From the Desert of Paran

This focus on the community came together with some other things going on in my life at the time. I have always struggled on and off with my prayer life, and I had tried some different strategies to revitalize it. I tried what essentially amounted to Orthodox Christian fasting. (My intention was to mimic Coptic Christian fasting, but I could find only limited sources on that in particular, and the difference is somewhat negligible anyway.) I tried praying with a Jewish siddur (prayer book). These strategies would help for a while, but eventually the strain of doing them on my own, with no communal support, would become too much, and I would give up. I had also noticed how it seemed that Evangelicalism is afraid of tradition—that it will not admit when it has a tradition, and often changes its strategy so as not to create what might look like a tradition. Similarly, it calls itself non-liturgical, but the same general set of songs is sung regularly, the service is configured more or less the same way from week to week, and the prayers use similar language and themes. I thought that a community that took more seriously the role of tradition and its own influence on the way its members read would at least be more honest. So it came into my mind that if I were ever to make any real progress, I would need to seek out and join myself to a traditional community.

Orthodox Judaism was a natural first place for me to look. I had had some interest in Judaism from an early age anyway, and it had grown significantly in recent years. A friend had introduced me to Chaim Potok’s books, which portrayed for me a world in which study was devotion—not entirely unlike Evangelicalism, but with a great deal more depth. Also, I was studying Semitic languages, so the idea of praying in Hebrew and studying the Talmud in Aramaic appealed to me. If I had to pick some tradition, this seemed like a good candidate. I started to gather information—browsed what I could find on the Internet, signed up on some e-mail lists—even concluded that if I were going to convert, it would have to be an Orthodox conversion. But I never really took any meaningful steps. Perhaps if I had bothered to deal with the New Testament the way I had with the Old, I would have concluded that Jesus was probably nothing more than a popular Jewish teacher whose followers got carried away after he died. But I could not really see myself rejecting Jesus as Messiah, and it seemed inevitable that I would be expected to do so explicitly, since I was coming from such a strong Christian background. I also knew that my wife would never go along with it, and I was not prepared to give up the expert status I had earned within Christianity to start over as a convert who was expected to absorb and accept, not to question and challenge.

I thought for a while that Messianic Judaism might be a suitable compromise. An acquaintance had introduced me to a type of Messianic Judaism that teaches Torah obedience for all Christians. I figured I could get at least some of Jewish tradition, including Talmud study (since there’s no comparable Christian source to consult for the application of Torah to daily life) and prayer in Hebrew, without giving up faith in Jesus or asking my wife to leave Christianity. Since I wouldn’t have to go through any type of formal conversion, I could keep my expert status and jump right away into the debate over what faith and practice ought to look like. The one nagging problem that I had with the idea was the role of tradition. In this respect, Messianic Judaism would not be much different from what I already knew. It would pick and choose from Jewish tradition whatever was determined by individual study to be appropriate. And the whole system was based on a reconstruction of early Christianity that depended on sufficient scholarship and might one day be overturned as easily as it had been established. I thought for a time that I could get past this problem, but ultimately I could not.