I met a girl once at an all-night Shavuot hosted in Park Slope. I don’t remember her name but I remember the rest of her very distinctly. She had perfectly-crimped hair and a kind and gentle manner of speaking. We bonded over both feeling like outsiders - her story was that she had become convinced her ancestors had been conversos and was drawn to convert back to Judaism. She was working with famous internet Rabbi Manis Friedman, and although we spent the whole night together bonding over our shared love of the Spanish language, I did not ask for her number at the end of it.
And I realize now that I was following the opposite Baal Teshuva journey to hers.
The famed concept is that people of Jewish ancestry who have lost touch with its practices find themselves spontaneously drawn to return to some form of Jewish practice.
The story I’m familiar with is that Judaism is heavily about honoring one’s ancestors, making it broadly similar to many traditional Chinese religious practices. An early controversy in the Catholic Church surrounded how to respond to Confucian veneration, and while the Pope at that time declared it incompatible with a Christian view, in later years the perspective of the Jesuit missionaries became the norm.
The way that I came to view the Jewish Sabbath was that the “second soul” which joined participants only on that day was the experience of intense intergenerational connectedness that manifested when performing a set of very ancient and unchanging rituals. Ultimately I believe that any sufficiently-old set of traditional practices becomes a vehicle for connecting with one’s priors who upheld those same traditions and that being connected with one’s priors provides an obvious advantage.
The Traditions of Reform Judaism
The nature of existing within a religion called “Reform Judaism” is that it presents only the merit of kindness and peacefulness and of following your own inner intuition when seeking ancestral practices to connect with. My experiences following that Shavuot let me ultimately to become disillusioned with the direction my inner intuition had previously been pointing in a very specific way: I ceased feeling a desire to connect with that specific set of ancestral practices but became even more convinced of the merits of the concept of connecting with ancestral practices.
When I imagine my ancestors as participating in my life’s journey alongside me, the story of my initial phase of seeking out greater religious observance was pleasing to those of my Jewish ancestors who lived prior to the 19th century and puzzling to those of my Jewish ancestors who lived during the 20th century. Yet my bacon-loving mother was ceaselessly supportive despite her own obvious lack of desire to return to the separation of meat and milk, and I imagined her Reform ancestors representing a similar Reform attitude of “to each his own” and being supportive if unconvinced.
One of the most significant traditions of Reform Judaism which was frequently repeated to me during my upbringing was the idea that we should be really excited about the “Messianic Age”, a time in which Isaiah’s prophecy of an end to armed conflict will come true, but extremely skeptical of the concept of “the Messiah”. When I sought closer alignment with my Jewish ancestors prior to the Reformation, the conflict which arose with both my former self literally and my ancestors who practiced Reform Judaism metaphorically was over this foreign belief.
The strange theological position which I think this belief upheld by my Reform Jewish mother represented was, I would later conclude, the complement of a view represented by the famous Maimonides, or at least one attributed to him in a book I read which sought to contextualize the distinction between his theological framework and other beliefs which co-existed alongside it prior to the establishment of his reputation. The belief attributed to him was that the only thing which could be said with certainty about the Messiah was that he would be a partilineal descendant of King David via King Solomon, and that everything else could not be determined conclusively. And I view this belief very specifically as representing the simplest possible rejection of Christianity and Islam, as a rejection of Jesus’ unknown paternity representing a conclusive disqualifying factor in terms of representing the position which Christians and Muslims both attribute to him. I think that he living in al-Andalus was articulating a Judaism which is about rebelling against Muslim authority.
The Muslim view is as I understand it that Jesus did not die but rather rose to the heavens body-and-all like Elijah purportedly did, and the commonality I perceive between the two is that, whereas the most obvious argument against Jesus being the person responsible for fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy that they would “beat their swords into ploughshares and not make war any more” was that he was dead and swords were still heavily being used, and the fact of Paul’s I-believe-genuine experience of a vision of Jesus at perhaps the same moment he died having created a counter-argument to this in “no he did not die he still lives”, the need to sidestep the possibility of this clearly-still-posthumously-influential figure-representing-a-desire-for-world-peace being the messiah was the motivating factor behind both negating his eligibility for Messiah-ness on the basis of his paternity and relegating him to an Elijah-figure who will bring the real Messiah who unlike him won’t die without producing a royal lineage, the latter of which was a possibility entertained by Christians as well.
