How I Became a Television Star -- And Almost Didn't

In early 2007 I appeared in a national television commercial. This is a story I wrote at that time explaining how it came to be:

      "Excuse me, Sir, would you be interested in . . .?" 

      "No. Whatever it is, I'm not interested." 

      Having grown up in and around New York City, I was suspicious when I was approached by a stranger with a clipboard in Grand Central Terminal. I thought it was either a request for a donation to a spurious charity or an attempt to sell me something I didn't need and didn't want. But when the man approached me a second time, saying "I'm not selling anything" and showing me a photo ID issued by Grand Central, I was at least willing to listen to what he had to say. 

      I'm glad I did, because it lead to an interesting experience, a stint as a very minor celebrity and a serendipitous payment of a few hundred dollars. You may have seen me on ABC television shouting "Frodo!" in a Spike Lee-directed commercial for the Feb. 25 Oscars telecast. My being approached in Grand Central was how it came about. 

      Two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, my wife Keleigh and I took the Shoreline East commuter train from Old Saybrook into the city to visit the Metropolitan Museum and have lunch and dinner in kosher restaurants. With the holidays coming up, I knew that it would be late October before we might have another chance. But when I was asked if I would be willing to audition for a commercial directed by Spike Lee, Keleigh and I decided to give up an hour or so of our museum visit, if both of us could audition. So we filled out some information sheets and release forms, had digital and Polaroid pictures taken, and were ushered into a large but unused waiting area where there were cameras and lights set up. 

      A couple of hundred feet away from where we were told to stand, a middle-aged Black man was sitting on a crate and saying lines to a young boy, who repeated them. My wife asked me why he looked familiar, and I looked closely and said "because that's Spike Lee." After two or three other would-be actors auditioned, Keleigh went up and gave her lines. It had been explained to us that the commercial would be for the Oscars telecast, and the idea was ordinary people saying famous lines from classic films. 

      I thought that Keleigh's audition was very good, and when she finished and it was my turn, Spike Lee told me that he thought so as well. He gave me some lines to say -- some of them were familiar, some not, and I didn't remember everything that I said, though I do remember saying "ET phone home" and "Luke, I am your father." 

      A month later we got a phone call from Chiat-Day, the Los Angeles advertising agency producing the commercial. They told me that they wanted to use some of my footage -- unfortunately only mine, not Keleigh's -- if I was still willing to allow them to do so. If so, they would Fed-Ex a release and a contract which was to be signed and returned immediately. 

      I didn't know what they would use until the morning the Oscar nominations were announced, at which time the commercial began running on abc.com,oscars.com and on television. I watched myself shout "Frodo", and I must have seen that moment a hundred times since. To be honest, I didn't even know who or what "Frodo" was until I "Googled" the word after seeing the commercial for the first time -- it's a line from "Lord of the Rings." I also don't know how much I will get paid, because the compensation formula in the contract was a bit complicated, but it should be between 600 and 1200 dollars -- much of which, God willing, Keleigh and I hope to use this summer in Jerusalem to help strengthen the Israeli economy. All in all, it was an interesting experience, but I'm not planning on giving up the rabbinate to go into acting full time.

Note: the actual payment for the commercial turned out to be about $3600, not the $600 to $1200 I anticipated it would be.

A talk for Martin Luther King Day

A couple of years ago I was surprised, but honored, to be invited to keynote the Norwich NAACP's annual Martin Luther King Day service. Here is the talk I delivered on that occasion:

Making King's Day Matter

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

Norwich, CT, January 18, 2010

I want to thank Rev. Barbara White and Evans Memorial for hosting this event, and I want to thank you for honoring me with this invitation to speak here today as we celebrate the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When Rev. Greg Perry called me several weeks ago and asked me to do this, there was no doubt in my mind that I would accept, but I was a little surprised and a little bewildered. But then I remembered a conversation that I had about a year ago with Brother Joseph Hemphill, who some of you certainly know. What you may not know is that some of my conversations with Brother Joseph work their way into the sermons I give at Beth Jacob. And it was just about a year ago, because we Jews read the entire Five Books of Moses every year through, and it is just about this time of year that we begin reading the book of Exodus. So freedom and liberation are on our minds, and it is always appropriate that we're reading the Book of Exodus at the time that we are also remembering Dr. King. And it was in that context that Brother Joseph said something that really stuck with me. He said, "you know, what Dr. King did, he didn't just do for the Black people."

