: "Can I get some Jewish pizza with this wine?" The relationship between Pope Benedict and the Jews has been tumultuous, to say the least. Luckily, recent evidence shows that Pope Benedict has discovered his own personal affinity for the Jewish people, thanks to their pastries.

Wilma Limentani, owner of a kosher bakery near the Vatican, has received a thank you note from Catholicism’s highest authorities, informing her that Joey Ratz himself is a huge fan of her biscotti and her nut-and-raisin concoction called “Jewish pizza.”

Just don’t tell him it’s made with the blood of Christian babies – kidding! His Holiness was introduced to Limentani's delectable confections by his nice Jewish doctor.

Related: Arabs Hot for Israeli Porn

Spin The Wheel: and see what you get!According to a recent survey of over 35,000 Americans, more than a quarter of adults in the United States "have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion." Not only that, but if you count shifts from one Protestant denomination to another, a whopping 44 percent of Americans have flip-flopped on religion. It seems that the grass is always greener, even when it comes to God. Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the survey revealed that Americans are very likely to leave the faith in which they were brought up, and that "the group with the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated."

The Catholic Church is experiencing the greatest net losses: While one in three Americans was raised in a Catholic home, less than one in four describes him or herself as Catholic. These losses would have been even greater if not for the influx of immigration from Catholic countries in Latin and South America.

The group experiencing the greatest growth in numbers included Americans who have no religious affiliations: Now 16.1% of the population. Interestingly, only one-quarter of those in this group describe themselves as atheist or agnostic: The majority of the unaffiliated population simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular."

Other survey highlights:

• Nearly half of Hindus in the U.S., one-third of Jews and a quarter of Buddhists have obtained post-graduate education, compared with only about one in ten members of the adult population overall. Hindus and Jews are also much more likely than other groups to report high income levels.

• Men are significantly more likely than women to claim no religious affiliation. Nearly one in five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13% of women.

• Among people who are married, nearly four in ten (37%) are married to a spouse with a different religious affiliation. (This figure includes Protestants who are married to another Protestant from a different denominational family, such as a Baptist who is married to a Methodist.) Hindus and Mormons are the most likely to be married (78% and 71%, respectively) and to be married to someone of the same religion (90% and 83%, respectively).

• Of all the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States, black Americans are the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation. Even among those blacks who are unaffiliated, three in four belong to the "religious unaffiliated" category (that is, they say that religion is either somewhat or very important in their lives), compared with slightly more than one-third of the unaffiliated population overall.

Check out the rest of the results at the Pew Forum website.

Not kosher: Valentine the heart-spotted pigLast week, when I posted Alex the Videographer’s call for love, a user named Levitt8 replied “Tell me again why a Jew needs a date on St. Valentine's Day?” True, the holiday is named after an early Catholic martyr – but the “saint” part has really disappeared from the holiday. Beliefnet explains that Vatican II took the day back from St. Val because the Church was “embarrassed by the presence of saints on its calendar who might never have existed” (you know, because religious leaders around the world tend to come down hard on stuff that defies the historical record.) So even though it’s named after a Christian figure, literally no one celebrates it as a religious holiday any more.

Some Jews have another reason for staying away from the holiday: In 1349, it was the occasion of a massive pogrom in Strasbourg. So if you prefer holding 648-year-old grudges to eating candy and sharing warm feelings with your loved ones, then yes, a boycott might be in order.

Keep in mind, though, that no less a Jewish authority than Shmuley Boteach thinks you should celebrate Valentine’s Day. Boteach suggests showing up at your sweetie’s house wrapped in a bow. For the record, when I was in high school a boy actually did this to my best friend, and she was VERY impressed. It might not work on women over the age of 15, though.

The Pope: An ancient prayer is causing modern controversy A few years ago he pissed off Muslims around the world when he suggested that Islam was a religion of the sword. Today, Pope Benedict XVI has enraged the rest of the monotheistic family.

