Dispatch Faith: Born Jewish, Became a Christian, and Living in the Tension, by Michael Reneau & Corey Nathan: 

[W]hat each gets wrong about the other. …

The day before Thanksgiving in 2000, I took the red-eye back to Jersey. At the time, I was a brand new Christian, maybe a month in, and hadn’t even been baptized yet. A buddy of mine, knowing what lay ahead of me on this trip, said, “We gotta get ya dunked, man.” So on the way to the airport we stopped at his church. It might have been the most lightly attended baptism since Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts. It was just me, this fellow, my wife, and one other friend who was downright giddy about it all. The four of us climbed the steps to the baptismal pool and did some dunking.

My parents still lived in the house where I grew up. When we got there early that Thanksgiving morning, I asked my dad to sit down with me out on the front porch, and we had a conversation that lasted for more than two hours about me becoming a Christian. This was hard because my family is observantly Jewish and still attended an Orthodox synagogue. My father’s initial reaction was mostly reserved and clinical. Still, I could read him. When he got that look—eyebrow up, lips pulled back into his teeth until they disappeared, breathing in and out through his mouth—it was unmistakable. In that moment, he mostly kept it to himself.

But about a month later, I got a 10-page letter outlining all the reasons why I must not become a Christian. He came at it from every direction. Religious, political, emotional, filial, historical, psychological, philosophical. And that was just the first page.

So I began to answer him one paragraph at a time. I was pushing 30 and still, to my own surprise, my father’s acceptance was just about the most important thing in the world to me.  But to say I was overwhelmed by this first-century rabbi—Jesus—would be an extreme understatement. …

A foot in two different rooms. With my native tongue being that of an American Jew, and having become fluent in the language of American Christianity (even if I speak it with a thick Jewish accent), in the last 26 years I have seen how the people in both those rooms are so sure, yet so wrong, about the other. Some of my Jewish friends and family have spoken authoritatively about Christians and Christianity in ways that bore little resemblance to what I was coming to know in church and Scripture. At the same time, new friends at church would speak with their own authority about “the Jews,” usually something about legalism or the Pharisees, in ways that had nothing to do with the Judaism I was raised in.

Each was talking about a group. But I knew names. And stories. Our stories. …

My mother’s reaction when she first began to register “this whole affair” of me becoming a Christian was a mix of exasperation and exhaustion. “I’m sorry”—her hands fanning the air as she groped for the words—“I just nevah thawt I’d have a son who was wawking with JEEEzusss!” And then, beginning to collect herself, yelling across the house, “Ronnie, du hast?” (Her version of the Yiddish expression meaning “did you hear?”) “Our son is a Bawn Again rePUBlican!”

Many of my Jewish friends wished me well. But others started avoiding me once they heard, convinced I only wanted to proselytize, like the whole Christian thing was a low-grade fever they might catch. …

By the spring after that tense Thanksgiving, Pastor Tom had taken my wife and me under his wing. He called the same afternoon we attended our first service. Grace Baptist was one of the largest churches in the Santa Clarita Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles. And Tom Givens was the main preacher there. So getting a call that very day felt as if we were being rung up by the president.

PT, as I called him, took a liking to me and exuded the serene patience of a fly fisherman, despite my tendency toward a truculence that would surface now and then as this Jewish square peg kept failing to fit the American Christian round hole. He was much like my father’s rabbi from Chabad, Choni Marozov. Both of these men seemed to see me and to know what I believed. And they each blessed me anyway. (More on Rabbi Choni later.) As for Pastor Tom, he was fascinated by my story. 

David Brooks wrote an entire book about this kind of attention titled How to Know a Person.

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle … and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. …

‘You can’t change your face.’ … Rabbi Choni … gives me an aliyah—the prayer that’s recited before and after a portion of the Torah is read—every time I go to Shabbos services with my dad, even though he knows exactly who I think Yeshua is. As he puts it, “We disagree on Moshiach, but you can’t change your face.” I take that not just as a compliment, but as a great honor.

This is a big deal—whether it’s in front of a thousand people at a prominent evangelical church or at Chabad with just enough to make a minyan. Rabbi Choni and Pastor Tom not only welcomed me into the house of God, they put me before their respective congregations. And the prophet Isaiah’s promise was kept:

For My house shall be called

A house of prayer for all peoples.

Twenty-five years on, my dad and I have moved past a lot of the contentiousness that characterized our early debates. We’ve both largely forgotten about You Take Jesus, I’ll Take God. Writers like Solzhenitsyn, Heschel, and Wendell Berry have given us more fertile ground to explore. His persistence in a relationship with his son, regardless of our differences, regardless of the chasm between our theological propositions—that’s what prevailed. 

Thank God. Steadfast commitment is what kept us in the room together.

Every once in a while, I’ve orchestrated an event to bring those two rooms, my two different worlds, together. One of the first times I pulled it off was when our older son was born.

We decided to have a brit milah for him in part because I knew it would be meaningful for my father. The ritual is something deeper than a naming ceremony. It was a way to declare that we are the continuation of a story—my father’s story, and his father’s—and a story that, in rituals like this one, we place ourselves back inside.

We had family and friends there to mark the occasion, including some from church. One of them was a pastor named Mike. And it was that day that Pastor Mike and my dad struck up a friendship that has lasted ever since. Mind you, Mike is well over six feet tall, a fundamentalist Christian, and a lifelong conservative. My dad is about a foot shorter, a Brooklyn Jew, and a committed Democrat. This most unlikely pair have been dear friends for more than 20 years.

I recently asked him what’s the secret to staying so close to my dad. “We choose to see each other as persons rather than simply a collection of our positions,” he said in a way that would make David Brooks smile.

And then one more word. Grace.

My father and I don’t agree now. We didn’t come to some meeting of the minds where we reached our theological consensus, everybody hugged, and lived happily ever after. There have been deep ruptures between us, ones that weren’t even about Jesus. There was a stretch, not long ago, when we didn’t speak for months.

Until we did again. He decided, the way he decided after our talk on that porch 25 years ago, that whatever he wanted for me or from me mattered less than being able to sit around a table and share a whiskey or a coffee or some chopped liver and gefilte fish with his boy. He’s had to respect boundaries he doesn’t agree with. He didn’t budge. Neither did I. He just wants, more than anything, a relationship with his son.

That’s the kind of thing neither room really has a program for. Too many Christian spaces have come to look more like Constantine’s Rome than like the kingdom of Christ. Too many of my Jewish friends have this inherited cultural allergy when it comes to anything that smells like proselytization.

To set all that aside is one thing. To agree to disagree, that trite arrangement where everyone just avoids the subject, that’s the easy way out, and it’s not what I mean. But to abide with one another, to break bread with each other, and then stay for the scotch, is another.

It’s not about winning some argument. It’s not even about, dare I say, “winning one for Jesus.” It’s about a father deciding a relationship with his son was worth more than any of it, and proving it for 25 years by refusing to leave the room.

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