By Robert J. Kurland
In a few weeks (as I write this) the Jewish holidays will arrive: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. [Editor’s note: today, September 21.] And once again I wonder: am I a Catholic Jew or a Jewish Catholic? There is a difference. The noun, the second word, conveys the fundamental identity; the adjective is a modifier.
An Irish Catholic is not the same as a Catholic Irishman. Until 32 years ago, I would not have considered what the two phrases in the title meant. I was an agnostic Jew who fasted on Yom Kippur and celebrated Passover with a family Seder, but otherwise: no religion.
My wife, a cradle Catholic who loved everything Jewish (including me), could cook kugel, matzah-ball soup, etc., better than my mother or grandmother ever could, so any ethnic longings I might have had (mostly culinary) were satisfied.
After my conversion, the place of the Jews and of Jewish history began to matter to me. While studying Catholic doctrine, I discovered that Judaism was the foundation of the Catholic faith. And I began to wonder: what was my identity—Jew or Catholic?
At my first Mass I thought: this is like a Seder—the wine, the washing of hands, all the phrases. I concluded that I was like an Irish Catholic, an Italian Catholic, not like the group I associated with in my early Catholic years, the Hebrew Catholics who insisted on retaining a Jewish identity and some Jewish religious practices.
I was uncomfortable trying to be both Jewish and Catholic. Had I not refused to have a Bar Mitzvah because, in my adolescent intellectual arrogance, I felt that the ladies in fur coats at the Reform temple were hypocrites?
As a child I suffered bullying and cruel remarks for being Jewish. And I could not, at 65 (when I converted), focus on Hebrew, the Torah, Friday candles; they were as unfamiliar to me as if I had been raised Baptist.
Now I wonder whether that childhood experience was, in fact, the real reason I rejected the religion of my rabbinic great-grandparents. Perhaps the attempt not to be Jewish runs in the family. My maternal grandfather fled his Russian shtetl to Paris because his father, the town rabbi, would not let him study calculus instead of the Torah.
My grandfather went to Paris, lost his religious faith, but remained a Jew. Another Jew arrived in France as a child, converted to the faith as a teenager while being sheltered from the Nazi invaders, was ordained a priest and rose, as a friend of Pope St. John Paul II, to the rank of cardinal.
He was Jean-Marie (born “Aaron”), Cardinal Lustiger. He retained his Jewish identity to the end of his life and beyond: he asked that the Kaddish, the Jewish ceremonial prayer for the dead, be recited outside the church before his Catholic funeral Mass. Responding to criticism from French Jews that he should not claim a Jewish identity, he said: “I was born a Jew, and I remain so.”
Both my grandfather and Cardinal Lustiger agreed: a Jew remains a Jew. I wish I had their certainty about who I was and who I am.
If my fundamental identity is not that of a Jew, why do I fast? Let us first examine that expression “fundamental identity.” Fundamental means primary, prior to any other quality. Cardinal Lustiger said: “I was born a Jew, and I remain so.” Did he mean that his fundamental identity was that of a Jew, that being Jewish in everything took precedence? I do not think so.
My Judaism is my family background, third-generation Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe: a formative background, but not a determining one.
The Church itself has said in a Vatican II declaration (Nostra aetate) that the covenant between Israel and God has never been revoked. Moreover, Cardinal Lustiger went further in asserting that Israel’s vocation was to bring light to the nations and that Christianity was the means to do so. His Catholic faith defined his Judaism.
So what about fasting? I maintain that it is a means to demonstrate and strengthen faith. For example, before the Temple was destroyed, the priest sent the scapegoat into the desert with the people’s sins enclosed in the red ribbon tied to its horns.
Did penance and the forgiveness of sins disappear when that was no longer possible? No. For me, the sacrament of Reconciliation is the true replacement of the Temple ceremony.
As an agnostic Jew I fasted, believing in Spinoza’s God, Einstein’s God, “Der Alte” (the Old One, immanent in the laws of nature). From the flea market of my Jewish heritage I chose a means to purify myself before a God who might exist. It was not a declaration of Jewish faith.
Fasting as a Catholic is different for me. Although fasting is a matter of discipline, not dogma, it is important that I give something up, that I do penance; important not to make myself cleaner or better, but to participate in a very minor way in the Passion of Christ.
I fast on Yom Kippur as the Italian Catholics of Wilmington carry St. Anthony through the streets of Little Italy every June: a day of my people, preserved within the Church. They celebrate; I fast. But my Yom Kippur fast is a Catholic fast, not the stricter Jewish fast, which is without water or food, from sunset to sunset.
So, in the end: Catholic Jew, not Jewish Catholic.
About the author
Bob Kurland is a retired physicist of advanced age (BS Caltech—with honors, 1951; MA, PhD Harvard, 1953, 1956). In 1995 he became a Catholic. He writes “not so much to discourse authoritatively on matters that are known to me as to know them better by discoursing devoutly about them” (St. Augustine, “The Trinity” 1,8).