In a move that must have given both Ann Coulter and Mel Gibson hard-ons, the Pope has re-sanctioned an ancient Good Friday prayer which calls on God to illuminate the hearts of the Jews that they might recognize their savior Jesus Christ. To his credit, the Pope did choose to remove passages from the ancient Latin rite which referred to Jewish "blindness" and the need to "remove the veil from their hearts."

To the surprise of nobody, Jewish groups have got their knickers in a twist. The Italian Rabbinical Assembly has suspended its decades-long dialogue with the Church. And the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement which read:

"While we appreciate that some of the deprecatory language has been removed ... we are deeply troubled and disappointed that the framework and intention to petition God for Jews to accept Jesus as Lord was kept intact."

Walter Kasper, the Cardinal in charge of the Catholic Church's relations with Jews, has vigorously defended the Pope's decision. Kasper (who happens to be German) is perplexed by Jewish touchiness:

"I must say that I don't understand why Jews cannot accept that we can make use of our freedom to formulate our prayers. We think that reasonably this prayer cannot be an obstacle to dialogue because it reflects the faith of the Church and, furthermore, Jews have prayers in their liturgical texts that we Catholics don't like."

To those of us less naive about Jewish sensitivities, it is obvious that reintroducing this prayer into the liturgy would reopen old wounds. It harkens us back to a time when Christians looked at Jews the way Tom Cruise looks at a car accident.

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I’ve been reading Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy, and my favorite part so far is in the introduction, when she writes:No Shit: Patron Saint of Dentistry

I am not sorry to have been a Catholic, first of all for the practical reasons. It gave me a certain knowledge of Latin language and of the saints and their stories which not everyone is lucky enough to have. Latin, when I came to study it was easy for me and attractive, too, like an old friend, as for the saints, it is extremely useful to know them and the manner of their matyrdom when you are looking at Italian painting, to know, for instance, that a tooth is the emblem for Saint Apollonia, patron of dentistry, and that Saint Agnes is shown with a lamb, always, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria with a wheel…Having to learn a little theology as an adult in order to understand a poem of Donne or Crashaw is like being taught the Bible as Great Literature in a college humanities course, it does not stick to the ribs.

It’s true, I think, that learning the Bible and other religious lore early on sets you up to have a deeper understanding of all kinds of things, from art to poetry to linguistics. I think my literary analysis skills were honed in my high school Bible classes, where we carefully dissembled every sentence, sought out all kinds of interpretations and learned to understand something in multiple layers. Plus, I’m always the first in my grad school classes to pick up on Biblical references (which are really important in pretty much any text written before 1920).

I’ve been thinking about this stuff in connection with the big Flying Spaghetti Monster uproar. In case you’re not up to date with your flying spaghetti lore, here’s how CNN explains the whole thing:

When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.

FSM: Don't Mess With Pasta

The appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting gives a kind of scholarly imprimatur to a phenomenon that first emerged in 2005, during the debate in Kansas over whether intelligent design should be taught in public school sciences classes.

Supporters of intelligent design hold that the order and complexity of the universe is so great that science alone cannot explain it. The concept's critics see it as faith masquerading as science.

An Oregon State physics graduate named Bobby Henderson stepped into the debate by sending a letter to the Kansas School Board. With tongue in cheek, he purported to speak for 10 million followers of a being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- and demanded equal time for their views.
"We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it," Henderson wrote. As for scientific evidence to the contrary, "what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage."

Full Story

These guys are waging a war against intelligent design, which I fully support (the war against it, not intelligent design itself) but I think they’re missing an opportunity to do some serious iconography. I mean, there should be certain saints that show up only with a certain kind of pasta (rigatoni for some, elbo for another, and angel hair for the highest order of saint).

The thing is, FSM is useful for mocking religious education in a certain way, but at the end of the day FSM doesn’t teach Latin. There are some important skills we get from a religious education, and I think in an honest discussion we own up to that.

