Harvey Cox, the eminent Christian theologian and scholar of religion, offers an intimate tour through the Jewish year certain to inform and enlighten Jews and non-Jews alike. As a member of an interfaith household, Cox has had ample opportunity to reflect upon the essence of Judaism and its complex relationship to Christianity. Organized around the Jewish calendar from Rosh Hashanah to Yom ha-Atzmaíut, Common Prayers illuminates the meanings of Jewish holidays as well as traditions surrounding milestone events such as death and marriage. Describing in elegant, accessible language the holidays’ personal, historical, and spiritual significance and the lessons they offer us, Cox “is instructive and enlightening, revealing the depth and passion of his religious thought and practice” (Boston Herald). As seen through his eyes, the Jewish holidays offer a wellspring of discovery and reflection for every reader.

Common Prayers

Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year

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By Harvey Cox

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2002 Harvey Cox
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618257330

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Excerpt

Introduction

For my house shall be called
A house of prayer for all peoples.
- Isaiah 56:7

In keeping with the vision of their prophets, the builders of the
ancient Temple in Jerusalem designed it to be a house of prayer for
all peoples. There was an inner area where only Jews were admitted.
Here stood the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest was
permitted to enter, and that only once a year, on the Day of
Atonement. There was also a section explicitly named "the Court of
the Gentiles." Throughout the ancient world, many gentiles worshiped
with Jews without ever converting to Judaism. The Jews welcomed them
as "God-fearers," and their presence in the Temple reflected the age-
old Jewish hope that one day all nations and peoples,
including "strangers and sojourners," would join in praise of the One
who created them all.
The word "gentile" is not synonymous with the
word "Christian." Our English "gentile" is derived from the Latin
term for "nation," and in Jewish usage it means anyone who is not a
Jew. (I sometimes enjoy informing my Jewish friends that among
Mormons, "gentile" refers to anyone who is not a Mormon, including
Jews.) Of course, the distinction between gentile and Christian meant
nothing during the years of Herod"s temple, since the newborn
Christian movement was still a sect, among many others, within
Judaism. But this changed after 70 C.E. when, during the reign of the
emperor Titus, the Roman legions razed the Temple and expelled the
Jews, including those Jews who were followers of Jesus, from
Jerusalem. It was only after that catastrophe that the division
between what we now call Judaism and Christianity began to set in.
Decades passed before it became a complete rupture.
Today, only the famous Western Wall of the Temple remains.
But I sometimes think of myself as one of those strangers
or "sojourners" mentioned by the Jewish prophets. For a decade and a
half, in addition to following my own spiritual tradition as a
Protestant Christian, I have also lived and prayed with Jews. I have
a special reason for doing so. Fifteen years ago I married a Jewish
woman. Nina had been raised in a family of largely nonobservant Jews
in New York City. As a teenager, partially (she now concedes) in a
display of adolescent rebellion, she began attending activities at
the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. But when she left home for college
and graduate school, she also became nonobservant. Later in life,
however, after some painful personal experiences, she began to
reclaim her Jewish heritage. She was still engaged in this quest when
we met. Today her Jewish faith is deeply, and increasingly, important
to her.
I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania. My own parents
were quite casual about churchgoing, but they dutifully dispatched my
two brothers, my sister, and myself to the Baptist Sunday school next
door. My grandparents attended it also but were not at all what I
would call devout. Our family never said grace before meals, and as
children we were never taught to say prayers before bedtime as some
of our friends were. Nonetheless, as I grew older I became more
involved in the church, first through the youth group and choir. I
joined the church at thirteen; by then I was already fascinated with
reading books about religion and theology. When I left for college I
had decided I wanted to explore these fields further, perhaps even to
become a minister. My parents did not disapprove but were somewhat
less than enraptured. They advised, quite rightly, that a career in
accounting would yield more financial security. As the decades
passed, however, they reconciled themselves and eventually even
seemed pleased with the direction my life had taken.
When Nina and I met we were both professors, she at Wellesley
and I at Harvard. We had each suffered through the dissolution of a
marriage and were slowly mending. I had three children, all grown.
She had none. We had been introduced by mutual friends who thought we
were well suited to each other, and we soon discovered we were. We
