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| Rev. Heidi Neumark, New York |
I continue to identify as a Lutheran because I was born into
a family that was deeply involved in the Lutheran Church – my father was a
Lutheran pastor in New Jersey and my mother a devoted and faithful spouse who
played to perfection the role of pastor’s wife. As a preacher’s kid, or “PK” as
we were called, I was expected to put on my best clothes and attend church and Sunday
school each week without complaint. Although I fulfilled my churchly duties
with occasional grumbling, the Lutheran church influenced greatly the young
lives of my sister, brother and I. And despite the rapidly changing social
mores and generational conflicts then brewing over Vietnam, civil rights, and
the sexual revolution, churches and other religious institutions retained a
degree of respect in the 1960s and early 1970s that no longer seems apparent
today.
I would gradually drift away from the Church after leaving home
for college and discovering a world filled with doubt and ambiguity. I became
disenchanted with the public representations of religion that dominated
American society, especially in the judgmental harshness of Christian
fundamentalism and the growing influence of Evangelicalism. By the 1980s, these
forces had begun to push aside the more theologically liberal, mainline Protestant
churches to which I had become accustomed. In later years, when I married a
woman of the Jewish faith and raised Jewish children, the many assumptions of
my childhood faith and relationship to Christianity became further strained.
And yet, although I attended church less frequently, the
influence of my upbringing never really left me. I remained connected through
family and the pull of heritage to my religious roots. I sought out Lutheran
churches and pastors concerned with social justice and that practiced a more
nuanced, ecumenical brand of religion. I was theologically and intellectually
comfortable in such churches, which allowed me to reconcile my conflicting
religious sensibilities. I also came to appreciate and connect with the Reform
Judaism practiced by my daughters, and I found solace in meaningful
participation in their Jewish education.
As I look back on my religious origins and the faith of my
childhood, I find myself decades later with a broader perspective, more attuned
to the many faces of religion in the world today. I am less attached now to the
institutions of religion than to the human search for God in the 21st Century.
I wonder how different my life would have been had I been born into a Jewish,
Hindu, or Muslim family, or had I entered the world during another place and
time. So much of our fate is determined by our life circumstances at birth, a
matter so fortuitous and yet, so determinative of what is expected and assumed
of us during our formative years. Still, I am proud of the deep and loving
connections I experienced in the religion of my youth, however far I may have
drifted from those shores in later years.
I am fascinated by the pursuit of God in modern times, by
the human quest for meaning and purpose, and the many ways in which humanity
expresses its hope and need for a divine presence. It is abundant in the faces
of the people I have seen walking the streets of places as diverse as Philadelphia,
New York, Rome, and Jerusalem; human beings made of the same biological design that
differ only in appearance, language, customs, and beliefs.
I am presently reading Hidden Inheritance: Family Secrets,
Memory, and Faith (Abingdon Press, 2015) by Heidi Neumark, a Lutheran pastor in New York City who recently
discovered her German Jewish roots and learned that many of her father’s family
members and relatives perished in the Holocaust. As a young girl in New Jersey
in the 1950s and 1960s, and as the daughter of first-generation German
immigrants, Neumark was proud of her German Lutheran heritage. She attended church
every Sunday and developed a love of liturgy, a deep and abiding faith, and a
strong sense of justice. After graduating from Brown University in the early
1970s, she attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and
became an ordained Lutheran minister. For the past thirty years, Neumark has devoted
her life and career to urban ministry, serving congregations in the South Bronx
and Manhattan. She has lived and worked in some of New York’s poorest
communities, contending with the everyday struggles of her congregants, with crime,
drugs, prostitution, abused and broken homes, AIDS and gangs. Neumark thrived and
was strengthened by serving among people who had originated from radically different
backgrounds and life experiences.
In Hidden Inheritance, Neumark explores her family’s past
and discovers that she descends from a long line of German Rabbis that ended
with the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Many of her family members
experienced the horrors of Kristallnacht; a cousin was murdered on the streets
of Dresden, her grandparents and several great aunts, uncles, and their
children were deported to the concentration camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz,
where many of them died. A few fled to other countries. Years earlier, perhaps
to evade anti-Semitism and in an attempt to assimilate into German society, her
father was baptized as a Christian. In 1938, before the Final Solution had
materialized, before the worst of the pogroms and death camps, he immigrated to
America, never to reveal the secrets he took to his grave.
