Not Really Past

I've had an interesting past couple days, centered around my friend who has decided he's currently Jewish. (I know he'll protest to that statement, but c'mon, two weeks ago he was Catholic. A few months ago, Mormon. He tends to flip around among them.) I don't have any problems switching religions if that is where your spiritual journey leads you, I want to make that clear. I just have to give him a hard time.

Yesterday, we visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie together. It was an intense experience for both of us. For him, who has relatives who died and survived the camps, I can only guess the impact of what we saw and learned there. I can tell you I felt compelled to comfort a lot. For me, the experience was... horrifying. It's hard to imagine the kind of institutional and insidious hate that led to mass murder, and the fact that there are parts of the world where genocide still exists. All of us can think of a person in our lives who would have been a target of the Nazis. And we are also left with the question: Would I have fought this horrifying injustice? Or would I have taken the nationalistic feel-good propaganda at face value and turned away from the truth? It's a scary and uncomfortable question, but one worth asking.

This morning I attended Torah study with the same friend. It was a beautiful experience. I was struck, like every time I study Judaism or the Hebrew Bible, how we as Catholics ripped off so much from the Jewish tradition. Of course, I don't think it's "ripping off," but reverencing the tradition we evolved from, the tradition our Savior loved and practiced, and the tradition established by our Creator, Adonai, YHWH. The first forty minutes of study was chanting in Hebrew, largely from psalms and prophets. (I have to say, my Hebrew was not too shabby. I mumbled a lot, but surprisingly little for a goy like me) It reminded me of praying liturgy of the hours in a community where the psalms are chanted. There were even a few prayers in common, though it was hard for me to keep up with chanting the Hebrew and reading the English translations.

We then read from Leviticus and did some reading of commentary and discussion. It was fantastic - I can't say anything we read or talked about goes against any Christian theology I know. In fact, it was just fun to put my head back in that academic scripture commentary space again. We even drank grape juice and broke bread. Then we ended with some more chanting. In case you're curious, I highly recommend listening to a little Hebrew chant sometime; it's much more melodic than our Gregorian form.

It's comforting to me that we have so much in common. One of the things I love about Catholicism is the long tradition - sure, our Mass has evolved over time, but the essentials are the same as the house churches that met before Christianity was the king's religion. To experience something that goes even further back but no less important to our salvation history brings the past forward. I feel connected. The God of our fathers, our mothers, walking with them and with us. The group I was with was in anticipation of Passover, and I was in anticipation of Holy Week. Our holiest of weeks are still the same week, and both are about liberation. That's the kind of connection I can sink my teeth into.