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Scripture readings, from the Tanak or Hebrew Bible:

                                   Song of Songs 6: 4-12: The bridegroom speaks: "You are beautiful, my dearest, as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem.  Turn your eyes away from me; they dazzle me.  Your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead; your teeth are like a flock of ewes come up fresh from the dipping, each ewe has twins and none has lost a lamb.  Your parted lips behind your veil are like a pomegranate cut open.  There may be sixty princesses, eighty concubines, and young women past counting, but there is one alone, my dove, my perfect one, her mother's only child, devoted to the mother who bore her; young girls see her and call her happy, princesses and concubines praise her.  Who is this that looks out like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as the starry heavens?  I went down to a garden of nut trees to look at the rushes by the stream to see if the vine had budded or the pomegranates were in flower.  I did not know myself; she made me feel more than a prince reigning over the myriads of his people."

                                 Ruth 1: 16-18: Ruth says to Naomi:  "'Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay.  Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.  Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.'"

Opening Hymn: #630 (Blue Hymnal): "Light One Candle to Watch for Messiah"

It’s our wedding day.  I'm 50 years old, and I'm getting married.  Our friends and family have found seats in the plain Quaker meetinghouse, and the chuppah--the large, hand-painted square of cloth supported at each corner by a pole held by one of our four sisters and brothers, waits for us to gather for the ceremony beneath it.  Christian tradition calls for Barbara to make a grand entrance as she comes down the aisle; Jewish tradition would call for her to circle me seven times early in the ceremony.   But marrying as Christian and Jew, we have sought to marry our traditions as well as each other, and so we waltz down the aisle together, turning and turning, while a former student plays a beautiful melody on her violin from the balcony above. 

And that’s how it’s been, these first seven years together--not only figuring out how to be together as male and female (hard enough!) but as Christian and Jew as well.  But not all our compromises have been so easy to reach.  In fact, often what has been most rewarding is not trying to find a “middle ground” between our traditions, beliefs, and customs, but staying true to our differences, sharing them, and being challenged by them to deepen our own tradition.  We turn and turn, threatening at times to fly apart, but we don't if we each keep an arm around the other.

Take Shabbat, Hebrew for Sabbath.  Shabbat begins for Jews at sunset on Fridays, and ends a little over 24 hours later when the first three stars are visible on Saturday evening.  For many Jews, Shabbat is still a weekly religious holiday to be taken quite seriously.  More Orthodox Jews will usually refrain from doing any work on Shabbat, including driving (many walk to synagogue services), cooking, and perhaps even turning on lights--though it's considered a good day to study scripture or start a new baby.  Many other Jews, including Barbara, follow fewer such customs.  But they share a belief that Shabbat is a sacred time, a day set apart from the ordinary week and its concerns, no matter how they observe that sacred separateness. 

I like this, and when Barbara and I light the two Sabbath candles Friday night at home and wish each other “Shabbat Shalom” (peace of the Sabbath to you), and sing the blessings over the challah (bread) and wine, it calls me to slow down and think about what matters.  It has also reclaimed for me some of the feeling I used to have for Sundays when I was growing up in the 1950’s--going to Sunday School and church, gathering as a family for Sunday dinner in the early afternoon, and relaxing (in those days, most stores were still closed on Sundays). 

It may seem obvious, but I would not have renewed my interest in a ritual day of rest if Barbara weren’t only Jewish but also an observant Jew.   And I think she's even become “more Jewish” over the years we’ve been together.  She grew up in the Reform movement of Judaism and currently defines herself as a Reconstructionist Jew, a branch that emphasizes finding the essence of tradition and expressing it in a modern context; this movement began the practice of having a bat mitzvah service to welcome girls to Jewish adulthood as well as a bar mitzvah service for boys.  But she also studies Torah on Friday mornings and Pirkei Avot (sayings of the fathers) on Saturday afternoons at a nearby Orthodox synagogue.  (I might add that when she goes to study with others who are Orthodox, she changes clothes to something more modest--a skirt down to her ankles, a loose-fitting blouse, sometimes a shawl, and her kippah (prayer hat); I always have to smile to see her go out the door, as to me she looks even more beautiful than usual, and I can't imagine she won't be at least a little distracting to the men.)  Barbara also sometimes leads worship services, went to Israel last fall and is going again this week, is part of a Jewish-Muslim women’s potluck and dialogue group, and is active in trying to find some lasting solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.  Her faith journey is her own but also is a gift to me and our marriage.