Recently a lapsed Catholic friend confessed a serious case of religion envy—for the religion I happened to be born into. “I’ve always had a strong admiration for Judaism,” he told me. “If I had to choose any religion, it would be yours.” Ironically, I had a similar confession to make: I’d always felt the same way about the Catholic Church.

In an age when schoolchildren in the most goyish suburbs learn to sing “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” alongside “Silent Night,” when churches and synagogues engage in interfaith outreach, and where politicians regularly lump sharply contrasting belief systems together under the category of “faith,” it shouldn’t be surprising that religions can seem interchangeable. Especially when your own religion feels a bit lacking. Don’t like fasting on Yom Kippur? Why not try on Catholicism for size? Unhappy with the latest Pope? Drop by your neighborhood synagogue or mosque. But religious values aren’t a Chinese menu, where we can pick two from Column A and three from Column B to suit ourselves. In fact, the better metaphor here would be a delicately balanced house of cards; pull out one from the middle, and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Making Catholics want to be Jews since 1909: Isaiah BerlinAs my friend explained his high regard for Judaism, I realized that he was attracted to certain Jewish cultural traditions but didn’t realize how they fit into a larger philosophical framework. He had two reasons for his high regard for Judaism, beginning with our people’s famous penchant for heterodoxy. Unlike Catholicism, we have no Vatican that issues The Final Word which all Jews must follow. He also admired our tradition of scholarly debate: rabbis carrying on heated discussions long into the night, not to mention Jewish writers and intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt carrying on that tradition in the secular culture. My friend found this refreshing compared with Catholicism, in which the word of God goes directly through the church to its adherents, with no room for questioning.

I found it difficult to recognize the religion he was describing. True, we lack a central authority, and our rabbis don’t hector us from the pulpit like stereotypically stern Irish priests. But then our rabbis don’t need to hector us, as the Jewish laity has more than ably fulfilled that role. Judaism emphasizes faith performed in the context of a community (which is why, in order to pray, you need the presence of ten adult males.) Step outside its accepted norms and you’ve got two choices: subject yourself to an earful about it from family, friends, and strangers, or walk away from the community.

And while there is a lot of debate in religious circles, I wouldn’t necessarily categorize it all as intellectual since it focuses mostly on matters of ritual rather than philosophy. (What’s so intellectual about a debate over whether it’s permissible to put sugar into tea or tea into sugar on Shabbat?) This reflects Judaism’s emphasis on practice over intent—the here-and-now over the metaphysical. Our leaders often find themselves absorbed in such profundities as the proper way to slit the throat of a chicken. In fact, most of our greatest intellectuals (Spinoza, Marx, Freud) were reacting against the grain of our religion, not with it. Compare this to Catholicism, which inspired St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.

Beat that, Judaism: Notre Dame in ParisAnd that’s why, as I told my friend, I’ve long had a secret case of religion envy for Catholicism, with its emphasis on the soul, not rituals. Catholics have the freedom to live their daily lives as they see fit, because Catholicism has few rules governing the banalities of what to eat or what clothes to wear. Also, especially in contrast with Jews, Catholics have a much better knack for pageantry and decoration. Walk into any Catholic cathedral and then a Jewish synagogue; which space is more likely to inspire a state of awe and meditation conducive to prayer? Perhaps the chief source of my Catholic religion envy, though, is the ritual of confession. Imagine it, free therapy! For a Jew, what could be a bigger wet dream?

But as my friend quickly pointed out, Catholicism’s fetishization of the soul can become meaninglessly ritualistic in itself. Catholics can eat shrimp to their heart’s content, but their penalty for breaking the faith’s few key rules is rather extreme: an eternity in hell or a slightly shorter time in purgatory. As for Catholicism’s theatrical pageantry, it’s fun to look at occasionally, but after a while, it can all get a bit tacky, even gruesome. The point is not to inspire individual meditation, but mass conformance to Catholic dogma. And Confession isn’t a bit like therapy. The priests aren’t there to sympathize but merely to help you atone—all in all, a ritual as empty as the rabbi of a synagogue with over a thousand members shaking a congregant’s hand on Shabbat.