And that's correct, and that's why it's OK for a white, Jewish person to give this talk today. What Dr. King did, he did for all of us. As Abraham Lincoln said so long ago, "as I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave master." It is not just that Black people needed to be liberated from the shackles of racism and oppression. White people needed to be liberated from their own oppression as well, because oppression is a product of fear. It is not just African Americans who are better off today because of Dr. King. All of us are better off, because we are working together for a society where we will be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character. Dr. King's dream was not a Black dream or a white dream, it was an American dream, and a human dream. And it was a dream influenced by the Abrahamic covenants of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I want to begin this afternoon with a story from the Talmud. The Talmud is a collection of Jewish legal and ethical materials, laws and stories, that was codified around 1500 years ago, but much of the material is quite a bit older than that. When I as a Jew and a rabbi read or hear stories of Jesus, they are familiar to me, because Jesus, too, was a rabbi, and he was not the only rabbi of his time to teach by means of stories and parables. So maybe those of you who are Christians will find something familiar in this type of story as well.

One day Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi encountered Elijah the Prophet. As you know, in our traditions Elijah is considered to be the harbinger of the Messiah. And so Rabbi Yehoshua asked him “when will the Messiah come?”

“Ask him yourself”, came the reply. “He sits at the gate of Rome with all the other beggars, but there is one way you can single him out. All of the beggars un-bandage all their wounds at once and then re-bandage them all at once. But the Messiah un-bandages one and then immediately re-bandages it, un-bandages another and then re-bandages it, thinking that perhaps he will be needed and have to go in a hurry.”

Rabbi Yehoshua traveled to Rome and found the Messiah as Elijah had said. “Shalom to you my Master and Teacher.” “Shalom to you, ben Levi.”

“When will Master come.” “Today!” the Messiah replied.

When Rabbi Yehoshua returned to Elijah he was crestfallen. “Surely he lied to me, because he said he would come today and yet there is no sign of him.”

“You misunderstood what he was saying,” replied Elijah. “He was quoting to you from Scripture, Psalm 95. ‘Today – if you would but hearken to God’s voice.’”

Imagine a world where no child goes to bed hungry. Where no child lives in fear of the adults who control his life. Where the poor are not merely given what they need to survive but treated with respect, and given the tools with which to lift themselves out of poverty. Where workers are always treated fairly. Where disputes between individuals and between nations are settled on the basis of justice and reason, not on the basis of who has the greater might. Where animals are protected from human cruelty; where natural resources are treasured as God’s gift to humanity and used wisely, with concern for future generations and their needs. Where the elderly are not considered a burden but treasured for their wisdom and experience. 

Such a world is not a fantasy. That world is possible. You and I, with God's help, can bring that world into being. 3500 years ago at Mt. Sinai, God gave the Jewish people a plan to bring that world into fruition. And then Christianity and Islam came onto the scene to spread that plan, but we still -- all of us -- continue to fall short.

The Jewish people really became a people in Egypt. When Jacob and his family went down to Egypt, the entire nation consisted of one patriarch, his twelve sons and one daughter, the wives and children of the twelve sons and their household employees – a band of seventy souls in all, perhaps. After four hundred years that number had grown somewhat. Six hundred thousand adult males left Egypt -- together with wives and children probably 2.5 to 3 million.

The Jewish people, then, was forged in the crucible of slavery. Thirty seven times the Torah commands us to remember that we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Not so we should seek revenge.  In fact, we are specifically commanded not to hate the Egyptians, because they provided us food when we faced starvation. No, the Torah reminds us of our origin as strangers in order to remind us that because we were strangers, we in turn have a special responsibility not to oppress the stranger but to love him.

At the time of Jesus, there were two other great rabbis of the age, Hillel and Shammai. Once there was a pagan who, for whatever reason, enjoyed making fun of rabbis. He went to  Shammai, and said to him: “I am willing to convert to Judaism if you can teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai like Jesus was a carpenter by profession and apparently brooked no nonsense. He took the yardstick that was in his hand and whacked the pagan over the head.

              So the pagan went to Hillel. And Hillel took him up on the challenge. He said to him “what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the entire Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now go and learn."

     For us Jews, there are two sources of values. One is the Bible, and the other is Jewish history. I believe that it is no accident that Jews have been in the forefront of every struggle for human freedom.
Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel were close friends. The picture of them marching arm in arm during the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 is one of the great iconic images of the Civil Rights era. Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel first met in 1963 at a "Conference on Religion and Race" in Chicago. This is what Dr. Heschel said then:"At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses.... The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses."
 Thus it is no accident that the two white volunteers killed by the Klan during Mississippi Freedom Summer in the United States almost fifty years ago alongside James Chaney were Jews named Schwerner and Goodman. It is no accident that in apartheid South Africa, for years and years the only anti-apartheid member of the all-white legislature was Helen Suzman, the Jewish representative of a predominantly Jewish district in Johannesburg. It is no accident that the two demographic groups in the United States whose voting patterns are most alike are African Americans and Jewish Americans. It is no accident; it is a direct result of the Torah’s repeated admonition to “not oppress the stranger, but remember that you were a stranger in the Land of Egypt.” What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary.

