Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar?

Meredith Gould, PhD, is the author of Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar? The Jewish Roots of Christian Worship. She is guest-blogging this week on Jewcy, and this is her first post.

Conventional wisdom: write about what you know. Crazy reality: write (a lot) about what I want everyone else to know. And yes, I do realize this may come across as presumptuous and possibly even arrogant.

Among the many things I want everyone else to know: Jews and Christians shared a God, faith, and many religious practices for nearly a century after Jesus died. We continue to share many more similarities than differences, although neither Christians nor Jews typically view it this way. In fact, I think we spend way too much time highlighting differences. Our world is a freaking mess as a result.

Hi, my name is Meredith Gould, and I’ll be here all week writing not only about these issues, but about the tsouris that went into and emerged as a result of writing, Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar? Jewish Roots of Christian Worship.

For example, I got all add-and-delete with the word, tsouris. First I wrote, "about the carp that went into…" because I’ve been amusing myself lately by using "carp" instead of "crap." I like how that little bit of letter transposition looks on the screen, how it stops the eye, makes the mind wonder, "WTF?" before settling down into realizing it’s a substitute for "crap."

In my case, the word "carp" also makes my mind wander into childhood memories of scarfing down prodigious amounts of smoked carp, whitefish salad and nova after being released from the bondage of Temple Sinai’s Sunday school classes. But then, I deleted "carp" because I worried about using that word and going into the riff you just read. Surely it would generate nasty comments about stereotypically linking Jews with food, which is at best a hackneyed device. (Note: I will be writing about food issues.)

So, I decided to use tsouris, a Yiddish word so common that it’s included in the Urban Dictionary. Did it really need to be italicized for Jewcy.com? Probably not, although italicizing the first instance use of a foreign word is good editorial form. I added, italicized, un-italicized, and then deleted tsouris altogether. Surely using Yiddish would generate nasty comments about trying to validate tribal affiliation. (Note: I will be writing about identity.)

A half hour into this mishegas, I put tsoursis back into the text and here we are. Welcome to my world. This is exactly the kind of interior carp that forced me to pay out-of-pocket and completely un-reimbursable fees for a meds consult while writing Why Is There a Menorah on the Altar?

For some odd reason that now seems like total delusion, I thought I’d simply introduce Christian readers to how Judaism’s enduring legacy is revealed in Christian belief and religious practices. How big a deal could this be? I’d already received an enthusiastic reception from Catholics wanting to know more about their Jewish roots? How could it possibly become so darn personal? I’d already outed myself in an earlier book as a "Jew in identity, a Christian in faith, and a Catholic in practice."

As I’d discover while writing this book, highlighting Judaism’s legacy would also mean highlighting more similarities than differences among Catholics, Christian Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans and Episcopalians. And that’s how I ended up learning more than my stomach lining could handle about interfaith so-called dialogue and whatever currently passes these days for ecumenical relations — yet another thing I want everyone to know.

Tomorrow: Cultural identity? Religious identity? Will we never be done with this conversation?