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!