The Weirdest Email I Got in 2024

An unharmonious missive from somebody who won a prize for promoting “harmony”

Once upon a time, I was catching up with a friend, who told me that her most recent ex was a conflict-resolution guru. It’s hard to make money as any sort of guru, conflict-management or otherwise, so this chap had had a day job, in HR at a small company. But it turned out, my friend told me, that he had been fired from the job in HR and was unemployed, and generally down on his luck, around the time they had broken up. So I asked her, “Why was he fired?” And she replied, “Anger-management issues.”

At the time, I think I was surprised, found it ironic or hilarious or something, that the conflict-management guy had anger issues. But in my years reporting on religion, I have learned that the professional peacemakers are often the angriest people out there. The guy who hawks pacifist pamphlets at the farmers’ market is way more likely to deck you over a parking-space dispute than your angriest MAGA chump.

So was I surprised when the rudest email I got in many moons came from a professor of “interreligious dialogue” who lists on his CV, as one of his laurels, something called the Interfaith Harmony Award? No, reader, I was not surprised. I was not surprised that Mr. Interfaith Harmony was not, in fact, very harmonious.

Okay, you ask, what was the email in question? After Mr. Interfaith Harmony read my piece on David Brooks a couple weeks back, he sent me an email that read, in total,

Wow. Quite the rant. I prefer the sophistication of Michael Wyschogrod’s ‘Letter to a friend.’

Okay, this email is not Tony Hinchcliffe-level scathing. But it’s pretty obviously terse, and rude, and a bit mean, dismissing my essay as a “wow”-worthy “rant,” and then calling me unsophisticated. It wasn’t very nice at all—not harmonious, one might say.

Still, as my grandma always told me, even the most passive-aggressive seminary professors might have a thing or two to teach you. So I decided to investigate the sophisticated Michael Wyschogrod, of whom I had not heard.

Michael Wyschogrod

Wyschogrod was a Jewish philosopher who in 1995 published, in the journal Modern Theology, “Letter to a Friend,” a seven-page essay structured as a letter from Wyschogrod to a Jewish friend who has become a Christian. It begins:

Dear Friend:

It is now several years since we have met and come to know each other. During that period, the depth of your religious quest and your profound sincerity have become clear to me. It is for this reason that I am writing. You were born a Jew and have recently been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. This is, of course, not totally unprecedented. Over the centuries, there have always been Jews who have become Christians. But what is different about your situation is that you have said that in becoming a Christian you have not ceased being a Jew. You experience your Christianity as a deepening of your Jewishness, even a fulfillment of it.

From there, Wyschogrod goes on to share his feelings. He quotes Jean-Marie Lustiger, the late (Jewish-born) cardinal of Paris, who when he got baptized said to his parents

I am not leaving you. I’m not going over to the enemy. I am becoming what I am. I am not ceasing to be a Jew; on the contrary, I am discovering another way of being a Jew.

“These words, I think,” Wyschogrod writes to his friend, “express your feelings also. They have given me much thought.”

The discussion goes on. At one point, Wyschogrod notes that

it is clear that from the Jewish point of view accepting trinitarian Christianity is not a good thing to do. In fact, it is so bad that a Christian Jew loses all sorts of privileges in the community of Israel, such as being an acceptable witness in a rabbinic court or being counted in a prayer quorum of ten. But all this in no way changes the fact that a Christian Jew remains a Jew.

Then Wyschogrod gets to his conclusion. Because the Christian Jew is in fact still Jewish, he or she should, qua Jew, continue to keep the commandments—keep kosher, dwell in a sukkah during Sukkot, celebrate Passover, etc. This despite the fact that, in centuries past, the Christian community wanted baptized Jews to stop acting like Jews, to stop keeping commandments, to stop being distinct—they were, in a sense, striving for a world with no Jews:

In short, if all Jews in past ages had followed the advice of the Church to become Christians, there would be no more Jews in the world today. The question we must ask is: Does the Church really want a world without Jews? Does the Church believe that such a world is in accordance with the will of God? Or does the Church believe that it is God’s will, even after the coming of Jesus, that there be a Jewish people in the world?