recognized right away, of course, that our different religious paths
constituted a factor we could not ignore. This led to many spirited
discussions which made it clear that neither of us wanted either to
convert to the other"s faith or to find some in-between solution.
Finally we both decided to stay what we were, to try to learn as much
as we could about the other"s religion, and to honor it and
participate in it as far as our convictions would permit.
We have one child, Nicholas, who at the time of this writing
is fourteen. We both agreed, before he was born, that we wanted him
to grow up with some spiritual anchorage. But we also agreed that
trying to raise a child in two religious traditions is almost always
confusing and counterproductive. I am altogether satisfied with the
decision we made. Since I recognize that Jews consider the child of a
Jewish mother to be Jewish, that is the faith in which we are both
nurturing Nicholas. We had also agreed, however, that this would not
mean that I would delegate his spiritual tutelage to her. We have
both shared in the process, and some of what the reader will find in
this book consists of what I have learned in the fifteen years of
study I have undertaken in order to equip myself to appreciate my
wife"s faith and to do my part in the guidance of our son. For me,
indeed for all of us, it has been an intensely satisfying experience.
But most of what I have learned about Judaism during these
years has not come from books. As anyone who knows how central family
life is to Jews will recognize, our marriage entwined me in a maze of
aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins. As one of the family,
I have been able to get a close-up of the Jewish world. It is
important to me that the Judaism I have discovered is not quite the
same as the one I have read about in historical accounts and
theological works. It is a hands-on week-by-week and year-by-year
Judaism of songs and scents and ups and downs, with both its
comeliness and its homeliness clearly on display. Still, as a
Christian, I experience Judaism from the perspective of a kind of
metaphorical Court of the Gentiles, not as a complete outsider, but
not as a full insider either.
Interfaith marriage is hardly unusual nowadays. Every year in
America more Jews marry gentiles than marry each other. Despite the
efforts of rabbis, priests, ministers, and, often, of parents and
friends, the number of such marriages shows no sign of abating. We
husbands of Jewish wives are hardly a homogenous group. We are old
and young, rich and poor, and in-between. We encompass journalists,
policemen, computer engineers, psychiatrists, disc jockeys, and a
hundred other professions. Some of us are religious, some are not.
Very few of our number are what I am, a Christian theologian, and I
realize that this makes our marriage quite unusual (but, then, are
not all marriages in some sense sui generis?). We non-Jews who marry
Jews, though we may be a mixed company, inevitably get an intensely
intimate view of Judaism. This book is a kind of distillation of what
I have learned, during fifteen years of marriage, about Judaism,
about my own faith, and about myself.
I have at least four reasons for writing this book. First, I
want to help my fellow Christians, especially those who might be
curious but puzzled about Judaism, to understand it better. Naturally
I would hope that anyone with a serious interest in Judaism would
read primarily books by Jewish scholars. But in addition, these
reflections, written from my perspective of the Court of the
Gentiles, might be a helpful supplement for non-Jewish readers, if
only because my angle of vision is closer to theirs. As the husband
of a Jewish woman I have learned a lot, maybe even more than I
originally bargained for, about her tradition. I have now imbibed
fifteen years of Jewish holidays, Sabbaths, rituals, Torah studies,
klezmer music, prayers, family gatherings, jokes, gossip, and gefilte
fish. After several embarrassing faux pas, I now know the difference
between mishugonah and mishpochah (an important distinction: the
first means "berserk" and the second refers to family), and between
kvetching and kvelling (an even more important one: the first
means "complaining" and the second means "taking pride in your
children"). More seriously, I have fasted on Yom Kippur, shivered at
the blast of the shofar, sat shivah (the seven days of mourning) when
relatives have died, drunk the Sabbath wine on Friday evenings, and
prayed at the Wall in Jerusalem. In short, I write from what I regard
as a highly privileged position. I am a participant who is also in
some measure an observer; an observer who is also a participant.
I remain, of course, a sojourner in the Court of the
Gentiles. My perspective is not that of a full-fledged landsman. It
never will be. But neither is it that of a coldly objective analyst.
The prayers I pray when I am among Jews are Jewish prayers, but I
have learned how to make them my own as well. I have come to share
some of the same delights, hopes, and frustrations about Judaism that
many Jews do, though I feel them - as it were - in a different key.
My knowledge of this ancient and complex tradition will never be more
than that of a novice. But my unusual position as a Christian