Towards that end, I believe that it was James, his half-brother, who did represent the most legitimate concept of treating Jesus as Messiah because them having been raised by the same parents produced in both of them a similar sense of whatever Joseph and Miriam of Nazareth’s values and beliefs were and their primary defining difference was indeed their paternity. The Catholic framing of James as Jesus’ cousin serves first to de-legitimize any claim he and his progeny might have of a continuing royal lineage associated with Jesus, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary serves to further establish that this royal lineage centers on the boy whose biological father was not Joseph and not on the lineage of a Jewish biological male. I believe that this makes the belief system intrinsically more appealing to any male whose biological father is not Jewish.
Whereas the Maimonidean counterpoint to the overlap between “view Jesus as Eliyahu and allow for a second person as Messiah” and “celebrate the memory of Jesus and make no attempt to continue his lineage through others” is to place an emphasis on a strong desire at the top of one’s “wishlist” for an ideal messianic candidate being “from the same male lineage that oneself is also from”, the response communicated to Mohammad is to imagine Jesus as Elijah dying as a part of his Second Coming with authority being handed to a worthy Muslim leader, which aligns perhaps-uncannily closely with the solution presented in the Babylonian Talmud which is to create the existence of a second messiah who is the “son of Joseph” and for him to die and hand authority to an eligible partilineal descendant of King Solomon. This being consistent with the observation of overlap between the writings of the Midrash and the Quran, to the point of provoking accusations of plagiarism.
The perspective landed on based upon this person’s application of a Reform Jewish statement of “would you shut up already about the messiah and focus on our common ground regarding the other part of Isaiah’s prophecy which was about peace and brotherhood” was that Reform Judaism is technically compatible with both Zoroastrianism and Daoism, which both differ from it in precisely the same way - that being the belief in the existence of a specific messianic person who receives credit for bringing about the messianic age and is required to be a member of the same male lineage as that which produced the religion’s most famous poet and also coincidentally-or-not most of its modern practitioners.
The Reform-Oriented Baal Teshuva Impulse
The establishment of the Rabbinic holiday called “Hanukkah” and the de-canonization of the books of Maccabees in both the Jewish and Protestant traditions serve to present a specific perspective on the Hasmonean royal lineage and its legitimacy when compared with a hypothetical future Davidic lineage. The notion that Jesus believed his own succession would be based upon his intentional appointment rather than his biological reproduction is established within a widely-accepted passage assigning the name to “Peter” to someone as symbolizing his position as a cornerstone in whatever Jesus viewed his church to be. The historicity of this statement is beyond my ability to assess, and yet I think the notion that he himself wanted to begin a society in which the qualification for leadership was not about lineage but rather exclusively about individual merit is a notion very consistent with the direction in which Pauline Christianity took even after segments of it ceased being in alignment with the continuation of the legacy of the authority vested in the Seat of St. Peter.
Hence what we see within the Abrahamic realizations of the concept of Saoshiyant/Li Hong/Messiah are a version which specifically views this lineage requirement as producing a person who would so exemplify the ideals of the ancient hero being referenced as to make those ideals generalizable to people of all lineages, a version which specifically views these lineage requirements as producing a person who will so exemplify the ideals of the ancient hero being referenced as to produce an unending lineage capable of representing those values forever without producing another person like King Solomon, and a version which views these lineage requirements as producing a person who will not produce a lineage and who will instead guide a member of a closely-related lineage to be capable of defining enduring peace.
The Reform perspective which I am defining as strictly non-overlapping with the Orthodox perspective is that a day will come when the ideal representation of the values of King David which inspired the messages heard by Isaiah and others are obvious and known to all the peoples of the Earth, and that on that day the idea of honoring and valuing your ancestors the way Reform Judaism does will be widely recognized for its obvious benefit, that every existing religion will continue in a fashion similar to its fashion of continuation wherein the descendants of its present adherents will endeavor to uphold the most resonant aspects of those traditions in a way which authentically satisfies their own inner “Baal Teshuva” impulses. Which is simply the impulse of a later iteration on something to connect with and understand its former iterations as a means of understanding itself.