That’s when it hit me: Understanding someone else’s religion is like learning a language. You can’t just translate the words one-to-one. Rather, you have to begin by tackling the logic of the whole supporting system underneath.

100% halal: A kosher symbol on a soda bottleIt’s not just a question of Judaism and Catholicism, either. I find it lovely that many Muslims search for the kashrut symbol on non-meat products in American grocery stores because a kosher product is often also halal. Keeping kosher and eating halal, however, are hardly the same thing. In fact, one of the reasons kosher meat is not considered halal is that kashrut is based on the Jewish principles of cleanliness and the ethical treatment of animals. Halal rules incorporate these principles, but they privilege the uniquely Islamic value of submission to God’s will, which is why a prayer affirming the greatness of Allah must be uttered immediately preceding the animal’s slaughter.

Why do we feel the desire to mold unfamiliar religions to fit our own wishes and ideals? Maybe in an era of terrorism and armed conflict in the name of God, we want to comfort ourselves by affirming the notion that deep down we really are all the same. (We are, but our religions aren’t). For some of us, religion envy may be a symptom of a consumer society in which almost every product can be customized to fit each customer’s specific tastes. “Would you like your sandwich on whole wheat, foccacia, rye, white, country Tuscan, country Tuscan whole wheat, or country Tuscan whole wheat low-carb?” “Would you like your religion belief-centered, practice-centered, monotheistic, pantheistic, ritual-heavy, or ritual-lite?”

The more I hashed the matter out with my Catholic friend, the more it became clear that our religion envy came out of sadness, even regret. Just as children idealize their friends’ parents when their own parents seem not to understand them, we too idealized each other’s faiths (and denigrated our own) because of our desire to correct what we saw as the flaws of the religions we’d been born into. Religion envy is a band-aid, but it doesn’t quite fit over the wound.

Inscribed "I had a blast at Benjy's Bar Mitzvah": The pope's kippahFor example, my friend stumped me with the following un-Jewish question about Judaism: “What happens if you don’t go to synagogue? Is that a sin? Does that mean you’re going to hell?” He’d been turned off from Catholicism after being told that skipping church on Sundays was a mortal sin.

But Judaism addresses the subject of hell only in passing, with scant detail. For all Judaism’s rules, our emphasis is not on doing right to receive a reward or avoid a punishment, but on doing right for its own sake. Perhaps the best answer I could come up with was, in true Jewish form, another question: “Does the Pope wear a yarmulke?”

Similarly, in all my questions about Catholicism’s emphasis on spirituality the name “Jesus Christ” never came up. In fact, I was surprised when my friend explained that you can’t be a good Catholic without affirming your belief in Christ as the Son of God who once walked on Earth and died for our sins. “But what if, even if you’re not sure Jesus was divine, you follow all of his teachings to the letter?” I asked. Nope, not good enough. For Catholics, faith in Jesus’ godly status is a prerequisite. I’d been unable see this dogmatic aspect of Catholicism because I was too busy admiring the religion’s spirituality as an antidote for Jewish dogma.

If we must accept the notion that different faiths are indeed fundamentally different, where does that leave those of us who’d like to promote interfaith understanding, particularly now, when we’re so frightened of people who passionately believe things that are antithetical to our own belief systems? A false understanding of how other religions work is just as bad as no understanding. Instead of promoting untruths like “we all believe in the same God, just with different names,” we should approach the faith of the Other with a completely open, almost childlike sense of wonder and bewilderment. In other words, we should be adult enough to say something as juvenile as, “Wow, your god used to think if you eat meat on Fridays you’d go to hell? Interesting, but I don’t understand that at all. Tell me more.”

…As acknowledged by the Pope himself –oops, sorry, by his second-in-command. The whole bungle with the new-old-Latin mass may thus sort itself out by the removal of the prayer for the conversion of the Jews from the Latin missal. So while the criticism of ADL’s Foxman’s reaction to the motu proprio would certainly please most people here at Jewcy, the Catholic writer who characterized his statement as “a mix of ignorance and bellicosity” is going to have an interesting time arguing with himself: as the Pope is infallible, if he says that what he said wasn’t what he should’ve said, what should you believe?