theologian who has taken an active part in Jewish life for a decade
and a half enables me to draw some comparisons and contrasts most
rabbis, priests, and ministers would not be able to make. For this
reason, I hope this book can also serve, to quote the great Jewish
sage Maimonides, as a kind of "guide for the perplexed" - in this
case, perplexed gentiles.
My second purpose for the book is more personal. I want to
explain how I have come to understand my own Christian faith better
because of my marriage to a Jewish woman and my participation in the
life of her faith community. Christians sometimes say that we need to
understand Judaism because, after all, our religion is "rooted in the
faith of ancient Israel." This is true as far as it goes. But what it
overlooks is that there have been nearly two thousand years of Jewish
history since Christianity came to birth. Little by little I have
become quite uneasy with the "roots" metaphor. Thinking of Judaism in
this way consigns it to the past. It makes living Judaism invisible.
After all, we do not see the roots of a tree. They are hidden
underground while the leaves blossom and the fruit ripens in full
view. The roots analogy may even inadvertently contribute to the
mistaken idea that Christianity has somehow superseded Judaism, a
notion I completely reject. I want to understand Judaism, not just
because of what it was, but because of what it is. Judaism is the
tradition that sustains fourteen million human beings (many of them,
it would seem, my relatives). And it is also a luxuriant repository
of a spiritual wisdom available to anyone.
But Christians also have a special reason for understanding
Judaism. Someone once defined Christians as gentiles who worship the
God of Israel. I think this is correct, and therefore I also reject
the dangerously deluded idea - still harbored by some Christians -
that the two religions worship a different God. The fallacious
platitude that the Jewish God is one of legalism and vengeance while
the Christian one is a God of grace and love is both historically and
theologically insupportable. It is the product of ignorance, not only
of the Bible itself, but of the subsequent history of the two faiths,
and results in a warped picture of both. I will return to this later
because I am convinced that appreciating Judaism, both its history
and its present manifestation, is essential to a full understanding
of Christianity. It lends depth and resonance to all the ideas that
are central to my faith: how I understand the nature of God, the
purpose of human life, the significance of Jesus, and the meaning of
faith.
I have a third purpose for writing these pages. I want to
question the idea that a Jewish-Christian marriage necessarily
dilutes the substance of either or both spouses" faiths. The fact is
that Nina and I have come to the opposite conclusion. We have no way
of knowing what might have happened in our separate faith journeys if
we had never met or married. Still, I think I am probably a better
Christian and she believes she may be a better Jew not in spite of
but because of our marriage. We both recognize that making any
marriage work is a difficult and demanding enterprise and that
marrying a person of another faith does not make it any easier. But
we have also come to believe that a mixed marriage can be a spiritual
venture that sharpens and strengthens the faith of each partner. We
think we have found some ways to help this maturation happen and to
steer around the hazards that often assail marriages like ours. Both
the Jew and the Christian who make this decision quickly discover -
if they had not noticed before - that such a marriage is not just
interfaith. It also entails the complicated cluster of ethnic and
cultural qualities that make Jews different from Christians. But we
believe these can make such marriages both more daunting and more
satisfying. We hope this book can provide some hints for other
couples who are either already involved in a religiously mixed
marriage or may be contemplating one.1
Finally, I also hope that Jewish readers will profit from
reading about my experience of their religion. To "see ourselves as
others see us" can often help us to see ourselves in a new light. I
have gained fresh insights into my own tradition by reading comments
and reflections about it, and even criticisms, made by thoughtful non-
Christians.2 Sometimes what they say at first seems annoying, but it
always makes me think. Discovering what there is in my own tradition
that seems attractive or strange or opaque to someone who tries
seriously to comprehend it from the outside often enables me to
appreciate it in a new way. Today many more people are learning
things about their own religions from the affectionate close
observations of friends and spouses, and this has been a positive
development.

Continues...

Continues...

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Excerpted from Common Prayers by Harvey Cox Copyright © 2002 by Harvey Cox. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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HARVEY COX is the author of the groundbreaking The Secular City and many other books, including The Seduction of the Spirit, which was nominated for the National Book Award. A professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.