    All the rest is commentary. But in our day Hillel’s teaching is not enough. It is not enough because it is merely passive. And as both Blacks and Jews learned so painfully within the memory of many sitting here today, it is not enough to merely personally refrain from doing evil. Rabbi Heschel said  "The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference," while Dr. King said "To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system." Not to act communicates "to the oppressor that his (sic) actions are morally right." And so I would add a corollary to Hillel’s maxim: “what has been done to you, do not let be done to another.”

In February 1993 I was part of a group of rabbis and rabbinical students who spent a week in Haiti examining the human rights situation there and the U.S. government’s policy at the time of returning Haitian refugees who were intercepted trying to make their way by boat to our country. And interestingly enough, all ten of us cited exactly the same motivation for going on this trip: the St. Louis.

In 1939 a boat with 900 Jewish refugees steamed away from the shores of Germany. They were bound for Cuba, which had given them visas. But for one reason or another, the Cubans changed their minds and sent the refugees away. So the boat, the St. Louis, headed for New York harbor. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent them back to Germany, where most of them disappeared in the crematoria of the Holocaust.

So for a Jew, who knows Jewish history, seeing a boatload of refugees returned home to face likely death hit too close to home. When I am asked one day what I did when we sent the Haitians away to be killed, I won’t have to say “I was a good German. I did nothing.”

We are a people that learn from history. Because we were slaves and strangers in Egypt, we have tried to free the slave and honor the rights of the stranger. Because the world watched and did nothing while we were slaughtered, we were determined not to watch and do nothing as Bosnians and Rwandans were slaughtered. And because we are all of us people who learn from history -- whether as Jewish people, as Black people, or simply as American people -- we cannot sit idly by and watch and do nothing while people continue to die in Haiti.

    Brother Joseph was right when he reminded me that what Dr. King did, he did for all of us. Dr. King's genius was that his vision was rooted in the biblical texts that almost all Americans hold to be sacred. His dream was, as he himself said, "deeply rooted in the American dream." He called us, all of us, to be the kind of people that we know in our hearts that we ought to be. He called us to live lives of justice and of peace. He called us, finally, to join hands and build the kind of world that God wants us to have. He called us to hearken to God's voice.   

              When will redemption come? Today, if we would hearken to God’s voice.

              When will redemption come? When we bring it. Let’s not wait to begin the task.

Two-minute Torah: Lekh-Lekha: For Your Own Good

First, a Hebrew lesson. The fourth word of this week's Parasha provides us with yet another example of how it is impossible to truly understand the Torah without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew. God says to Abram "lekh-lekha", but what does "lekh-lekha" mean? The "lekh" part is pretty simple, it is an imperative, a command, meaning "go." But the "lekha" part is not so clear. It can mean "to yourself" or "for yourself" or it could just be poetic alliteration.

Rashi understands it as meaning "for yourself" and amplifies it: "l'tovat'kha u'l'hana'at'kha" -- for your good and for your benefit. In other words, Rashi is telling us that God is promising Abram that the result of his journey will be beneficial to him.

In the midrashic tradition, Abraham (at this point still known as Abram) undergoes ten trials. The last, of course, is the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. The first is this command, "lekh lekha."

But wait, the Sefas Emes, a Chasidic commentator who lived about 100 years ago says. How can it be a trial if Abram knows that God has already promised him that it will be for his own benefit?

And then he answers his own question. Knowing that it would be beneficial to him was precisely the trial that Abram faced. Abram's desire was to do everything purely out of obedience to God and not for any other motive. How could he maintain that purity of motive knowing that his obedience would also prove beneficial to him in a "this world" way?

What a counter-cultural thought. Those of us who are rabbis and Jewish educators often find ourselves in the position of "selling" Judaism, of convincing people to observe mitzvot which they don't currently observe, to support the community and so on. We generally try to convince people that they will benefit personally in some way: people need a day of rest, a Shabbat meal brings the family together, keeping kosher will help you feel closer to God, and so on. But the Sefas Emes is saying that's not what Judaism is about at all. Our only desire should be obedience to God; any other motivation simply gets in the way.

Does this speak to you at all? What motivates you to do the Jewish things you do?

Why People Become Orthodox

About three years ago the Orthodox blog Hirhurim -- Torah Musings ran a symposium on why people who were not raised Orthodox choose to join the Orthodox community. Here is my contribution to that symposium. See if it rings true.

