My fascination with Judaism is life-long, and my love of it, as an authentic attachment to a pluriform community that I do not belong to, is not much younger. As an elementary and middle schooler, I was enchanted by the aesthetics of classmates’ holidays, and my precocious (and sometimes petulant) interests in studying religion were already blossoming then, leading me to try and learn Hebrew on my own (unsuccessfully, but I did glean the alphabet and something of a vocabulary even at that stage). In high school I frequented a synagogue among the churches I hopped to and fro, and in college, of course, I began formal study of Ancient Judaism and Christianity (and finally got around to actually learning to read Hebrew). For the first two years of my full-time teaching career after grad school, I taught in a pluralistic Jewish Day School, and became deeply invested in the life and flourishing of the Jewish communities here in my hometown. As a scholar, I continue to keep up with what’s going on in Jewish Studies, biblical studies, and “Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity” scholarship, for lack of a better term, as my home base, from which I make forays into other specialties. As a theologian, I often check my work, so to speak, against traditional Jewish exegesis of scripture, modern Jewish scholarship, and classical and contemporary Jewish halakha and aggadah. I’m one of a handful of Christians I know that’s seriously considered conversion to Judaism on more than one occasion. I’m one of fewer Christians I know who finds celebration of the history of Christianity difficult precisely on the metric of Christian mistreatment of Jews and persecution of Judaism. And I know almost no other Christians that have tried to keep up as I have with conversations Jews have with other Jews about Jewishness, not just in antiquity but today (I’m sure there are such people; I just don’t know them).
So, all of this seems to justify a kind of sustained encomium to what I have always sort of considered my immediately secondary home outside of Christianity. While I will touch on both historical and contemporary aspects of Judaism, this will be a post less about the history and formation of Judaism as about what I find compelling in the character of Judaism as a Christian admirer.
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