Joe ‘God’s Rottweiler’ Ratzinger, formerly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (itself formerly the Inquisition), and formerly of the Hitler Youth, had recently changed his name to the more innocent-sounding ‘Benedict’, in the hopes no doubt of avoiding suspicions. This did not fool the more astute amongst ourselves –and indeed your most humble servant had placed a bet with a friend, to the effect that Ratzy would manage to elicit a schism part deux before the end of his reign. I must say my heart was warmed by his antics regarding his desired excommunication of all those darn Mexican legislators who recently legalised abortion. While the angelic PR team scrambled to minimise yet another papal blunder, I could only think of how closer to winning my bet His Holiness was getting me.

It was without surprise, then, that I found out this week that my pecuniary interest must take root in my apostatical, nay, heretical origin –for I, dear reader, am a Jew. And Jews, whether they believe in their mistaken religion or not, happen to be a great stumbling block for the rigorous Catholic (some would say more generally Christian) theologian: it seems we cannot reach the so-desired Judgment Day until all those mislead people finally recognise Christ as the true prophet. Hence, as long as there’ll be Jews, there won’t be a party.

And how to tell us best that we should vote for Jesus than in Latin? Liberal Catholics are already shocked, as represented by Jewcy’s own Scott Korb, who noted in his piece on the pope’s latest that “The old Latin prayer for conversion is as offensive now as when it was discarded more than thirty-five years ago.” While we can hope with Scott that this backward turn will only help eventually change the RC Church, what is the time frame going to be for this change to take place? It seems that Catholics individually act according to principles of social justice, openness (yes, I know the limits of the reference in this last link) and modesty that are not always their hierarchy’s. But are they then still Catholics? Being a Roman Catholic seems to imply allegiance to the Pope and the Vatican: “the Second Vatican Council states that all the Pope's teaching should be listened to and accepted.” Hence the following question to my Roman Catholic friends: why not do away with an antiquated, constraining and potentially dangerous ecclesiastical hierarchy?

And just to make sure you didn’t miss on the link…

The Icon Says: Good Luck Understanding this!I’ve begun to notice that a lot of Jews don’t really know anything about Christianity. Which is not to say that we should, but I’m a little surprised that we can live in this “host” culture, be constantly surrounded by Christians, spend our growing up years learning the words to “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” by osmosis… and still not know the basics.   

Oh, you think you do? Then tell me…  

What does “nondenominational really ” mean”? 
Are all Methodists linked by one common umbrella organization? 
Which is freakier, Church of God or Church of Christ? 
Can you define (Christian) Orthodoxy?  

I’ll try to be brief and honest, and I apologize in advance for the fact that I’m going to oversimplify.  In fact I’ll probably offend someone a little.  Brevity and etiquette don’t often go together. So I suggest you use the links I’m offering too. 

For now (and for the sake of dividing these posts), I’m going to split all Christians into two categories:  Protestants (I’m including the Anglican Church here, though many would argue with me) and “the rest”. 

We’ll begin with “the rest” because they came first.

 It started with us, right?: Early Christianity 

Yeah, Christians all trace their roots back to Judaism, to Jesus. But “Christianity” didn’t really start out to be a “religion”.  After Jesus died, a bunch of Jews splintered off so they could talk about how awesome Jesus was… but there were a lot of little sects, and it took a long time for things to get streamlined.  Most of these people still thought of themselves as Jewish, and many Jewish Christians thought Jesus would be right back down to earth. 

It wasn’t until the apostle Paul (who studied with Gamaliel—remember, most of these dudes were Rabbis) started preaching to non-Jewish communities (and basically invented Christian mission) that “Christianity” began to solidify.  Paul brought these first Christians the critical mass they needed by suggesting that there was no need for gentiles to become Jews (and undergo adult circumcision) to become followers of Jesus.  This was all happening shortly following the death of Jesus, in the decades before the destruction of the second temple. 