I attend a largely gay, lesbian and transgender church, Spirit of the Lakes, but Barbara and I have been active members of a neighborhood synagogue called Mayim Rabim for some years.  This doesn’t mean I’m also Jewish (as my mom, may her memory be for a blessing, used to fear I would become).  In fact there are some important ways in which I, as a non-Jew, do not participate in services, even though I've been welcomed graciously by the community: I would not be called up to read from the Torah on Saturday mornings, for example, and many might not count me as part of a minyan (the minimum of 10 Jews needed to say certain prayers).  Barbara feels I should not say the Shema or the Kaddish, which for centuries have been central to Jewish identity.   (If, however, God forbid, she should die first, I can, as has been tradition for centuries, chant the Shema in her ear while she passes.) 

Ironically, given some of the gender rules in more traditional congregations, I can sometimes participate in a Jewish service in ways she cannot: in both Riga (Latvia) and Marrakech (Morocco), I sat on the main floor of the old synagogues with the men for High Holiday services, while Barbara was up in the women’s balcony behind a screen, her view obscured--my maleness temporarily trumping my goyishness.  Sometimes I can help by not participating: during High Holiday services, other non-Jewish spouses and I often sit at the greeting table so Jewish members can be in the services.

While some aspects of observance are appropriately closed to me, I have still come to experience and appreciate more about Judaism.  There are melodies I find particularly beautiful, and I find myself humming them at unlikely moments.  I appreciate the emphasis on learning, particularly the encouragement Jewish tradition gives for wrestling with scripture--or even, at times, like Jacob, with God.  I recall one Simchat Torah, a holiday for celebrating the giving of the Torah to the Jews at Mt. Sinai, when the congregation stood in a large circle facing inward, while carefully holding with gloved hands the Torah scrolls completely unrolled.  We could see the whole story of the People at once (Look!  There’s Passover!  And Jonah!  And David!   And Miriam, dancing by the Red Sea!  And that sad moment when Moses knows he will never make it to the Promised Land with his people.).   I'm so moved by the sheer beauty of the black Hebrew letters on ivory parchment.  Each week we read a particular parsha or Torah portion, so that by Simchat Torah the whole Torah's been read; I like how we then rewind the Torah scrolls and immediately start once again with Bereyshit, the Creation--for learning never ends, and a Jew ought to read the Torah without end.

Barbara and I don’t keep a kosher kitchen, but we like the idea of kashrut: that we are called, even commanded, to be mindful about the spiritual significance of how we consume the earth's resources, and to take care that our consumption does not harm others.  During the Friday night service celebrating the arrival of Shabbat I like standing to welcome the Shekinah, or feminine aspect of God, the Sabbath Bride.  I like the attention to the memory and naming aloud of those who’ve gone before, in traditions such as reciting the Kaddish (or mourners’ prayer) at each service for those who’ve recently lost someone or are celebrating a yahrzeit (the anniversary of the death of a loved one).  I like going to bar and bat mitzvahs when thoughtful Jewish girls or boys become adult members of the Jewish community, as we'll do this spring for our niece in Philadelphia.  I like the havdalah ceremony at the end of the Sabbath on Saturday evening, when we reluctantly let go of our day of sacred time to return to ordinary life, the smell of spices and haunting melodies in the air.

I’ve learned a lot about Judaism itself, but also how Jewish my own Christianity is, and what that might have meant in the life and words of Jesus.  I see Jesus, in part but importantly, as a Jewish rabbi and prophet, and aspects of my "Christian" tradition make more sense and are richer in that context.  Bible verses, prayers, and commandments I once assumed were Christian I come across in the Torah or hear, with a start, in Jewish services.  This Lent, once again, we will have people over for a Passover Seder at our home just a few days from Holy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper, when Jesus and his disciples gave new meanings to their own seder of liberation.  (Among other things, this teaches me that communion or mass is not just about personal salvation, but social justice and life abundant as well: the first "communion" was in the context of the central story of the Jewish people, its liberation from slavery and injustice in Egypt.) 