It is a fascinating tale of history, heritage, and the
legacy of conflicting faiths. Among the most compelling parts of the book are
Neumark’s reflections on how insight into her newly-discovered past affects her
own inner faith journey. I was particularly moved by her reflections on the
sacrament of Holy Communion, in which Lutherans break bread and drink wine as
symbols of the body and blood of Christ, the spiritual nourishment of the
Christian faith. For Neumark, the newly-discovered knowledge that family
members perished in the Shoah with the partial complicity of the Church in its
failure to oppose centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, has forced her to
reflect in a new way on the very sacrament that gives her sustenance:
“On the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread.” I feel partly like a traitor myself – that I have betrayed my own Jewish kin, albeit unknowingly. And yet I cannot turn away from the altar where for me, in spite of everything I now know, these remain life-giving words. . . . [offering] the hope that life can go on, that one day, we can sit together and share a healing, liberating meal, that shalom is possible.
Neumark’s experience is a dramatic example of how thinly veiled
is our religious heritage. Had her father not been baptized, had he retained
his Jewishness and passed it along to his daughter, Neumark might today be a
Rabbi. But instead of lighting Shabbat candles or reciting the kaddish at Friday
evening services, she preaches the Gospel on Sunday mornings. Hers is a compelling
story that naturally leads me to wonder how any one religion can legitimately lay
claim to exclusive truths, for what we believe and what religious rituals we
practice are so often determined by chance and the circumstances of one’s
birth.
* * *
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| Jerusalem's Old City, April 2015 |
Last week I listened to an episode of On Being with Krista
Tippett, in which she interviewed Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi
of the United Kingdom and a prominent author, religious leader, and philosopher.
A leader in the Modern Orthodox movement, Rabbi Sacks spoke of the challenges
and opportunities presented by a world of diverse faith traditions.
“I think God is setting a big challenge,” he explained. “We
are living so close to difference, with such powers of destruction, that [God]
is really giving us very little choice.” Sacks believes that we can either
accept the beauty and life affirming nature of the diverse and
multi-dimensional world in which we live, or find ourselves on a more negative
course. Ultimately, it
comes down to whether we can see the presence of God in the face of a stranger.
Two months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rabbi Sacks
stood at Ground Zero in friendship, fellowship, and shared prayer with leaders
of most of the world’s faiths. “It was then I realized it is either we go in
this direction or a more negative way.” When we understand that we are enlarged
and not threatened by other faiths, it becomes more difficult to practice religious
arrogance and exclusivity.
Wisdom lies in the bio-diversity of life. “Everything that
lives has genetic code written in the same alphabet,” Sacks explained. “Unity
creates diversity. . . Don’t think of one God, one truth, one way, think of one
God creating this extraordinary number of ways.” If we consider that the human
race has developed nearly 6800 spoken languages, why should we think there is
only one language to speak to God?
Sacks contends that the 20th century witnessed the collapse
of moral language, and that today only the loudest and rudest voices win. And
yet the greatest single antidote to violence and misunderstanding remains
conversation, in speaking and listening to others. In On Being, Sacks observed
that one of the most powerful movements for peace in the Middle East is a group
of Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children to violent conflict. By
their example, they witness to the world that through empathy and
understanding, speaking and listening, one can change hearts and minds. When we
can get Israelis and Palestinians alike to think of what is best for their
grandchildren, rather than focus on individual claims of injustice and
victimhood, we can make real progress towards peace. “It is when you can feel
your opponent’s pain that you begin the path towards reconciliation.”
The world will forever remain a complex place,
full of disappointment and despair. Religious extremism and religious conflict are part of the problem, but so is religious illiteracy -- the failure to understand the "other" and the many dimensions and faces of religious belief and practice in the world today. Perhaps if we recognize how fortuitous are the origins of our own religious identities, we will make more meaningful connections to people of other faiths, or of no faith, and the many who remain conflicted about faith. Then, too, we may see more clearly that which we have in common -- the desire for community and fellowship, the need for foundational principles, and the search for God in a broken world.
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