Where’s the love?
Jews ‘do’ justice, holiness, forgiveness. So how about the most basic of human emotions?
It was Bishop Krister Stendal who illuminated the blessings
of interfaith conversations with the concept of “Holy Envy.” The idea was to articulate what we admired about other faiths.
Here is what I envy: the feeling I get when I go to church.
I go to church more often than most observant Jews. In part, I’m there because I teach students to be ethnographers of religious experience. Obviously, to write about how people live out their faiths, you have to do fieldwork.
However genuine the explanation, it’s really just a cover story. I’m there because the experience I have in church never happens to me in synagogue. In church — and it’s usually the African-American Pentecostal Holiness church I go to, but sometimes it’s the First Baptist by the train station — I sit among people who believe that God really loves them. Not love like an abstract concept. Not love like a complicated kabalistic formulation. Love, like your mother hugging you, not because you were righteous, upstanding, and perfect, but simply because. Maybe you deserved a potch on the tuches, too, but bottom line, God noticed you and cared.
I may smirk when my Christian friends thank God for helping them find a parking space, thinking that a too-trite request for divine intervention. I may shake my head when I hear that my football-playing student gets down on his knees, in the middle of the field, and points upward, thanking God for the touchdown. But I am also envious, too: How come they get to believe that their God cares so much about what they need and do? This is a post-Holocaust sentiment, and hardly mine alone, but the last time I imagined God heard my entreaties and believed God could make radical interventions, I was a child.
I go back to church, again and again. At my two favorite churches the mature ladies, dressed to the nines and wearing big hats, have tissues tucked into their sleeves. On hot Virginia Sundays, they carry those cardboard fans that look like ping-pong paddles. This is good, because I get all weepy at church. I understate here: In truth, I tremble and cry, like it’s catharsis time in the ancient Greek theater in Epidaurus — and the ladies are quick to pass me tissues or fan me down. By this time, people are standing on their feet and they are singing and clapping and dancing with their arms, and letting loose. (No, if you’re wondering, I don’t sing along.)
At synagogue, if you shukl a lot (unless it’s one of those shuls where shukln is de rigueur) or if you get excited by your prayers (unless you’re in Renewal-land), your enthusiasm would put people off. To cope, they’d pretend you weren’t there.
Excepting weddings, funerals, and a healing service I once went to led by Debbie Friedman, I am never moved to cry in synagogue. I am so busy saying all the words of the prayers and noticing all the people I care about that it never strikes me that I have blown an opportunity to feel I am loved by God.
But it’s not my absorption in praying and caring alone that keeps me from feeling that God cares about me. As Jews, we tend to be obsessed with upholding lofty standards. It doesn't dawn on us that in our natural state, we could be worthy of God's love. This could explain why we are so self-critical and ambitious — useful traits to have if you’re going to be a brilliant artist or scientist. Maybe it keeps us edgy and resilient, propelling us to do the next mitzva and to repair the world.
God’s love is in our prayer book: “Ahavat olam bet Yisrael, amcha ahavta — With everlasting love, you love the House of Israel,” and we call God, “Ohave amo Yisrael — the one who loves your people Israel.” But this is corporate love: God loves our whole team and cheers us on. Looking between the words, I suppose I could discern God’s loving me, but I don’t feel it in my bones.
At the end of church, when I am plotting how I can get out quickly and avoid the coffee reception, lest I give the impression that I can be recruited, I am also thinking about which of my Jewish friends from synagogue might want to come to church with me next time. There is so much for us to learn. Beyond experiencing the love feeling — and wouldn’t that for many replace the need for therapy? — there is the feeling of being noticed. If you are new, you are asked to stand up and say your name. Right then and there, one of the church elders walks up to you and gives you a packet with information about the church and the names of people you can call for just about anything. You get a tape of a spirited sermon, or maybe it’s some church music you can play if you’re homebound. (At church, they care about the people who can’t be there — if you’re sick or too old or incarcerated, the whole service is videotaped and played on local cable TV.) All the attention for newcomers at church can make a person shy, but isn’t it preferable to going to synagogue as a visitor and being ignored?
When I take Jewish friends on a “church date” and go out for coffee after for a “postmortem,” we decide that there is one part of our Jewish service that does enliven strong feeling. It’s when the ark is open, the Torah is taken out, and we rise. I know I jump out of my seat and stand at attention. My body remembers being small enough to be held aloft in my grandfather’s arms so that I can plant a good kiss-pat-kiss on the passing Torah. He’d tell me this was how Jews showed respect, but being a theologically astute toddler, I knew he was signaling that God’s presence, in the scroll, was most emphatic. On days I read from Torah, my voice gets trembly because of the weightiness of the deed and the honor. As I descend back to my seat, my shul-mates bless me. They kiss and touch me like I was an after-tracing of the Torah scroll procession, as if the strength and honor I had accrued might rub off on them.
This is surely feeling, but alas, it’s still not love, the personal kind. It’s a feeling of love of tradition, amazement in its endurance; delight in being a vessel for its continuance.
As I dash out of church, I always pause to look back and register a feeling that Jews do well, and in a snap: call it naches, call it kvelling. We may have forgotten how to feel God’s love, but it was out of our Jewish midst — our God, our holy text, our sacred practices — that the aspects of Christian worship I admire arose. Evoking Merle Feld’s poem, “Standing Again at Sinai,” if we once knew the feeling and could risk its intensity, maybe we could discover it again.
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