Like most sociological phenomena, the phenomenon of Jews not raised Orthodox turning to Orthodoxy is a broad spectrum. There is little in common between the product of a Solomon Schechter school, USY and Camp Ramah who now belongs to a Modern Orthodox congregation, on the one hand, and the former beer-guzzling “frat boy” who now has multiple children and lives in B'nai B'rak. Lest one think I am conjuring up stereotypes, I am personally familiar with both of these individuals.

Almost twenty years ago, I was working as a Hillel director in Washington, DC. Since the Hillel I directed only rarely had services on Shabbat morning, I generally attended a large Conservative synagogue. This synagogue hosted a number of different types of services under its roof, and soon after I started to attend there, together with a number of other people in their twenties and thirties, I helped to found a service which we called the “Traditional-Egalitarian minyan.” This was a service which was liturgically Orthodox (including reading the complete Parasha rather than the more-common “triennial cycle” used by most Conservative shuls) but featured equal participation by men and women. At the time, I believe there was only one couple in our minyan that had children -- a boy and a girl, both in elementary school, who attended a Solomon Schechter school as had both their parents.

At some point, over Shabbat lunch, this family told me that they were looking for a house in the suburbs so that they could join a Modern Orthodox synagogue whose rabbi they admired. While ideologically they still considered themselves Conservative, they felt that for the sake of their kids they were better off in an Orthodox shul. Why? Because there were no other shomer Shabbat kids in the neighborhood. Shabbat was a lonely experience for the kids and the dissonance between their lifestyle and those of most of the other families in the congregation was increasingly untenable.

This phenomenon is a fairly common one. A young man or woman attends a Schechter school and learns about Shabbat and kashrut and tefillin and so on. At Camp Ramah, they live halachic Judaism (by Conservative standards if not Orthodox ones) 24/7. They may attend a college with a strong Conservative minyan at Hillel and many other Conservative Jews who participate in the kosher meal plan. Then they go out into the world and want to be a part of a community where this level of observance is maintained. If they happen to live in New York or Washington or Boston or LA -- and perhaps a handful of other places -- they can find either an independent non-Orthodox minyan or a “Library Minyan” within a larger Conservative shul where this level of observance is, if not the norm, at least not considered outlandish. If they are not so fortunate -- or if they are single and looking to find a spouse with the same observance level and want to broaden their dating pool -- they may well gravitate towards the Modern Orthodox community.

This is a sort of “Orthodoxy by osmosis” and it is not even clear to me that most of the people who go through this transition would necessarily even describe themselves as Orthodox. For sure, they do not subscribe to the formal delegitimation of Conservative Judaism which is the theoretical normative Orthodox position. They will still eat in their parents' home, attend their parent's Conservative synagogue when visiting, accepting an aliyah, davening for the amud, perhaps allowing themselves to be counted as the tenth in a minyan which counts women. They may even send their kids to Camp Ramah in the summer. But in their home communities, they function as part of the Orthodox community.

Other people make a more radical break with their past. Sometimes they manage to live bifurcated lives, earning a living as physicians or lawyers or accountants or in other professions, but practicing a type of Judaism that at best teaches isolation from, and at worst contempt for, the non-Jewish and non-Orthodox worlds.

One of the most puzzling conversations I ever had was with an attorney of my acquaintance. He had been a law student nearly twenty years ago at the university where I was the Hillel director, and at the time had just returned to the States after a year studying at a ba'al teshuvah yeshivah in Israel. Subsequently we both lived in Baltimore and I happened to mention to him that my office was on the same street as the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived. He said to me “I got a lot of spiritual benefit reading him when I was in college. But I don't want my kids to read him.”

Since it was a pleasant Shabbat afternoon and I was a guest in his home, I didn't press the point - in retrospect I wish I had. But I recall another conversation I had with an emergency room physician who embraced Orthodoxy while doing his residency in Washington DC. He told me “I saw so much horror day after day; I needed to be a part of something unchanging, something which would give me an anchor and prevent me from going crazy.”

For the second group, then, turning to Orthodoxy provides certainty and stability in a world of rapid change and multiple sources of meaning. For the first group, a turn to Orthodoxy provides communal support for an observant lifestyle - a support which, to my chagrin and that of most Conservative rabbis, is sadly lacking in our own congregations.

There is another group who also adopt Orthodoxy for communal reasons, but they differ significantly from the Schechter/Ramah group. These are people who for various reasons have had difficulty fitting in elsewhere in the Jewish community and in society as a whole. Through the work of kiruv groups, particularly but not exclusively Chabad, they have found affirmation of their worth and a place to belong.

