"Not Too Jewish for an Icon"
One morning in Romania I dreamed I was walking through the streets of New York City and awaiting a purification ritual. I knew nothing about the ritual itself, only that my friend would take me to her Catholic church, and then I would be purified. I walked around the city in happy anticipation. Many of my dreams involve walking up a staircase, then finding a closed door, and turning back around downstairs. Staircases are like ladders, a metaphor for mystical ascent, and when they appear in my dreams I interpret them as such. Walking up a staircase to a closed door seems like an inhibited ascent, the ultimate endpoint forbidden to me for some unconscious reason. In this dream, while I was milling around waiting to be brought to the church, I went upstairs in my friends apartment building, and I tried the door which did open this time. I spoke to two women who lived there, who were friendly but seemed confused by me, and after speaking with them I felt satisfied and went back down.
When I woke up from the dream, I took a long walk through the real-life city of Cluj. It was the first sunny day since we arrived, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I walked aimlessly and found myself in the goyish beys-oylem—the local non-Jewish cemetery—which was much larger and more dense than the Jewish one. Here the ground was covered in little red plastic containers that used to hold candles, as well as wilting flowers and other signs of decayed remembrance and devotion. The graves themselves are intact. The cemetery is packed, huge, goes on forever. Later that day, after spending the morning and early afternoon in Yiddish class, I visited four churches: Szent Mihaly Church, the Franciscan church, the Greek Orthodox cathedral, and Calvaria Church. The first three are all in the old city, in the vicinity of the town square at the center of Cluj. I didn’t necessarily decide to spend my day that way, but the dream of purification seemed to be pulling me into each of these buildings.
Calvaria, my last stop, stands alone on top of a hill on the west side of the city, surrounded by communist housing blocks. I had tried to enter a few days before, but the gate was locked. This time, the day of my beautiful dream, the gate opened for me and my friend Tsodek. We entered the cathedral, where we were greeted by a groundskeeper who spoke to us in Romanian. All I understood from his tour were the years he said: gesturing to the larger part of the building, “1880,” then “1440” for the sundial on the wall, and “1040” for the part of the church that houses the altar. Here was a structure nearly 1000 years old. The groundskeeper explained—in Romanian that Tsodek spoke Spanish well enough to understand, at this point, at least a little bit–that the church was established as a Benedictine monastery, and the path from the gate entrance to the church curves like the path down which Jesus carried the cross.
At a flea market with other friends in Cluj, someone said “I’m too Jewish to have Jesus on the cross in my home, but I’m not too Jewish for an icon.” He collects them. I am exploring how my Jewishness relates to an interest in Christianity. It’s no secret that I like to deconstruct the boundaries between our religious traditions—in the past, I have written about the interaction between Sufism and Kabbalah, and neo-Platonism which in turn influenced Christian mystics as well. Speaking about interactions between Jews and Christianity feels a bit more complicated to me, because—the unfortunate, obvious reality which I hesitate even to remind us of—Christian hegemony and compulsory Christianity has been a violent force resulting in bloodshed, for Jews, Muslims, pagans, and everyone else in Christendom as it has overtaken huge swaths of the world.
Christians have suffered from Christian persecution, also. Christianity was only established as a single church through accusations of heresy and shutting down breakaway churches. Both methods work through violence. The list of Christian tendencies that have been suppressed to non-existence is innumerable, but includes: the Donatists of North Africa, Nestorians, Monophysites, Bogomils, Cathars and Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites, all prior to the Reformation. (My “World Religions 101” textbook provides a useful timeline.)
The first time I visited Romania, in August, I spent my first day exploring churches because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. When I went back this February, I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, and decided to do the same thing. I felt that the churches were a familiar place which would ground me, reminding me of where I had arrived. Walking into the Franciscan church, which smells of incense and is under construction, with all of the altars covered lightly by dust, I enjoyed how the structure of the building itself seemed to cajole me to look upwards toward the heavens. Churches tend to do that. When I walked out, and down the stone-paved street, I passed by a group of people speaking Yiddish—surely other participants in the program, who I had not yet met, but nonetheless. I continued my walk, and when I walked into a place for dinner, I recognized one of my dad’s close friends from the Bay Area, also in town for the Yiddish program. I thought, this is what my life would have been like here, in the before times: hearing Yiddish in the street, seeing a friend of my father’s, feeling unalone. And, of course, living in a place dominated by churches.
Certainly we feel Christian hegemony in America, but I am certain it is a bit different. In Romania, churches are exquisite and proliferate, and typically the most elaborate and decorated places. Walking into the building offers transcendence when day to day life outside may have been toil. In addition to the fear of persecution by Christians, I wonder how Christianity dominated European life for Jews as the hegemonic religion, the main claim to transcendence. Were Jewish ancestors tempted to step inside the churches? How many of them felt called to learn about this other way of believing?
I have been thinking recently about whether the term “theology” applies to religions outside Christianity. I’ve been taking a course, just for fun, called “What is Theology” where we read only Christian texts. These texts debate the difference between theology and philosophy, and extoll the ongoing battles within Christian discourse about the nature of the trinity, and questions like whether Christ is soteriological—a savior–or economical—a closed system with nothing outside it. When I asked about the exclusion of Jewish or Islamic sources, the seminar leader said that of course, legal discourses like halakha and sharia contain theological claims, but it’s different because revelation is privileged over reason in Christian theology, in a way that is not found elsewhere. It seems to me, still, that theology itself is construed on the basis of questions that Christianity raised and had to answer for itself, riddling away at the contradictions raised by Jesus’s life and death, by his immanence and his transcendence.
How can a Jew relate to Christian spirituality? As much as I would like to think that religions transfer ideas among each other, that faith and spirituality are singular practices belonging to each individual consciousness, and thus not really a part of any nation or group of people, the truth is that Christianity asserted itself in the community of my ancestors through violence and empire, overtaking its ideological opponents. There is no way to enter a church outside of that history. And yet, there are still the frescoes and the architecture, my dreams of purification, the smell of incense and a desire to look toward the heavens. A desire to walk into a place and feel a spiritual presence, a desire which is met by the presence of churches.
