I admit I only read David Brooks’s most recent confessional after reading Mark Oppenheimer’s response in Arc. I have read similar essays by Brooks in the past, tracing his “journey” from agnostic to believer. In his latest missive, he continues his syncretistic tacking between Judaism and Christianity but confesses to aligning himself with “the whole shebang.” I respond, not because I think Brooks’s journey is particularly unique, but because I think Oppenheimer’s response raises important questions about Judaism’s relationship to Christianity.
Brooks, as I read Oppenheimer, is not the subject of this inquiry as much as an occasion for it. I am not defending Brooks or maligning him. As I see it, Brooks’s position is simply the product of a man in post–New Age America, a man in search of meaning through the lens of the Judaism of his birth and the discovered Christianity of his culture. I use the term “New Age” descriptively and not judgmentally, as Oppenheimer seems to do. That said, I do find it ironic that the once–über progressive New Age is now the provenance of right-leaning punditry. What would Ram Dass think? For Oppenheimer, Brooks’s “New Age” embrace of Christianity reads as an extension of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. But of course, James was a product of his own time, for which we could also cite examples from Rufus Jones to Evelyn Underhill to Aldous Huxley and all the way to Houston Smith. A century later, we’re still grappling with these issues, and justifiably so.
To my mind, there is little new here. Yet this may be a moment to reconsider where we are. Jews have seriously engaged Christianity, and Christians have seriously engaged Judaism, from the rise of the Jesus movement in the first century to the present. Historians may ask when Christianity and Judaism finally emerged as two distinctive religions, but history is filled with examples of Jews and Christians who chose to adopt elements of both identities, whether fully or in part. Oppenheimer writes as if Brooks is an outlier. History and scholarship suggest otherwise.
I do find it ironic that the once–über progressive New Age is now the provenance of right-leaning punditry. What would Ram Dass think?
Among Christians, some tried to excise Judaism completely—from Marcion in the second century, widely dismissed as heretical, to more mainstream twentieth-century German theologians such as Adolph Harnack. And yes, as Oppenheimer notes, Nazis utilized a form of Marcionism. But if Oppenheimer wants to draw such categorical distinctions between Judaism and Christianity, why wouldn’t he actually support the Marcionite approach? If one can either belong to the former or the latter, why does the former need to be part of the latter? Why would one need an Old Testament on Oppenheimer’s reading?
The mainstream Christian position became defined by a sense of the need to read Jewish scriptures alongside the New Testament and to affirm the Jewishness within Christianity. And thus it is perhaps not surprising that some Christians embraced Jews and Judaism as part of their Christian faith, resisting supersessionist replacement theologies. From the twentieth century, we might cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who paid for his anti-supersessionist argument with his life, as well as Paul Van Buren’s dual-covenant theology.
Among Jews, Oppenheimer is not alone in asserting that there is no affinity whatsoever between Judaism and Christianity. Jewish thinkers such as Leo Strauss in his Philosophy and Law and Trudy Weiss-Rosmarin in her Judaism and Christianity: The Differences made this categorical distinction. Weiss-Rosmarin wrote, “There is no common religious ground which Judaism and Christianity can share, after the Jewish legacy appropriated by Christianity has been distorted beyond recognition of its Jewish origins.” And Strauss famously said, “There is no reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity; Judaism is the anti-Christian principle, pure and simple.”
But there is hardly any consensus on either of these proclamations, even among Jewish thinkers and historians. Take Daniel Boyarin in his books Border Lines: The Partition of Judeao-Christianity; A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity; Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism; and, most recently, The Jewish Gospel; or Annette Yoshiko Reed’s Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism. All of these books show how history complicates the abstract categorial distinctions made by Strauss, Weiss-Rosmarin, and others. I have made my modest contribution to these topics in my books Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity and the Construction of Modern Judaism and The Bible, The Talmud and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Commentary the Gospel, and in my essay “Loving Judaism though Christianity: The Cases of Oswald Rufeisen (Brother Daniel) and Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik.”
Whether or not one agrees with Brooks, it remains that the very question that he raises stands at the center of constructions of modern Judaism, as Susannah Heschel shows in her Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus.
So, what is really at stake here? Oppenheimer’s criticism is fair. In my view, however, his argument lacks the historical context to really get to the heart of the matter. Whatever might seem obvious about the differences between Judaism and Christianity, when seen in the abstract, often becomes complicated within individual identities. And this is especially the case since halakhic definitions of Jewishness do not hinge on holding any particular beliefs about the messiah. Even some Jews who converted to Christianity have still retained a sense of their “Jewishness” (or even saw Judaism in their Christianity), as in the case of Henrich Heine, who famously claimed, “I was baptized but not converted.” Immanuel Fromann, an Eastern European Jew who became a Christian, wrote a Hebrew commentary to the Gospel of Luke largely based on Kabbalah, and famously recited the Shma on his death bed. Cardinal Jean-Marie (Aron) Lustiger, a converted Jew originally from Poland who became the cardinal of Paris, asked that Kaddish be recited at his funeral in 2007. A rabbi in Paris organized a minyan that met in the plaza outside Notre Dame where the church funeral was held, and Lustiger’s brother recited Kaddish in his memory. In an interview, Lustiger claimed his Christianity was the fulfilment of his Judaism. This became the subject of an entire volume in the journal Modern Theology, in which Jewish scholars weighed in with nuanced responses to Lustiger’s claim.
Cardinal Jean-Marie (Aron) Lustiger, a converted Jew originally from Poland who became the cardinal of Paris, asked that Kaddish be recited at his funeral in 2007.