As a pluralist, I believe that most (not all!) of the different varieties of Judaism have something to offer to the well-being of the k'lal. We are fortunate that the American Jewish community is so diverse. As a Conservative rabbi, I am generally happy when someone chooses to increase their observance and if an assimilated Jew chooses to become Orthodox, he or she no doubt benefits as does the Jewish community as a whole. It is a path I myself have not chosen because I find some of the “truth claims” Orthodoxy makes to be manifestly lacking in credibility. I wish that we Conservatives were more successful in creating observant communities so that we did not “lose” so many of our best and brightest to Orthodoxy - but that is a problem we will have to tackle on our own.

Two-minute Torah: Comparative and Absolute Righteousness

Not everything I wrote is as lengthy as what I have posted so far. Every week -- well, almost every week -- I send out a "Two-minute Torah" commentary. Here is today's, on Noah.

The Torah reading this week is Parashat Noach which begins with the story of Noah. The very first sentence of the parasha tells us that Noah was upright “in his generation.” Anyone familiar with rabbinic interpretation will immediately be drawn to that phrase, because it seems superfluous. Why doesn’t the Torah just tell us Noah was upright? What does “in his generation” add to our learning?

Rashi tells us that there are two possible interpretations, without himself choosing which one is correct. One possibility is that “in his generations” is a form of damning by faint praise. It is only “in his generation” that he is considered righteous -- in other words, comparatively but not absolutely. He was the least evil person in a very evil generation and thus by comparison could be considered righteous; but had he lived in a different generation he would not have been particularly noteworthy.

The other possibility is that Noah’s righteousness is all the more noteworthy given that he lived among evildoers. By this understanding, it is easy to be righteous when everyone around you is also righteous -- just as it is easier to keep kosher in Jerusalem than in Norwich. But it is harder to be righteous when all around you, social pressure is pushing you in the direction of evil.

Which is true? One thing for certain that we learn from this debate is that all living is contextual. Our surroundings do influence us. It is harder to hold to our principles when all around us we see others violating them; but perhaps on the other side, we deserve all the more credit for doing so. I suspect that in the end, both possibilities that Rashi offers can be true simultaneously.

Christians and Jews: Praying Together with Integrity

I presented this lecture almost seven years ago at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. The "Driscoll Lecture" is a very distinguished annual lecture series on Catholic - Jewish Relations and I was honored to present this talk. It is scheduled to be published as a chapter in a new book on Catholic - Jewish Relations by the Paulist Press but the publication has been delayed for some time. So meanwhile, you can read it here!

Christians and Jews: Praying Together with Integrity

The Sixth Annual Driscoll Lecture in Jewish-Catholic Studies

Iona College, New Rochelle, NY

February 2, 2005

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

The desire to have Christians and Jews (and indeed, those of other religions as well) pray together is a distinctly modern phenomenon. For most of Western history, a person’s religious community was his or her community. True, Jews and Christians might trade and do business with each other. But friendships between those of different religions were rare if not impossible, and interreligious prayer was not high on anyone’s agenda. As Lawrence Hoffman writes: “historically speaking, worship has precisely not been in common with anyone but one’s own people.”# “One’s own people,” of course, were those who shared one’s religion.

But the American and French revolutions, and the subsequent spread of democracy, meant that people of any religion were now citizens and part of the larger community. Since the social and political order now embraced those of many religions, might there not be occasions when joint prayer was in order? Indeed, there are records of interfaith services held by Reform Jewish temples and liberal Protestant churches going back to at least the 1880’s, if not earlier.

Despite the fact that interfaith prayer has been going on in this country and elsewhere for some time, it remains an area of some controversy. There are traditionalists in both Christianity and Judaism who will not participate in interfaith prayer. Others participate, but wonder how appropriate and meaningful such activity really is. Can Christians and Jews pray together in a meaningful way? Can they do so with theological integrity?

At the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies in Baltimore, our exploration of this question two years ago was prodded by the controversy within the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod over one of its Regional Presidents’ participation in an interfaith service at Yankee Stadium in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Some of you may be familiar with this case, where a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor was suspended by his denomination for participating in an interfaith gathering together with Jews, Muslims, non-LCMS Christians and other “pagans” – even though, at this interfaith gathering, he offered an explicitly Christian prayer in Jesus’ name.