This Jewishness of Christianity shouldn’t surprise me--almost all the early Christians were Jewish--but it does.  Growing up, I think I heard or assumed that Jesus and his followers had pretty much replaced Judaism, or at least reduced its relevance to a collection of the more dramatically interesting Bible stories for Sunday School.  Jesus’ God was loving and offered us grace, while Moses’ God seemed angry, judgmental, occasionally homicidal, and rule-bound.  Jesus seemed to be a Christian, hardly a Jew at all.  Part of what being married to an observant Jew has involved is my having to think much more deeply and critically about such assumptions--not least because they've meant persecution and death for Jewish people, but also because I'd misunderstood my own faith.  Unfortunately, I’m not the only Christian to make that mistake.  

Which brings me to some thoughts on why the sharing of our traditions and faiths for Barbara and me can never really be symmetrical in the way it might were one of us Buddhist or Hindu.  I am simply much more active in Barbara’s Judaism than Barbara is, or can be, in my Christianity.  Part of this is theological: I can accept Judaism and still be Christian, while Barbara can’t really be an observant Jew and accept Christianity.  Jesus might be one of her top ten rabbis of all time, but he’s not a uniquely compelling or transparent revelation of the love and justice for which we are created.  He is not the Messiah for whom Jews still prepare by working for a world that would deserve him (I’ve learned that Jews don’t just wait for Moshiach, but must engage in tikkun olam, repair of the world).

But there’s another important obstacle to a more reciprocal participation in each other’s faith traditions.  While Barbara’s faith is the source, the context, the basis for mine, mine has too often rejected, scorned, and persecuted hers.   As I mentioned, we look forward to having people over for our annual Passover Seder.  We will once again retell the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery to freedom, and the other stories of freedom and liberation we are in the midst of today.  But there’s always a part of Barbara that becomes vaguely nervous around Easter, because that’s the time when historically Jews were particularly likely to be persecuted, even killed.  She doesn’t really think someone’s going to get her (though Mel Gibson’s new film isn’t reassuring her), but the history of Christian persecution of the Jews is so many centuries old, and the Holocaust so recent (I was born as it ended), that it’s simply not realistic for her to feel drawn to or even comfortable participating in my tradition in the same way I am in hers.  She does sometimes come to church with me, particularly on special or family occasions--but it’s because she loves me and worries if I am going alone, rather than because she can feel there’s something there for her.

The year after we married we spent half a year in Lithuania on a Fulbright fellowship.  We lived in the capital, Vilnius, once an important center of Jewish life and Yiddish culture.  But during the Holocaust, about 95% of Lithuania’s Jews were killed.  While I was teaching Women’s Studies at the university there, Barbara was spending part of her time working with the remnants of the Jewish community.  I would walk to my classes through the part of the old city that had been the ghetto into which the city’s Jews were herded in the final days.  When we walked down those streets together, we were not on the same walk, because Barbara would have been one of those Jews. 

In January we took the train down through neighboring Poland.  We walked through the huge Jewish cemetery near the Warsaw ghetto, now overgrown with too few left to tend it.  We took the bus to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious concentration camps; perhaps it was my imagination, but after the driver greeted me when I got on he seemed to look right through Barbara.  I realized I could "pass" for Polish and she could not.  It was cold and foggy in the camp, with few visitors.  At one point we got separated, and I was alone.  For a moment it felt like time shifted, and it could have been 1944 once again.  I felt a rising uneasiness, even panic.  I wanted to find her, reassure myself.  I'd been walking through rooms heaped with suitcases, or shoes, or hair, or tallitot (prayer shawls), and it was absolutely quiet and still.  I felt a prayer in me when Barbara finally stepped out of the fog.  To repeat: Barbara could have been one of those Jews. 

Part of the value of a liberal arts education is that we understand better the historical and cultural contexts that shape our lives and within which we make our choices.  Barbara and I can't really have a "private" marriage inside a bubble of love, or solve centuries of Jewish-Christian conflict by ourselves.  We can't simply say "I'll do Passover if you'll do Easter."  Or worse: "Let's not argue about it...they're really just the same."

We bring a host of different stories, families, ghosts, and histories to our midlife romance.  Sometimes that's a burden, but often it's a gift, particularly when we discover the richness in what the other brings.  We lose that when we hope to change the other to be what would be easiest and most comfortable for us to bear.  Sometimes it would be nice if Barbara came to church with me more often.  But I suspect she'd never be more than a half-hearted Christian, while she makes an awfully good Jew.  I think that's what I prefer, and fortunately, Baruch Hashem (praise the Holy Name), that's what I've got.

Closing Hymn: Blue Hymnal, #779: "You Who Dwell in the Shelter of the Lord (On Eagle's Wings")

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