In 1960, Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew and Zionist, who had become a Carmelite monk known as Brother Daniel and, before his conversion, had saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis while working as a Polish-German translator for the Nazi police, attempted to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. His effort was the occasion for the “Who is a Jew?” case in the Israeli Supreme Court. An immigration officer had asked him, “How do you want to go to Israel— as a missionary? As a tourist?” “I want to go as a Jew” Rufeisen had replied. “But you are a Catholic, a priest, a monk? “Being a priest is my vocation,” Oswald replied. Rufeisen was denied immigration under the Law of Return but immigrated under the “Righteous Gentile” law (although the Israeli rabbinate disagreed with the secular court’s decision that he was not a Jew because he was a Christian). He spent the remainder of his life in the Stella Maris monastery in Haifa, whence he travelled around the country teaching Israeli high school students about Christianity. He was regularly visited by Jews whose lives he had saved during the war.
Even some Jews who did not convert affirmed the connection between the two traditions. One striking example is Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik, the grandson of Hayyim of Volozhin, who never converted but wrote Hebrew commentaries to Mark, Matthew, and Luke. He argued that there were no fundamental differences between Judaism and Chrisitnaity and that anyone who claimed to the contrary was either ignorant of rabbinic literature or lacked a correct understanding of the Gospel. I would also add Hungarian-British scholar Géza Vermes (1924-2013), who only came out as a Jew fairly late in his career, and whose work on the affinities between Judaism and Christianity remain a significant contribution to scholarship.
I raise these examples, and there are many more, to suggest that the questions Brooks’s confession raises are far from clear, and Oppenheimer’s assessment of Brooks lacks a better understanding of something that has gone on for centuries, if not millennia. A series of examples can be found in David Ruderman’s wonderful book Missionaries, Converts and Rabbis, which tells the story of Christian missionary Alexander McCall and the many Jews he worked with. One Jewish convert who worked for McCall, Stanislaus Hoga, once said, “It is vain to think of the conversion of the Jews to Christianity before Christians themselves are converted to Judaism.” Mic drop.
This spring, I am teaching a course, one I have taught many times before, called The Jewish Jesus in Modern Judaism. We begin with Spinoza and continue through myriad rabbis and Jewish scholars who wrote about the Jewish Jesus in Europe, America, and Mandate Palestine/Israel. Two instances are worth mentioning here. First, there was the Jesus controversy between Zionists Ahad Ha’am and Yosef Hayyim Brenner about the admission of Jesus, a Jew from the land of Israel, into the canon of Zionist heroes. Brenner was in favor, Ahad Ha’am was opposed. The second was in America in 1925, when Rabbi Stephen Wise, celebrating the English translation of the 1923 publication of Joseph Klausner’s Hebrew book Jesus: His Life and Teachings, gave a Yom Kippur sermon, at Carnegie Hall, on the Jewish Jesus. The sermon and the backlash among Jews became national news, covered in The New York Times.
I do not think it is inaccurate to state that in nineteenth-century America, almost every Reform rabbi of stature either sermonized or wrote about Jesus: Isaac Mayer Wise, Eli Hirsch, Kaufmann Kohler, Gershon Enelow, and many others. Closer to our time, there have been Samuel Sandmel’s book We Jews and Jesus, Byran Sherwin’s 1994 essay “‘Who Do You Say that I Am?’: A New Jewish View of Jesus,” and Irving (Yitz) Greenberg’s argument, in For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, that Jesus was a “failed” and not a “false” messiah—these works all challenge the notion that, as Oppenheimer states unequivocally, Christianity is, for Jews and Judaism, heresy.
In a slightly different register, one could adduce the more recent case of David Berger’s book The Rebbe, the Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, in which Berger argues that Chabad’s belief that their deceased rebbe was the messiah crossed all lines, making them heretics and thus similar to Christians. It is a strong argument. What was its impact? Almost none. For Chabad is arguably stronger today in the Jewish world than it was when their rebbe was alive.
So what does all this have to do with the Brooks-Oppenheimer debate? Brooks is a professional pundit and has decided to use his punditry to make a case for a spiritual revival in America. He does so as a Jew who has found meaning and even “truth” in Christianity. Okay. Is he a Jew, is he a Christian, or is he some sort of post-Jewish, post Christian, post–New Age, post-liberal spiritual seeker of meaning in a post-secular world? I have no idea, and I must say his assessment is not that interesting to me. But if that is what he is, then he is in the back of a long line—of Jews and Christians.
David Brooks can call himself whatever he wants. And Mark Oppenheimer can police Brooks however he wants. That is America. My issue is only the way Oppenheimer discounts Brooks by engaging in Jewish claims about Christianity that are far more complicated, theologically and historically, than he acknowledges. From the “Jewish Jesus” to the “failed but not false messiah,” from the “Judeo-Christian” to Hasidism’s toying with the barriers that separate the human from the divine in their doctrine of the Zaddik, from Leo Strauss to Elijah Zvi Solovetichik—and I guess to Brooks’ “whole shebang”—Jews and Christians have grappled with their differences and similarities for millennia. There is no reason why this will not, or should not, go on.
Oppenheimer’s intervention here is important, in part because he takes Brooks seriously, albeit critically. But if we are going to have this conversation, which is really an internal Jewish one, let’s have it. I don’t know, for example, if Christians think Brooks is a Christian. As far as I know, he wasn’t baptized. If Heine was “baptized but not converted,” is Brooks then “converted but not baptized”? And what would that mean for Christians?