Introduction: Piano Bench Sermons

I used to give sermons in the living room from my altar—well, the piano bench. I’m the son and grandson of pastors, and the nephew, too. It’s in the genes, plus a little environmental exposure. I would guess I was around 10 or 11 years old when I gave these sure-to-be gripping oratory performances.

The truth is, all the pastors I knew were pretty plain-spoken and even-keeled. Some traits generalize: Progressive Christian clergy and Reform rabbis own acoustic guitars and at least one tie-dyed garment.

The month of Elul in the Hebrew calendar is a time of preparation for the coming High Holidays, and Rosh Chodesh Elul, the head of the month, begins tonight at sundown. For the past few years around this time, I’ve tried to make sense of my life with respect to identity, and I consider who I am and what I’m up to. I’ve served as a progressive Christian lay leader in my life, and I’ve been called Rabbi by a select few for the past several years. I fit in completely and not at all in my communities of practice. I’m both pariah and partner; sibling and stranger; teacher and heretic. My core being is Jewish. My soul, my neshama, and my worldview is deeply coherent with an Eastern European, joyful, resistance, labor class, social democratic outlook that sings songs through the ages of my identity, and I’m also an intellectual, learned, post-critical justice-minded agent of progressive values in Jesus-centered assemblies where I’ve taught books, co-led racial justice work, and combatted Christian antisemitism.

My identity is coherent if you shed dogma, but my traditions are also apples and oranges: one is an ethnoreligious identifier, and the other is a sort of doxastic voluntarism.

In short, I’m a Jew who sometimes gives sermons.

Act I: You’re Doing Communion Wrong

The clergy on my dad’s side of the family (my late grandad, my dad, and two uncles) are ordained through the United Church of Christ, or UCC. This is a mainline Protestant denomination, which is to say that the UCC is more liberal and theologically progressive.

I, of course, didn’t realize this at the time. ‘United Church of Christ’ was just the formal title tacked onto the end of the church’s name on the letterhead. I knew there were other churches, but as a kid, I never thought too critically about possible differences between another church and ours.

When I think of church, my thoughts include plenty of women clergy and gay clergy. Later, I’d find out this is not the norm across the board for churches.

I knew from a pretty young age that my grandad, barrel-chested from his days on the farm, entering the ministry as a second career, didn’t include hell in his theology. On this plane of existence, Grandad thought, there’s plenty of suffering, plenty of hell. No one will meet it in the afterlife. It turns out that isn’t the norm either.

The first time I realized that we might be doing something a little more progressive was with an early girlfriend. She came with me to church, and it happened to be on a communion Sunday. I honestly have no idea if only having one of those communion Sundays a month is the norm or not. Do some people have communion every week? I only get around to lighting Shabbat candles about once a month, so that seems to be the norm for me. Maybe church is where I got my lax approach to Jewish ritual. That’s a joke.

Back to the story. We’re doing the communion thing, and she leans over to me, my girlfriend, and whispers.

“Your church does communion wrong.”

The fact that I didn’t know that there was a right way to do communion told me immediately that I was the liberal in this scene. Hell, when it came to that bread and juice, I’ve dipped it, dunked it, had it placed on my tongue, grabbed it myself, drank and ate separately, had it handed to me, took it from a plate, passed a cup, and had my own, stood up, sat down, with leaven like a bread crumb, and unleavened like a matzah, ate it when you got it, or after everyone has it… One time as a kid, I remember drinking the wine, and my buddy let loose a classic 1990’s “Raunchy!” and I did a spit take on my Sunday best.

If I’m at church on a communion Sunday these days, it continues to be my wife’s tradition, I quietly say the bracha, the Jewish blessing, before bread and before wine, hamotzi and borei pri hagafen, respectively, while the pastor blesses the elements from their tradition.

So yeah, I hadn’t heard that there was a wrong way to do communion, but I knew that I disagreed with that premise entirely, which was probably my first ever well-formed, independent theological thought.

From here, a couple of things happened in parallel. I could weave the accounts together, one on top of the other, but taking them in turn is probably better.

Act II: Post-Critical Naivete

Around the church, we’re back to middle school and high school days. I started reading this guy, Marcus Borg, who wrote with this other guy, John Dominic Crossan, or, as my brother, a seminary grad and one of my religious interlocutors, refers to him, “Dom.”

