2 of 3
Having failed as a Jew, Winner set about learning to be a Christian. Ever orthodox by inclination, she found herself theologically most in line with evangelicals. But this made her yet another kind of anomaly: an artsy Ivy League grad student with friends who watched The 700 Club. The juxtaposition exposed the snobbery of her academic community, but it tempted her to snobbery of her own. When she overheard a fellow graduate student suggesting that she might be a fundamentalist Bible-thumper, she wanted to tell him, "No, no, I'm not one of them, I'm one of you. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, but I also wear fishnet stockings and drink single-malt Scotch."
Besides the sense of being a stranger in at least two worlds, she faced internal struggles: gnawing loneliness, sexual desire, and doubts about Christianity itself. Then there was her nostalgia for the old life. It turned out that Judaism wasn't so easy to walk away from. It had become part of her:
I gave away all my Jewish books and let go of all my Jewish ways, but I realized, as I spent time with other Christians, that Judaism shaped how I saw Christianity . …I found my heart sometimes singing Jewish songs. I thought I had given away all my Jewish things, but … I'd just given away some books and mezuzot and candlesticks. I hadn't given up the shape in which I saw the world, or the words I knew for God, and those shapes and words were mostly Jewish.
The task ahead of her was to discover what it meant to have Jewish vision from within the Body of Christ. This brought manifold insights, some painful and some joyful. One Palm Sunday morning, her church in New York presented a Passion Play. After watching a mob of actor-Jews cry for Jesus' death, she hoped her priest would comment on the scene, provide some context. (Did the congregation remember that Jesus' disciples were Jewish, too?) But he didn't.
On the other hand, she found much of what she loved in Judaism implicit in Christianity, particularly Catholic expressions of Christianity, where faith is considered through a "scrim" of tradition, just as the Torah is always read within the context of the Talmud. One night she decided to visit a local synagogue on Simchat Torah, the day when Jews celebrate reading: She tells the story in the present tense:
the Torah scrolls are taken out of the ark, and everyone dances them around, scroll by scroll . …As you dance, you pray, Ana Adonai, hoshia na. 'Oh Lord, save us.' … I remember that in two months, Advent will start, and the beginning of Advent is when the church has its own Simchat Torah … when the church finishes one yearly cycle of Scripture readings and begins again . …And I watch the Torah scrolls dance by, and I know that I have already been saved.
I've never read a story quite like this one, where Orthodox Judaism mixes with orthodox Christianity in the crucible of one life. Only God could have brought Lauren Winner into being in the late 20th century. She's an anti-Danny Saunders, a bright and earnest child of pluralism who wants to walk the theological straight and narrow without dishonoring the cultural relativists who made her. She searches for truth within the boundaries of both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy, sucking the marrow of experience right from the bones of tradition. To watch her search is to see a small demonstration of the process described in Paul's letter to the Ephesians: the joining of two bodies (Jews, Gentiles) in one person. Winner herself becomes a metaphor for what occurs in the person of Christ.
As a piece of writing, her book is loose rather than neat. She skips and weaves through time and space and also thematic material, touching on every subject from Ash Wednesday evangelism to the difficult pursuit of chastity to the art of tattooing. It's easy to get lost in the shifting details of her narrative, to lose track of fixed points. I suspect, and accept, that Winner intends this. The story of her life so far—she's still in her mid-twenties—is in good part the story of herself thinking, an activity she engages in more than most, and one that doesn't always follow a linear course. Her view of the past will continue to shift and develop, I'm sure, as she sees her conversions from an ever greater distance, in light of an always unfolding present.
share this page
RSS Feed
