Humor and Insight in a Christian’s Observations About Jewish Life

In ancient Jerusalem, the temple was the focal point of Jewish worship. Within its deepest recesses was the sanctum sanctorum--the “Holy of Holies”--into which the high priest ventured but once a year, on the Day of Atonement.

Less known to non-Jews today, the temple grounds also embraced a section called the Court of the Gentiles. In those days, many Gentiles worshiped with Jews without converting to the faith. They were nonetheless welcomed as “God-fearers,” whose presence foreshadowed the day when Jews believed all nations and people would join in praise of one God.

For 15 years, Harvard University theologian Harvey Cox, a Baptist who married a Jewish woman, has stood in a figurative Court of the Gentiles. As a Christian, he observes Jewish holidays and joins in Jewish rituals marking the passages of life.

Now Cox, a best-selling author and one of the nation’s most perceptive authorities on the American religious scene, shares his sojourn in “Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian’s Journey Through the Jewish Year.”

Accessible and engaging, Cox blends stories of his personal journey with humor and a scholar’s insight. To read Cox’s account is to be invited on a spiritual odyssey, to set foot on a path that threads between Judaism and Christianity and leaves one, finally, in the presence of the holy and with a deepened appreciation for life and ritual.

The book, which will reach bookstores next month in time for the High Holy Days, may be especially timely and useful for Jewish-Christian couples and families. It offers Jews a Christian’s perception of Judaism, even as Cox relates how his Christian faith has been illuminated by insights, questions and perceptions from Jewish relatives and friends.

Cox is modest in his claims. Despite 15 years of immersing himself in Jewish life, he says he can never fully comprehend what it is to be Jewish. Yet he is a more than competent and trustworthy guide. Along the way, he points out Hebrew names for holidays and observances, all within the context of an engaging narrative or compelling personal story. This should be an especially welcome primer for non-Jews who always wanted to know about things Jewish but were afraid to ask.

His stories unfold in the everyday happenings of family and friends, in places where the commonplace is imbued with intimations of the holy--a birth, a marriage, a bar mitzvah, a death. His stories lead us through the Jewish calendar, the measured cadences of life’s passages of repentance and forgiveness, of God’s judgment and mercy.

Cox’s lucid account of the Sabbath--Shabbat--underscores the meaning and centrality of the weekly observance for Jews. Quoting Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Cox notes that Jews do not have cathedrals of stone and glass. They have the Sabbath, a “cathedral in time.” Judaism is calendrical, not creedal.

There is good fun and poignant moments along the way. For example, Cox tells of the ritual known as tashlich during Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. Tashlich means to cast away. In medieval times, people gathered by a lake or river on the first day of Rosh Hashana to cast their sins, symbolized by small pieces of bread, into the water. The ritual is making a comeback.

In 1998, Cox recalls that he and his wife, Nina, their son, Nicholas, and friends stood on a pedestrian bridge over the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. His wife read a tashlich prayer, and each of them dropped bits of bread into the water. The ducks below were delighted. One passerby politely asked what they were doing. “Great,” the man said after hearing the explanation. “I’ve got a couple of sins I’d like to feed to the ducks, too.”

Then, there were the deaths of loved ones and a beloved rabbi. The first time he attended a Jewish funeral, Cox said he was struck by the differences in what each faith emphasized. Christians speak of “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead.” Jews praise God alone in the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Such funereal occasions led Cox into reflections on Christian and Jewish ideas about the afterlife. He finds that there is in some sense a convergence as Christians like Pope John Paul II distance themselves from traditional ideas of hellfire and damnation as a physical place. On another issue, he said that Jews are beginning to return to an earlier tradition that spoke of God’s grace in ways that Protestants can appreciate.

Cox is careful to steer clear of any kind of syncretism. Writing of the “December dilemma,” when Christmas and Hanukkah are observed, Cox protests popular culture’s efforts to meld two different religious observances whose roots and purposes are so different.

The Romans destroyed the temple in the year 70, and with it the Court of the Gentiles. In response, Jews, driven into exile, were forced to dwell in a temple that could not be destroyed, the cathedral of time.

Cox has no intention of entering, metaphorically speaking, the sacred inner precincts of Jewish life by converting. He says he will linger always in the outer court, the Court of the Gentiles. For him it symbolizes three things: a place that is near but separate from a central sanctuary, which rightly is reserved for Jews; a court that nevertheless embraces common ground where “all the children of God” can interact and learn from each other; and a place separate from the outside world, but whose gates are wide open.