I had been exposed to Jesus Seminar and historical Jesus work pretty early in my life because of Dad’s career in the ministry, where the Senior Pastor of one of Dad’s early posts, if I recall the details, had been involved with some of the critical analysis for the Westar Insitute. Historical Jesus is the study of Jesus using historical methods. Scholars aim to understand who Jesus was, what he did, and what he taught by examining historical evidence and the cultural context of his time. This approach differs from religious interpretations and focuses on what can be known about Jesus through historical research.

These guys who I had started reading, Borg and Crossan, both affiliated with the movement, were doing book-length work on the topics. I was immediately struck. Whatever they were doing was exactly what I wanted to be learning. They were theoretically reconstructing the historical circumstances of all these stories in the New Testament. The stories themselves became dirtier, less reliable; Jesus got a beard, ya know? He picked up some traits in my mind’s eye. I began noticing the Jewish nuances and practices that were more than props in the text; the Temple had life. Even in a progressive Christian setting, where the UCC has been called by more conservative apologists: Unitarians Considering Christ, clever and funny, the focus is on Jesus, and the elements of the gospel stories serve mainly to amplify this leading role. At best, Christianity treats the Scribes and Pharisees as NPCs (non-playable characters, video game slang) and, at worst, as active co-conspirators in Jesus’s execution. At any rate, Borg and Crossan presented a new frame through which to see the text. Not only was Jesus Jewish in their view, but so were a majority of his followers, as were at least some of the anonymous authors writing the accounts about him.

Beyond revealing Jesus’s Jewish character with higher definition, Borg and Crossan also went a long way to present evidence that the gospel accounts were something like myths; proclamations. They were rhetorically-driven accounts that leveraged the Scriptures of Israel to make a case for Jesus’s special status, whatever that status was. The view was that stories about Jesus were told as a commentary on current events, using the scriptural frame the evangelists had access to. Maybe not made up from whole cloth, but the gospel writers borrowed concepts both from their tradition and from ruling Rome to create politically subversive texts about their main guy who ended up executed in a brutal exercise of state-sanctioned capital punishment.

An early and influential lesson from Borg divided three phases of religious engagement for contemporary parishioners: Pre-critical naivete, when the surface-level reading of the text is uncritically accepted. For example, there was indeed a huge ark and a giant flood. Next came a critical stage, when readers of sacred text begin to question the veracity of these accounts. How could a person build an ark big enough to hold two of every kind, or at least seven pairs of all the clean animals, depending on which account in Genesis you’re reading? The giant boat and stories like it, towers, talking animals, plagues, and so on are where critical readers get off the ride. Both religious fundamentalists and Internet atheists are locked in this critical stage, with fundamentalists accepting biblical events as historical and internet atheists rejecting claims on the grounds that there is no way these events could be. Both theists and atheists can fall victim to interpreting the text as history and accepting or rejecting it, respectively.

Those who uncritically accept the text return to the pre-critical, but those who hang on past the critical stage achieve a post-critical naivete. In this stage, readers reject the text’s veracity but find lessons and applications in the text. Borg described it this way: “I don’t know if this happened or not, but I know that this is true.”

Borg and Crossan argued, for example, that the birth narratives of Jesus; there are two, one in Matthew and one in Luke, and they differ, were constructed to subvert Rome and tie Jesus to Moses and to Adam. They argued that the Passion narrative about Jesus’s death was an independent circulating source that the Markan evangelist worked into their text, based on something like a street play or dramatic reading.

The historical lens probably rescued the literature for me. It allowed me to appreciate the material without having to explain it or believe it as testimony. I saw a new toolkit for working on the problems of scripture: Post-critical, historically enriched with context, and stripped of creed or doctrine.

‘Suppose in retrospect, to my early girlfriend, we probably were doing communion wrong!

Act III: The Jewish Reveal

By the time I was in my teenage years, I had more or less unplugged from traditional Christian beliefs and worship practices, but I was eager to continue exploring this historical work. In the non-doctrinal UCC, I didn’t have too much theological baggage to sift through, and the people I was reading affirmed an engagement with the text that didn’t require dogmatic commitment but curious skepticism.

Our family moved from Arizona to Indiana a few years before, and as a kid in Stussy shirts and board shorts, influenced more by West Coast skater culture than Indiana conservatism, I struggled to fit into the already fraught Middle School culture. I was on the outside. I lacked community. My mom had spent a long time lacking a community fit, too, or I would learn that she had, and in the waning years of her adoptive parents’ lives, she had begun a search for her biological family. After a decade of incredible searching, she discovered her, our, Jewish family.