However, “An increasing number of Christians are no longer comfortable with the old theology.” They don’t want Jews to disappear. What’s more, Wyschogrod argues, the New Testament makes clear that there were two communities in ancient Palestine: Christians, who did not have to keep the Mosaic law, and Jewish Christians, who still did. And so Wyschogrod concludes,

I now respectfully turn to you for your reaction. Am I right or wrong? If I am wrong, where is the flaw in my argument? But if I am right, are you not, from a Christian point of view, obligated to lead a Torah observant life because, as they say, you are a Jew? Are you not obligated to obey the dietary laws, the sabbath, the Jewish festivals, etc.? It is clear that such a decision could cause problems both for the Church and for Jews. But that cannot be the decisive issue. If you, in your conscience, become convinced that because you are a Jew you are obligated to lead a life in accordance with the Torah, then you must do so, no matter what the consequences.

Were there to be a number of Torah observant Jews (possibly even a Jewish Cardinal) in the Roman Catholic Church, who lead lives in accordance with the demands of the Torah without incurring the Church’s displeasure, a profound clarification of the Church’s attitude to the Hebrew bible and its Jewish roots will have taken place.

Wyschogrod wants to endorse his baptized friend’s insistence that he is still Jewish—but also wants to exhort this friend to keep obeying Jewish mitzvot (which, for all we know, the friend never did anyway). Put another way, per Wyschogrod, there is nothing problematic with saying one is both Jewish and Christian, provided that the person behave Jewishly, indeed more Jewishly than most Jews!

This essay (which, again, is new to me) has apparently been very influential, and has become a central text for interfaith dialogue. The issue of Modern Theology in which it appeared ran responses from Christians and Jews alike. For example, the Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz argued, dissenting, that when

one compromises monotheism, defects from the primacy of the Jewish people’s relationship with God and claims a satisfactory surrogate for the Torah and its way of life, one cannot still claim to be only another of the usual crowd of Jewish sinners.

While theologian David Novak took an even stronger stance:

The truth is that one cannot live either a Jewish religious life or a Christian religious life by oneself outside a historically structured faith community. Thus, for example, even when Jews worship alone, we still address God in the plural form “we.” Our absence from the worshipping community, then, is only acceptable when intermittent. (In my own case, I live more than one hour's commuting distance from my university because I need to live in close proximity to a synagogue that worships in the traditional Jewish manner.) Now just what sort of community does the Jewish-Christian really have? One could say “Messianic Judaism” or one of its cognates. But are these communities really historic? Well Wyschogrod himself admits that Thomas Aquinas ruled that Christian practice of Jewish “ceremonial” commandments is mortal sin because they have been replaced by the sacraments for all Christians (irrespective of their origins, Jewish or gentile). Here Aquinas is surely expressing solid Christian doctrine, not just his own opinion. And I might add, Jewish sources are just as insistent that not only Jews not practice Christianity but that gentiles not practice Judaism unless they are first willing to become converts to the historic Jewish community and all that this entails. Maimonides argued that any confusion of religious identities, any de facto religious syncretism, is a “made-up religion.” Wyschogrod is suggesting the totally unhistoric possibility of Jewish Christians returning to become in effect another Jewish sect and Jews regarding them similarly. But the intervention of almost two thousand years of either Jewish or Christian history has made such a return impossible—at least in this world. Wyschogrod, therefore, is wrong to suggest to Jewish converts to Christianity to simply practice ordinary Jewish commandments like eating matzah on Passover as if they could simply pick up as Jews where they left off. What he should be suggesting to them, if they are at all inclined to listen, is that they return (do teshuvah) to the covenant between God and his and their people Israel.

To me, the whole debate is fascinating. But I am not sure, contrary to what my harmonious, interreligious critic thinks, that it is more “sophisticated” than my treatment of David Brooks’s Jew-ianity (I just coined that; you can have it for free). Rather, I think it is more genial, and maybe even more compassionate. But I hold with Novak that Wyschogrod’s view is not sophisticated but, if anything, overly simplistic.

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