The Non-Jewish Baal Teshuva Impulse
I learned recently from my Aunt about my own family’s history. My grandfather was in possession of a book describing the lineage of his wife’s family spanning back nearly ten generations, to a time when a well-regarded Bishop moved his family to the Colony of Pennsylvania. The story I know from my father is that this same grandfather was kicked out of church for questioning the existence of God, and it would seem that the story told by his decision to write in the names of his children to this book of his wife’s genealogy was that Sid found in Marion a connection to the good aspects of Christianity which he had become disconnected from when he broke away from the denomination he did not fit in whose identity remains unknown to me.
When I decided to ask myself what it would look like to connect to my father’s religious values the same way an Orthodox Jew would connect to his own father’s religious values, I wound up on a fascinating journey through some dangerous and scary places as well as some surprisingly-pleasant ones. And the place it took me was towards a deep integration of those values which my father and his father had retained from Christianity even shedding the underlying religious framework. My honest opinion is that my father, who is a self-declared atheist, is the most Christ-like person I have ever met. I believe actually that many people in our world today who would themselves state a strong opposition to Christianity are behaving in accordance with many values which they do not share with their pre-Christian ancestors.
The key question which I believe that my existence seeks to answer is that of how one reconciles within one’s person the combination of a deep distillation of those good things which Jesus (and specifically Peter and Paul) represented in the absence of any specific religious claims made by them (or him) with the concept of rejecting the concept of attributing tremendous importance to a specific religious figure while otherwise honoring the legacy of the religious traditions which Jesus Peter and Paul all themselves upheld. When I find myself desiring to speak that answer, it is a desire to exist in a world in which my parents’ ancestors have no reason to be in conflict with one another either literally or symbolically. And when I find myself picturing such a world, a world in which my maternal and paternal Baal Teshuva impulses both point in the same direction, it is a world in which the necessity of a person holding as much power as Jesus or Yehuda Ha’Nasi or the Baal Shem Tov or Mohammad has been obviated, because those things which might be called “common sense” are universally-understood by all humans and the tools to live a life in which conflicts always become opportunities for growth are accessible to all human beings.
The challenge of imagining the existence of this world is that no set of human ancestors is free from the perpetration of the types of behaviors which would be incompatible with a world in which everyone universally agreed on reaching mutually-beneficial solutions to conflicts every time.
The gratitude that fills my person is that my father is an exemplar of good behaviors and the opportunities he presented me for improvement are highly understandable to me. I am grateful to have been born to a woman whom I view in a similar fashion.
My Controversial Belief
My controversial belief is that the concept of a “blood feud” remains as innate to humans as it was in our tribal days. I think that the simplest cause of the perpetuation of a blood feud is that one or often both parties refuse to recognize their own opportunities for improvement and choose to instead project that blame onto the other party. At the very root of my opinion on religious matters concerning the faiths of my ancestors is that Judaism has existed for a very long time built atop a blood feud with Amalek, and that the other party having been driven extinct has created a situation in which the opportunities for improvement which existed within Judah and which still exist to this very day can be perpetually ignored by continuing to beat a dead horse. I have come to view the conflict between Judah-ism and Samaritanism, which is practiced in the lands to the north of the bordering Mount Ephraim, as a continuation of the conflict described in Isaiah 11 between Judah and Ephraim. A conflict dating back as far as the authorship of the line in the Judahite scriptures which blames the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel on insufficient devotion to the God of Israel.
The rooting of my Baal Teshuva impulse is the belief that a line of the most ancient Israelite hymn to the God of Israel we have refers to a point in history in which Amalek and Ephraim did not have cause to hate one another, and that no blood feud is too deep-seated to be reconciled. I dream of a world in which the other blood feuds manifesting around us are also resolved with both parties identifying and acting on their opportunities for improvement, to the mutual satisfaction of any ancestors real or imagined and their current living progeny alike.
Thanks for reading.