Then these new Christians wandered around, wrote some stuff down, and waited for Jesus to come back.  This took hundreds of years.  A lot happened in that time, but we can skip ahead now, to 325, to the Council of Nicea. There, for the first time, a unified “Christian” doctrine was established.  It was determined that Jesus was “of the same substance” as God (which is, of course, an absolute theological wall for Jews and Christians).  So now we see the beginnings of “an organized religion.”

(tune in later for The Great Schism!!!   Ooooh!)

I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a perverse interest in nuns. In The Sound of Music my favorite scenes are the ones in the convent, and my favorite song is How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? I once read a mystery series about a former nun turned detective, and whenever nuns are on TV I get really excited. I know that by definition nuns are tres uncool, but I just find them really interesting. Mainly, I think, because I know that I couldn’t pull off the vows of poverty, chastity, enclosure and obedience for more than five minutes (especially not obedience), and it amazes me that anyone really can.
Nuns Are Cool: And They Like to Have Fun, too
Last year I heard an interview with Kenneth Briggs, who wrote a book called Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns in which he talked about why the population of nuns in America shrunk from 185,000 in 1965 to less than 70,000 today. One of the things he points out is that when nuns wanted to make reforms that were sanctioned by Vatican II, they were often shouted down by bishops, priests, and even the Vatican. Women who were prevented from exerting their influence, and so, it seems, the idea of joining a convent became less attractive.

Yesterday the Chicago Tribune published an article about a 33-year-old woman who’s joined the Poor Clare Colettine nuns in Cleveland. There’s lots of discussion of the hardships and trials of being a nun, and of course Sister Christina explains that it’s all really fulfilling and she’s very content with her life, but the whole time I was reading the article I kept thinking about the frum women I know, and how similar their lives can be to the life of a nun.

If you think about it, most ultra-Orthodox women live in poverty, or something very close to poverty, they’re secluded from the secular world, and they’re taught to be obedient. They’re not, of course, chaste. Many of them have more than ten children, but they’re chaste until marriage, and then sex is carefully regulated by the calendar. What’s interesting to me is that while the number of nuns in this country is declining greatly, the number of Orthodox women seems to be growing at a breakneck pace.
Doesn't This Snood: Look Kind of Like a Habit?
Thinking about nuns in comparison to the Ultra-Orthodox women I knew from the neighborhood where I grew up, I have a new respect for both groups. If you’ve ever spent time with either nuns or be-snooded mommies of eleven you know they share an unbreakable earnesty and intensity for all things religious. It can be intimidating, but even when you disagree with them (and I think it’s clear that I disagree with both groups on a number of matters) it’s hard not to appreciate just how incredible their lives are.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine a place for irreverent and inappropriate me in a convent or in Boro Park. I wonder if there’s a middle ground for people like me…

Often, I find myself sneering at Christians in a way that would be completely intolerable were my aim squared at any other cultural group. Making your kids pay for college themselves? Goyish. Not serving food with drinks? Goyish. Intelligent design? Goyish. Wal-Mart? Goyish to the Nth. I call it like I see it.

“That’s just an old Lenny Bruce routine,” says my husband, Ben (confirmation name: Paul), whenever I trot out my list. “You know, New York is Jewish; Butte, Montana isn’t.”

“Exactly,” I say, delighted that in the six years we’ve known each other, my husband’s become such an observant Jew.

As Ben has discerned, I’ve turned the red-state/blue-state divide into a goyish/Jewish divide. This makes demographic sense, of course: A high Jewish population is one of the most reliable ways to tell a blue state from a red, and although polling numbers say that 24 percent of American Jews voted for Bush in 2004, I’ve never met a single one of them. Further, while intolerance is generally verboten in my multicultural circles, it’s fine, even encouraged, to lash out at the anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-evolution zombies who have given the past two elections to the worst president in American history. Some call them red-staters; I call them goys.