The pump was primed for me to allow this revelation to influence my life. I was without a theological characterization of Jesus, viewing him as a first-century Jewish teacher more interested in giving instruction than receiving worship. I was developing a sense of historical criticism brought to bear on the sacred literature.

In the past couple of decades of sorting out my complicated and curious religious identity, I’ve learned that study, skepticism, and debate are hallmarks of Jewish engagement. Learning that a people’s history was flowing within was never a rejection of my upbringing but an affirmation of my identity. The more that I continue to learn, and even these days, after 25 years of study, intermittent synagogue attendance, ebbing and flowing home practice, and cultural connection, I am often responding to new Jewish insights with a resounding, “Oh, of course, that makes sense!” It has been a coming home.

Act IV: Secular and Unbound

I never disengaged from the service-mindedness and justice-centered values of my progressive Christian connection–probably because those are deeply Jewish values! As recently as the past couple of years, I’ve been involved in justice work through the UCC. Anyone who reads me or follows my content on TikTok or YouTube hears me talk about Amy Jill Levine, a Jewish woman who teaches New Testament Studies. I think AJ loves the gospels more than many Christians who I know! AJ really speaks to me because she is unequivocally confident in her Jewish identity while also deeply embedded in Christian education for clergy and parishioners.

About ten or twelve years ago, I was actually leading a small, progressive Christian worship service, where I didn’t necessarily emphasize my Jewish identity, but each Sunday I’d bring a historical perspective to Christian texts with a subtle objective of dismantling antisemitic beliefs, like Jesus replaces the covenant between God and my ancestors. Ever since then, a handful of people have called me Rabbi. I see it as an honor, and I’ll be the first to emphatically disclose that I am, in fact, not a Rabbi in any formal or credentialed sense. I would never claim to be something I’m not, but I think the anecdote is instructive. From piano benches to pulpit, synagogues to seder tables, I’ve always sought to operate with deep respect and integrity for my shared traditions.

A Jew who sometimes gives sermons.

This year I discovered the Secular Synagogue. We invite members to join us with this inclusive welcome:

If you are a cultural/secular Jew, someone who is becoming a Jew, partnered with a Jew, or otherwise Jewishly engaged, and want to connect to Jewish wisdom, ideas and community, this is the place for you! Every day you will join people just like you in Jewish-inspired challenges and learning.

The truth is, tears are welling up in my eyes even as I type these words. If learning our family connection to Judaism was a sort of homecoming, Secular Synagogue has pulled out a seat at the table for me to sit down. We are beginning our month of Elul programming this week, as we prepare for the coming High Holidays with education and commitment.

Growing up I heard my dad, Pastor Marc, welcome people to the church each and every Sunday: No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.

For a long while I didn’t speak up too much publicly about my identity. Traditional Christians often view me as a heretic–doing communion wrong, as it were! And for many of our family friends, I’m a pastor’s kid, not a Jewish man. In Jewish spaces, having not been raised in our tradition makes me a problematic case for Jewish law, or halakha.

Not a Christian, not quite a Jew.

Still, somewhat of a stranger and outsider, I’ve learned an important lesson over the past few years. Since I began telling this story more publicly a couple of years ago, with the launch of an early iteration of this blog, I’ve had several people identify with my story. Maybe they’re Jewish, but their parents didn’t identify with any of the practices, or maybe grandparents or great-grandparents hid the identity for safety from persecution. Or maybe, like my mom, there is an adoption story that complicated the case.

I’m not one to conceive of the world operating by some divine plan. I was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2016, and I’ve heard the refrain so often, “This is part of a bigger plan.” To which I respond, “If the plan was to give me brain cancer, that’s a bad plan.” But there is a sense that my story has utility. I’ve had other “halachically problematic” (©) Jews reach out to me, asking questions and seeking validation. It’s a little goyish of me to say, but I sure do wish our people did a better job of welcoming in the curious, after all, “you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

This month I’ll be preparing for the High Holidays and, again, evaluating my identity and commitments. If you’re Jewish, or on the periphery like me, maybe this speaks to you. If you’re from any other tradition, maybe this hits home, too. We may be the chosen people, but rather than being chosen, I like to think that chosenness is also what I choose to do. Each year, I choose to be more confident, open, and ready to let all my traditions speak to me.