But our concern was much deeper than a mere response to a controversy in the news. One of the core principles of our work is respect for the integrity and legitimacy of both Christianity and Judaism. Because we are aware of the many issues surrounding interfaith prayer, participants at ICJS events often talk and study about prayer but our events do not, as a rule, include having the participants pray together. Our educational events do not start with an invocation, our meal events do not begin with grace, and our overnight programs for clergy and educators do not begin the day with morning services. This policy has been the occasion for comment and sometimes even consternation over the years.

I want to limit my exploration tonight to the specific question of Christian – Jewish interfaith prayer. There are a number of reasons why this is a unique issue. First, the majority of Christians and Jews believe that both religious communities worship the same God. Second, they have certain sacred texts in common – what Jews refer to as the Tanach and what Christians refer to as the Old Testament. For reasons, which will (hopefully) become apparent, interfaith worship that includes religious groups that are not explicitly monotheistic – such as Buddhists, Hindus, or Wiccans – introduces certain complications. It is for this reason that personally, as a rabbi, I have participated in Christian – Jewish and Christian – Jewish –Muslim services but not services that include leadership from other faiths that are not explicitly monotheistic or Abrahamic.

Why do we have communal prayer? Communal prayer is an expression of a group’s innermost longings. In prayer, a community dialogues with its God. The community expresses its needs, its desires, its hopes and dreams. It’s no wonder that the folk aphorism has it that “the family that prays together, stays together.”

But prayer is not only the expression of a group. Prayer often creates and defines a group. Groups by their nature are exclusionary; by defining who is in, they also define who is out. Whoever is called upon to craft a service, which expresses the identity and desire of the community, is forced to define the community’s boundaries. This is why participation in interfaith or even ecumenical services is such a “hot button” issue for more conservative religious groups and for those defined by their adherence to certain doctrinal interpretations. Interfaith services create broader boundaries of inclusion than these groups are generally comfortable with.

A number of years ago my friend Rabbi James Diamond, the (now retired) campus rabbi at Princeton University, wrote an article for the interfaith journal Cross Currents called “Liturgical Chastity.” He wrote that one should “understand the act of worship in terms phenomenonologically similar to those in which we understand the act of sex . . . both are private. They flow from the deepest regions of the self. They are connected to how we live out and express as individuals our most fundamental identities.”#

If this is so, Diamond writes, then interfaith worship has the character of group sex. Though at first it may seem “innovative and even exciting,” at the end of the day it is “trivial and inauthentic.”

Diamond’s comparison of prayer to sex may at first seem shocking. But prayer is indeed an intimate act, one that makes us vulnerable. Attending services of a group different than one’s own can make one feel very much an outsider or even a voyeur. Conversely, when a congregation is overwhelmed by a large number of visitors who are not familiar with the service and do not participate actively (either visitors of another religion, or guests at a life-cycle event), regular worshippers will often note that the quality of their own prayer experience suffers.

While I’m not certain that I agree with Diamond’s description of interfaith worship as “trivial and inauthentic” it is not without its problems. Services that bring together Christians and Jews have been taking place in America for well over one hundred years. Throughout most of that time, the ground rules have called for a “neutral” service. The content of the prayers was meant to be something that everyone present could affirm. This meant that Christians were expected to omit any Christological or Trinitarian references. Jews were often, though not always, expected to omit Hebrew (not because there is any theological objection to Christians worshipping in Hebrew, but because it was considered exclusionary and inaccessible.) On a theological level, Jews were also expected to omit the many references in Jewish liturgy to Israel’s chosenness and the Jewish sense of a unique mission and destiny.

These neutral services may not offend, but what do they accomplish? Rabbi Donald Berlin, rabbi emeritus of Reform Temple Oheb Shalom in Baltimore, notes, “I am invited (to participate in these types of services) because I am a rabbi but then I am told to say something which has nothing to do with the fact that I am a rabbi.” Participants may leave the room feeling that they have done something positive in demonstrating good will towards people of other faiths. But is that what prayer is for? Is that even authentic prayer?

In other words, a neutral service requires Jews and Christians to check their distinctive identities, and their distinctive ways of praying, at the door to the sanctuary. Christians and Jews, under this set of ground rules, can pray together only by temporarily suppressing the fact that they are Christians or that they are Jews. We have said we want to have Jews and Christians pray together, but in order to do so, Jews cannot pray as Jews and Christians cannot pray as Christians.

Or can they? What, in fact, makes a Christian prayer authentically Christian, or a Jewish prayer authentically Jewish? A couple of years ago, while spending a year studying the issue of interfaith prayer in depth, our Institute brought together a group of rabbis and Christian clergy of various denominations to help us examine some of these issues. At a Clergy Colloquium, the Christian participants identified the following characteristics of Christian prayer:

• The prayer is offered in the name of Jesus, or in the name of the Trinity. (This qualification is not mandatory, since the Lord's Prayer has neither a Christological nor a Trinitarian focus.)
• The prayer is informed by Christian theology and/or by the Christian story.
• If the person praying the prayer is a Christian, then the prayer is a Christian prayer.