It’s so easy to take potshots, in the same way it’s easy to be against any large corporation—with a sort of screw-the-powerful thumb against my nose. It almost feels like a victimless crime. Who cares if I sneer at the foodways and folkways of the goyish hegemony? If I snigger “how goyish,” after a friend mentions attending a wedding where guests had to pay for their drinks? If I never watch a rerun of 7th Heaven?

***

But of all the Jews I know, really, I should know better.

Jew Don't Believe In This Kind of Heaven: Reverend Camden and familyMy husband comes from a family of deeply faithful Christians—Bush-voters, in fact, and red-staters in all but the zip code—yet they are people I respect, and for whom I feel enormous affection. Meeting them has helped me see why so many capital-C Christians vote the way they do. The Catholic Church is profoundly powerful where Ben grew up, and people really do believe what their priests tell them: that legal abortion is state-sanctioned murder, that faith is the most important quality a leader can have, that integrity is synonymous with belief in God. These Catholics differentiate themselves through their beliefs. They have faith in their religious destiny. To diminish their way of life as stupid and tacky—goyish—is to be not only cruel to my husband, it is also to be willfully reductive.

Oh, and by the way, not once has any of them given me any shit at all about being Jewish; in fact, they never fail to wish me a happy whatever-Semitic-holiday-it-happens-to-be. They would no sooner make jokes about my coreligionists than they would about their own. At our wedding, Ben’s grandfather toasted us with a hearty “Mazel Tov!”

I cringe, because I am not nearly so good.

***

In my desire to be more accepting of the goyim, to be more tolerant—to be more Christian—I keep bumping up against the fact that Judaism doesn’t seem to want me to. Fundamental to Judaism is the idea that we Jews are distinct, that we are different, that we are chosen—and they are not. There is no separate-but-equal in Judaism. My sincere effort to look at heartfelt belief in Christ (and all the political choices that go along with it) as just another way of marching along in the world is, according to traditional Judaism, intellectually and spiritually baseless.

Listen to the Aleinu: It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to exalt the Creator of the Universe, who has not made us like the nations of the world and has not placed us like the families of the earth; who has not designed our destiny to be like theirs, nor our lot like that of all their multitude.

Throughout Jewish history, we have set ourselves apart. We have dressed differently, kept different days holy, married only one another. Now, however, the division between my Jewish life and that of my Christian neighbors is so slim it’s almost invisible. How do I separate myself? By craving matzah ball soup when I have a cold? By a lingering reluctance to visit Germany?

Separate from the Nations: The world's oldest ghetto, in Venice, ItalyThe truth is, I am not nearly as distinct as my religion asks me to be.

There is something very Jewish in me that makes me want to separate myself, but I can only express that separation through scorn. Fundamentally, how am I different from the goyish masses? How am I Jewish if I am not a pro-choice blue-stater, a latte drinker, a Times reader, a person with a master’s degree in the arts of all ludicrous things? I have no other way to distinguish myself, although I know that this is not enough.

Since our marriage, my husband has found it easy to become “Jewy,” (his word)—to attend synagogue, to keep a vegetarian-kosher home, to subscribe to Tikkun. Of course he’s found it easy. The tradition he grew up with allows him a certain commonality with Jews; a post-Vatican II child, he grew up with the Old Testament and never learned to blame the Jews for the crucifixion. He has no cultural insecurity or religious mandate to keep him from attending a Christmas mass with his mother a day after Shabbos services with me.

But I will never feel equally comfortable with my Christmas presents, my candy canes, and my mealtime grace, and although I’d love to say, “Sure, I’ll check out mass with your mom,” the thought gives me the creeps. I love Ben’s family, and I’ve learned to respect their cultural choices—even their votes for Bush—but the Jew in me will never let me be too catholic in what I wholeheartedly accept.

