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A Baptist Among the Jews A Baptist Among the Jews by Mary Blye Howe Jossey-Bass, 2003 202 pp., $21.95 Mudhouse Sabbath Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren F. Winner Paraclete Press, 2003 161 pp., $17.95

Several years ago, I joined about 50 evangelical Christian youth in Israel for a six-week study tour with the Institute of the Holy Land Studies, now renamed Jerusalem University College. Day after day we immersed ourselves in Hebrew history—charting ancient Israel's battles with the Philistines on overhead maps, learning and reciting the Jewish Shema (Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one), visiting biblical sites with our instructor. We moseyed through Jewish shops along the main drag of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City, picking up Jewish prayers shawls or necklaces with Hebrew characters. We exchanged greetings of "Shabbat Shalom" with Jews at the Wailing Wall (the remains of the Temple Mount's western border), and the men in our group donned kippot (Jewish skullcaps) to offer written prayers in the wall's crevices.

When our classes came to an end, nearly everyone agreed that the experience had revolutionized the way we read Scripture (a rather typical response for Christians who've traveled to Israel). Place names no longer appeared alien to us, we better understood the symbolism hidden in difficult biblical passages, and overall, we evangelicals felt we'd reconnected with the Bible's Jewish character.

Or had we? Never once did we worship in or even visit a synagogue (if you don't count wandering around 2,000-year-old ruins). We never stayed with any Jewish hosts, never attended any Jewish festivals or celebrated Jewish holidays, never even took Hebrew 101 or visited any sites with Jewish guides. We were there as a Christian group who studied under Christian professors, read Christian commentaries on biblical archaeology, and attended Christian services—some of them Palestinian.

Not so with Mary Blye Howe. When it comes to rediscovering Jewish roots, this Southern Baptist belle has gone the distance. In her debut book, A Baptist Among the Jews, she writes, "I had read all my life of ancient Jewish rituals and lifestyles, but now I began to realize how uninformed most Christians are of Jewish ritual and tradition." So over the next few years, Howe set out to visit and worship in synagogues of nearly every Jewish persuasion all over metropolitan Dallas—from liberal Reform to "in-between" Conservative to mystical, orthodox Hasidic. Her investigation was so comprehensive and free-ranging that Jewish Rabbi Lawrence Kushner gave his full blessing to the book.

Howe's enthusiasm and love for Jewish ritual, study, worship and community is contagious. Her descriptions of Jewish worship and study of the Torah build a picture of a people deeply in love with God. "In Jewish hands, Scripture vibrated and pulsed into life," she writes. "I felt the passion of the Hebrew God in a fresh way, heard the cry of the prophets with a new force." Later on she describes ecstatic worship with the Jews as they dance in the synagogue with the Torah scroll. "The Jews speak in hushed whispers, in rousing discussions, in upthrown hands of perplexity and resignation at all there is yet to discover. They pray as though they can bring God crashing through the roof of the synagogue."

The Gospel According to Moses The Gospel According to Moses: What My Jewish Friends Taught Me About Jesus by Athol Dickson Brazos, 2003 268 pp., $16.99, paper

But what about that charge Christians often bring against Jewish legalism? Isn't it true that most evangelical Christians view their faith in terms of relationship and God's grace, while Jews understand God as law-giver and judge? That's too simplistic, Howe argues: "The purpose of Talmud (Judaism's oral law) wasn't to put endless nooses of law around the Jewish neck but to protect the defenseless, to ensure that people were treated with respect." Jews indeed experience God personally through their religious observances. She observes that Christians are plenty thirsty for vigorous spiritual disciplines—perhaps Christians realize they need a bit more law in their experience of grace.

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