Here at Catholic Answers, we’re used to hearing (and never fail to be cheered by) stories of people turning or returning to the Catholic faith after years of wandering in unbelief or sects. Sometimes these people credit the work of our apostolate as an instrument in their conversion. And we’re used to hearing about people who make the hop from pure secularism to spirituality-without-religiosity. For a recent example, bassist Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who says he’s “not religious in any way” but does “kind of believe in God . . . like a divine energy.”
Hey, it’s a start. Maybe next he’ll start kind of believing in wearing shirts on stage.
We can get behind any conversion—from the Latin conversio, signifying a “turning around [toward God]”—however hesitating or incremental.
But some such stories do tempt my inner cynic. One is the tale of Sarah Hurwitz, former lead speechwriter for Michelle Obama who was recently interviewed for NPR’s “Enlighten Me” series about her return to her “childhood faith” of Judaism.
The general story would not be unfamiliar to many Catholic reverts. After her bat mitzvah at 13, Hurwitz said “thanks but no thanks” to the religion in which she’d been raised and for a couple decades sought, but did not find, spiritual fulfillment in worldly pursuits. Then, by seeming fluke occurrence, she found herself reconnecting with that religion and finding in it a needed feeling of purpose and peace.
Except, to hear her describe it, she didn’t reconnect with Judaism but with an NPR-sanitized version of it.
The first warning buzzer sounds when Hurwitz immediately makes it clear that her re-embrace of Judaism doesn’t involve anything so conventional as theism—“It wasn’t, ‘Oh, there’s a man in the sky taking care of everything.’ Nope.” Rather, it was “the idea of the spark of the divine in all of us.”
Now, in a sense this notion isn’t wholly incompatible with Judaism. After all, the Hebrew scriptures teach that we were created in the divine image. (And Christianity, which came from Judaism, teaches that through Christ we can be re-made in that image—divinized—by participation.) There are strains of a mystical tradition in rabbinic literature. But at root, in a plain, immediate sense, the God of the Jews is pretty darn transcendent. “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one,” goes the famous Shema (Deut. 6:4) at the heart of Jewish belief.
Or, in the words of the venerable “Theology 101” meme, “There is a God, and you are not him.” Historic Judaism is not about us but about God: his power and praiseworthiness, his wisdom, the favor he shows to his people. You can’t have Judaism, in a sense, without the “man in the sky.”
Traditional Judaism is also a religion of law and strict religious duty. But Hurwitz describes her version of it as “one big mindfulness practice” that is “calling you to notice the person in front of us and to respond lovingly and kindly and with generosity.” It’s “crowdsourced wisdom . . . about how to be a good person.” This sounds much less like Judaism and more like the moral therapeutic deism that has been slowly emerging as our national religion. Less “Law of Moses” and more “Church of Nice.”
I know: it sounds like I’m nitpicking this woman for the flaws in her conversion, and right after I said that conversion is always good even when incomplete! But it strikes me that there’s a difference between being on a journey and switching the street signs. Even imperfect conversion, when authentic, should leave us bound to some divine truth that has convicted us, not filtering that truth into something that works for us. Were a Catholic revert to announce that he had reconnected with the faith of his youth, and say that by that he means some universalist, low-Christology, morally libertine, highly politicized boutique wing of Catholicism, I would have the same reaction.
In fact, Hurwitz seems to recognize this very thing when she counsels her interviewer, who admitted to sampling from a “spiritual buffet,” to stop “picking and choosing the parts that move you and make you feel good” and instead to “step into [a religion] as a complete system.” Hear-hear. By God’s grace may she one day embrace the fullness of Judaism, the religion of God’s intervention in time to save his people, and then, perhaps, its fulfillment in Jesus Christ—the Jewish man who is also God.