***

Related in Jewcy: Why we changed the headline. Also, Lauren Grodstein considers Monica Lewinsky in Jewess Studies

This one's almost too easy. If you've ever run the sink over a Quaker rice cake, you'll get an idea of the kind of mulchification that happens to Andrew Sullivan's intellectual integrity when he starts writing like this:

My sense of the fallibility of human reason and the ineffability of God's will leads me not to dismiss these "extremists" as fools or idiots, but to wonder what they have known that I may not know, even as I worry about their potential for evil as well as good (a potential we all have, including you and me).

And does he likewise wonder with such equanimity what elusive truth is known by those water-boarders at Guantanamo Bay? Surely they must believe their wager with the possibility of another attack on American soil is at least as urgent as the more famous one advanced by Blaise Pascal? Or can Andrew summon a stronger term than "fool" or "idiot" to describe the "extremist" state torturers he nobly denounces in between those fatuous photographs of leaves turning and beach-scapes awaiting Jesus' footprints?

Taste the full flavor of warmed-over Catholic belief. God's will has, for some undisclosed reason, addled so many of his "flock" that they can advocate the preaching of fairy tales in science class, picket the funerals of homosexuals, sign off on genocide (when it's of the right people), talk as if those who aren't their co-religionists are morally inferior and damned to hell -- and the worst this gets out of Sullivan is a head-scratching bewilderment. The Lord sure does work in mysterious ways. Don't judge: Leibniz thought so, and he invented the calculus!

Thanks, but I prefer Spinoza. And the grand achievements of true believers had everything to do with human ingenuity and the triumph of reason and nothing at all to do with the ontology of God. (Does any of us think, say, Martin Luther King would have been more comfortable with segregation and bigotry had the Rev. honorific not shared equal place with the Dr.?)

You may say that faith helps motivate people to do extraordinary things, but the divine spark is fungible with, and quite indistinguishable from, the neurological kind. It could be the love of a good woman, an early role model whose influence becomes a lifelong inner daimon, or anything else that forces us to struggle for the improvement of the species (and there's a word you won't find in either Testament). To exalt religion as prime mover of anything but convenient self-deception is to be remarkably... parochial.

The deep and many failures of George Bush's certainty have truly humbled the primus inter pares of journo-bloggers. Sullivan's more in touch in with his relativist side now. He's found "doubt" and made peace with the huggable Joseph Ratzinger. He's died for conservatism's sins, with Michael Oakeshott wielding the funeral censer. In his book, see...

I'm having a tricky time with this Op-Ed in the Jerusalem Post, about how the Catholic Church (and the pope)   "came out publicly against Saddam's execution" and is henceforth evil.  It's just a really stupid article, and I wonder how other people are reacting to it.  Here's a fabulous line of prose from the piece:

Did anyone seriously believe that God was going to welcome this baby-killer into heaven rather than placing him in hell? Why would virtuous and righteous men like John Paul and Benedict make such outrageous mistakes?

Umm....  the point is that we don't know what God is up to.  And the Church, in particular, believes in forgiveness for all.  Even baby-killers.  Wacky though it may seem to us. 

And refusing to support the state-sanctioned killing of someone evil doesn't mean you support the evil, it only means you don't support killing people (overlooking a history of inquisitions and so forth).

Now, I'm no fan of Saddam, but I'm strongly, consistently opposed to execution, and the death penalty in all cases. I know people have a hard time with this, but I just can't (no matter how guilty a person may be) get my brain around killing people who killed people.... especially if you're a reasoned nation or multinational court.  I don't see what purpose the killing serves in any moral sense (politics being another issue).

I'm not saying that I wouldn't personally shoot you in the face if you killed someone I love.  But I'm not reasonable.  I'm what we call a flawed human being.  And though I might have killed Saddam myself, I'm opposed to goivernments making the same mistakes human beings make.  Two wrongs don't make a right, and all that.

So I guess that means I "refuse to hate evil" too. 

And I wonder if people would like to share their "Jewish responses" the the death penalty?  And  I would love to hear from someone wha, as a general rule, opposes the death penalty, but supports it in this case.

Because that is something I have a hard time understanding. But I want to.