The rabbis who participated identified the following characteristics of Jewish prayer:

• Prayer is communal (a minyan is required).
• Prayer is commanded, and it is a response to the covenant relationship.
• Prayer is time-bound rather than space-bound: It is commanded at certain times of the day and on particular occasions.
• Prayer involves the establishment of a dialogue: Prayer speaks to God and bounces back to the community.
• The formulation of the prayer makes it Jewish; it begins and ends with certain words. There is a set liturgy that involves actions as well as words.
• There is a "uniform" for prayer: tallit and tefillin.
• Prayer is not mediated.
• Hebrew and Aramaic are used in prayer.

These lists, of course, are neither exclusive nor exhaustive, but they do give some indication that Jews and Christians may well mean different things when they use the word “prayer.”

Moreover, it becomes clear that if certain of the characteristics are considered absolutely necessary for Christians or Jews to participate, then Christian-Jewish interfaith prayer becomes impossible. Jews, of course, will not participate in prayers that invoke Jesus or are Trinitarian. Most Christians are not conversant or comfortable with prayers in Hebrew.# Moreover, I suspect a lot of Christians might be surprised and not a little bit hurt to discover that they are not included in the “we” or the “us” that most Jewish prayers contain: “Blessed are You O Lord our God, who has chosen us from among the nations and commanded us . . .”

So we are faced with something of a conundrum. We want to pray together, but we want to pray as Jews and Christians, not as generic human beings. There is something deeply unsatisfactory about the expectation that in order to pray together, we suspend our religious particularity and identity. If we believe that, as the September 2000 “Jewish Statement on Christianity” Dabru Emet states, “Jews and Christians worship the same God” and that “through Christianity hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel”, why shouldn’t Jews and Christians be able to worship that same God together?

The question, it seems to me, is not merely about the identity of the God to Whom the prayers are addressed. Rather, it is also about membership in the community that is uttering the prayers. Members of a religious community are not merely a random group of people who happen to be, each as an individual, covenanted to the same deity. Rather, they are covenanted to each other as well. This is why Jewish communal worship requires a minyan, a quorum of ten adult Jews, and why many (though not all) Christian denominations have rules about who may participate in Communion.

Many Jews and Christians believe that their covenant does not merely require them to worship God; it requires them to worship God in a specific way at a specific time. Prayer that does not conform to these requirements will, indeed, seem inauthentic to such people, even if it is done with the best of intentions and with utmost care.

These types of issues don’t only arise, of course, when discussing questions of joint prayer for Christians and Jews. They occur even between Christians of various communities. About fifteen years ago I was the only campus rabbi in the entire state of Virginia, and I was helping to plan an interfaith student weekend conference. The question of our plans for Sunday morning arose, and the Protestants on the committee wanted something that would include all of the Christian and Jewish participants ---Muslims and others were not on anyone’s radar screens at the time. They asked me if there were any Sunday morning required Jewish rituals and I replied “bagels and the Sunday Times.” But the plan for joint worship Sunday morning ultimately foundered because of the Roman Catholic obligation to attend Mass. While the Catholic campus ministers had no theoretical objection to an ecumenical Christian or even Christian – Jewish service, that would neither fulfill nor override the obligation to attend a Roman Catholic Mass celebrated by a duly-ordained Roman Catholic priest, and in the end there was no way that our packed schedule could accommodate both a Catholic mass and an ecumenical or interfaith service in addition. So the Catholics went to Mass, the Protestants had Sunday morning prayer, and the Jews either slept in or had a very leisurely breakfast.

“Who is my partner in the covenant?” is an unresolved issue between Jews and Christians. Those Christians who believe that Judaism is also a legitimate religion tend to use Paul’s metaphors of “grafting” and “adoption” and believe that Jews and Christians are two parts of the same overall covenant. Judaism has generally held to a two-covenant model: the Covenant of Noah, which potentially embraces all humanity, and the specific covenant between God and the Jewish people which is known as the Covenant of Abraham. The idea that Christians might also be heirs to the Covenant of Abraham, though in a different way than Jews, is a difficult one for many Jews to accept. Even Dabru Emet, which is the first Jewish statement about another religion to move away from Noahide language, doesn’t specifically address the question of covenant. But if I am correct, that the issue of prayer involves not only the identity of the Deity but also membership in the covenant community, this may give us a clue as to why Christians often seem more eager than Jews to engage in interfaith prayer. It may also give us a clue as to why so many Christians seem so eager to adopt and adapt all sorts of Jewish rituals, from the seemingly ubiquitous church seders to the use of ram’s horns and tallitot in Christian worship. At any rate, the tendency of Jews to see Christianity as merely one among many non-Jewish religions while Christians usually see Judaism as somehow more intrinsically related to their own faith is an often-present but unarticulated source of some of the tensions and misunderstandings which arise.

