MY JESUS YEAR

If you didn’t get to hear Benyamin Cohen when he spoke at the JCC during Jewish Book Month, you missed a real treat. On a national book tour to promote his memoir, this delightful young man regaled us with snippets from his yearlong adventure exploring different churches as he sought to reconnect with his own faith. Seems crazy, no? But in his book, MY JESUS YEAR, he reveals his difficulty in finding a spiritual connection to God within the Orthodox religion he grew up in.Born into a family of “rabbinic rock stars,” our hero struggled from his youth with feelings of doubt and apathy concerning his Judaism. The church across the street from his home in Atlanta became the object of his desire as he wondered what life would be like without the endless rules that marked an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. Moving away from home during his college years, he couldn’t shake his nagging attraction to things worldly and Christian, even considering a Big Mac with cheese as a rebellion against his totally kosher upbringing. But Jewish guilt kicked in and instead he visited a smoke-filled bar, exiting quickly after the smoke made him gasp for fresh air. With characteristic self-deprecating humor, he added, “Years later a doctor confirmed what every Jewish male already knows – we’re allergic to everything.” But his desire to look elsewhere for a meaningful religious experience could not be quieted. After obtaining the blessing of a rabbi who required him to wear a press pass and a kepah whenever he visited churches, the author set out on a Woody Allen-like journey. He first found himself in a 15,000 member African-American mega-church where his presence is announced by the bishop (a friend has tipped off the spiritual leader of the church that he will be there) and his face appears on the two huge in-house TV screens as the congregation whoops and hollers, “Bless you, brother!” His inner Jewish voice cries out, “Oh, God, forgive me.” As the four-hour service continues with spirited music, animated dancing and loud preaching, Benyamin wonders whether the Jews at Mt. Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments might have been the first mega-church. For the next year, he visits countless Christian denominations, awed by the different expressions of the original New Testament church that have sprung up in the last two thousand years. Completing his pilgrimage at the very church across the street from his boyhood home that first drew him to Christianity, Benyamin finds that it is a sparsely attended, dying church, hardly worthy of the fantasies it produced years before in his mind. It wasn’t the Garden of Eden after all. His journey completed, like Dorothy before him, he clicks his heels together and whispers, “There’s no place like home.” The prodigal son has satisfied his desire to explore Christianity and life outside the Orthodox confines, and happily resumes his place in the Jewish community. His journey has made him able to be the Jew he always wanted to be,“one who’s jazzed about his Judaism.” Though he chronicles a serious journey of faith, he does so with characteristic Jewish humor and honesty. In our family, there are those who are going the other direction, leaving their liberal Jewish upbringing and embracing a more orthodox Jewish lifestyle including becoming strictly kosher and “shomer Shabbas”(keepers of the Sabbath.) With two of my husband’s post-college single grandchildren opting for kosher living as well as my first cousin’s son and wife (a young couple with their first child) choosing a strictly Orthodox path, I am fascinated with their choices as they seek to find meaningful Jewish lives. The young people in our family who have chosen to be kosher say that it connects them to the generations before them who followed these same restrictions. A friend recently told me that his choice to observe the rules of kashrut is to imbue every act, no matter how insignificant, with a sense of the sacred. For one thing, keeping kosher is not as difficult as it once was. As I’ve learned from reading HADASSAH MAGAZINE, almost every city has restaurants that serve kosher meals. They also are running an ad for a Kosher Cruise (wouldn’t Kruise be better advertising?) during the Passover holidays. You can experience keeping kosher while “kruising “the high seas in a luxury ship. As I finish reading Benyamin Cohen’s book, I realize he never broke the rules of kashrut during his Jesus year. Since there are so many kosher restaurants available, I wonder if I should consider the opposite of what many in my generation did. Instead of keeping a kosher home, what if I only eat in kosher restaurants? It couldn’t hurt!

PRACTICING THE PRESENCE OF GOD

Last night I attended a class for single moms where I am a mentor. The teaching was on the story of Hagar from the Book of Genesis. Rather than concentrating on Sarah in this story of the beginning of the Jewish people, the teacher highlighted Hagar, the Egyptian slave. Hagar had no voice in the way her life was going and no husband to protect or provide for her. After being mistreated by Sarah while she was pregnant, she ran away to the desert. She was alone, pregnant and facing a grim future. But, as the Scriptures relate, the angel of the Lord found her and told her to go back and submit to her mistress as her son would be the father of a great nation. The story is told as if there is nothing unusual about an angel turning up to help someone out of a dire situation. What fascinated me was Hagar’s declaration after this amazing encounter. “You are the God who sees me...Now I have seen the One who sees me.” This simple but profound revelation is the core of a belief in God. At the end of the class I went up to the teacher and told her a truth that close friend Bobi Stern had told me many times before. She had heard a rabbi say that we are all living our lives in the presence of God and if we realized that, we would live our lives differently. This did not mean that God was snooping around, watching to see what we did wrong and then pouncing on us about it. It meant that we are never alone but have a loving God who is there for us in times of joy and sorrow. There’s no question that we would be more at peace and make better choices if we included what I call The God Factor. This is not to say that I don’t often forget about this truth myself when difficult situations arise. Hagar was to make another trip to the wilderness, this time at Sarah’s request. Her son was a threat to Isaac in Sarah’s mind, and she urged Abraham to send her and the boy away. Again, Hagar found herself alone and without food and water. As she put the young Ishmael under a tree to die, she began sobbing. It wasn’t long before the same Angel of the Lord appeared and spoke to her. (Not bad for an Egyptian woman who didn’t even know the God who had revealed Himself to Abraham.) Again, she was comforted and opened her eyes to see a well in front of her that would provide fresh water for her and her son. Throughout the Bible there are stories of what we would call miracles – God’s intervening in the events of people’s lives often by sending an angel to help them. But there are still miracles with us today. If you have ever read Small Miracles for the Jewish Heart, you will be amazed by how many present day stories there are about extraordinary happenings in the lives of ordinary people. As I watched the faces of these single moms light up, I knew the teacher had given these women what they came for – hope that things would get better and they were not alone. All of this took place in the context of community – people getting together to enjoy and help one another. And if there is one thing that Jews excel at, it’s creating a community. Beginning with Shabbat dinners and Passover seders in our homes, we have made the family the first and foremost “community” we are part of. But for those of us who don’t have the luxury of a nearby family, there is a new option: OurJewishCommunity.org. This is an online congregation that a young rabbi is leading according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. For her online Seder, Rabbi Baum’s guest list was about 400 though “it is not as if we will run out of gefilte fish,” she said. Another rabbi led his home Seder on a widescreen TV, not around the dining room table. His high-tech version was just another way to get his guests more engaged with the story of Passover. For Jewish young people who live in the world of iPads and YouTube, there are religious leaders who are attempting to connect with them through the technology that defines their lifestyles. Whatever the means, we all want to know that we are not alone and that someone is always there for us. If we don’t quite believe in “the God who sees us,” can we believe that there is something miraculous in the helping hand of a friend or the hug of a child? Our experiences may not be as dramatic as Hagar’s but they can be just as life changing.