A relatively new innovation for interfaith services is the model which Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College, calls the “Service of Mutual Affirmation.” While this type of service contains some “neutral” prayers, it also makes space for specifically Jewish and specifically Christian prayers, which are meant to be said only by members of that particular community. During those faith-specific prayers, the participants are not praying together, but they are coming together to pray, or praying their own particular prayers in the presence of the other community. I see this as having a distinct advantage over the older model of the neutral service. It does not require Christians to suppress their Christianity or Jews to suppress their Judaism. It allows members of each community to pray for at least part of the service in their own idiom and their own style. It can, admittedly, sometimes be uncomfortable for Jews who object even to hearing Christological or Trinitarian language, but in my opinion this discomfort is inappropriate. We should have no objection when Christians pray as Christians; our objection should be only to the assumption that everyone in our society is or ought to be Christian, or to having prayers lead presumably on our behalf to which we cannot in good conscience say “Amen.”

For now, Christians and Jews who want to be involved in interfaith prayer have two choices: they can opt for “neutral” prayer which fully expresses neither community’s identity, or they can adopt Hoffman’s “Mutual Affirmation” model, conscience of its limitations. Liturgy that allows Jews and Christians to worship together as Jews and Christians does not yet, at least to my knowledge, exist.

Although such a liturgy has not yet been written, perhaps the upcoming 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate provides the opportunity for Jews and Roman Catholics, in particular, to begin thinking about creating one. In order to do so, we need to take our theoretical cue from Dabru Emet and from Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s new book “For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity.” For Greenberg, Christianity is at least partial fulfillment of God’s call to Abraham to be a blessing to all of humanity. Judaism, as an intensely particularistic tradition that is tied very strongly to a particular ethnic identity and a particular land, could never become and was not intended to be, a universal religion. It was Christianity that brought the worship of the God of Israel, creator of heaven and earth and giver of the Torah, to millions and billions of people. Thus, Jews and Christians are related to each other in a special way, and it should be possible for us, acknowledging that we worship the same God, to pray together in some sort of meaningful way.

Nevertheless, though we do indeed worship the same God and are close to each other, we remain different and distinct religions. Recognition of this fact will help us to construct appropriate worship services and avoid some of the misunderstandings that have sometimes marked discussions about interfaith worship.

Because Jews and Christians remain distinct religions, it is only possible, in my opinion, for joint services to be supplemental and held on special occasions such as Thanksgiving or a commemoration of some historic event. My participation in a joint service does not and is not intended to fulfill my obligation for statutory prayer. A Catholic’s participation in a joint service does not fulfill her obligation to attend Mass. It would be inappropriate for a church to have a joint service instead of Sunday Mass or for a synagogue to have a joint service instead of its regular Friday night or Saturday morning Shabbat service – though it would be proper to have what Hoffman calls an “indigenous worship service with guests” on such occasions. When I was a pulpit rabbi, we would on occasion have a service where we had guests from a local church and their minister might even speak, or I and some congregants would go as guests to a church service and I might speak, but the services remained essentially what they would have been anyway, except perhaps with some more explanations and page announcements. But this is not what we mean when we talk of interfaith worship, and we should not try to turn a church or synagogue’s own indigenous service into something it was not meant to be.

So a truly interfaith, Christian – Jewish liturgy should be explicitly supplemental and not an attempt at fulfilling either community’s obligations to statutory prayer. Such a liturgy would have to follow several guidelines to have theological integrity. It should:

1. Acknowledge that Jews and Christians worship the same God, but they do so in different ways.
2. Acknowledge the legitimacy of each faith.
3. Acknowledge and celebrate not only the similarities between the two faiths, but also their differences.
4. Acknowledge, as Dabru Emet states, that “the humanly irreconcilable difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world as promised in Scripture.” It should also leave open the possibility that these differences are not meant to be settled at all and will persist even then.

Isaiah has taught us that in the end of days, God’s house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples. As Christians and Jews, we are called to work, individually and together, to bring that day to fruition. We do that, of course, through our own efforts, but we are also cautioned to remember that ultimate redemption belongs not to us but to God. Our desire to pray together is a sign of that future redemption; our difficulties in doing so, remind us that that day is not yet here.