Among friends: my life as a Jew & a Quaker.

Praised be the Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe who ... gives light
to the earth and all who dwell there.
--Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook

The principle of the Inward Light ... illumines for us every corner of
religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, daily living, social
relationships, and international relations.
--Faith and Practice: The Book of Discipline of the New York Yearly
Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends

On the shelves of the Ecumenical Library of the Interchurch Center, where I am librarian, sits a book called Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Orbis, 2002). It is a welcome presence in that little library, which serves the sixty nonprofit organizations that occupy the "God Box," an epithet the Interchurch Center holds on account of its resolutely square architecture and the predominance of religious tenants since it opened in 1960. Founded on a vision of Protestant ecumenism, with the intention of providing homes for national offices of mainline Protestant denominations, the Interchurch Center has from the start welcomed sundry other Catholic, Jewish, and socially conscious secular groups into its rental space, and today includes several Muslim organizations. The persons who staff these groups represent a still wider range of religious commitments, including Pentecostal and social-activist Protestants; Catholic laity, priests, and religious; all variety of Jews; Caucasian and African-American Muslims; Sufis; Hindus; and Buddhists. And so, insofar as the building belongs to those whose offices are there, it does indeed exemplify multiple religious belonging.

Of course, it is one thing for a building to be multiply religiously committed, quite another for one person to be. In Many Mansions? editor Catherine Cornille assembled an array of essays on different ways individuals have claimed to belong to two or more distinct religions. This is hardly news within the Asian religious context, where Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, and Buddhism can comfortably reside in one human life. It is more noteworthy when an Eastern religion joins up with a Western one, as in the case of Benedictine priest Henri Le Saux (1910-73), who became the Hindu teacher Abhishiktananda (and in what might have become the case with Thomas Merton had he lived longer). But multiple religious belonging is perhaps most noteworthy when it joins two of the Western monotheisms, for these religions of the one and jealous God are not accustomed to sharing space within a single human soul. The historic occurrences of it, at least between Judaism and Christianity, have been short-lived, unhappy, or judged aberrant by leaders of the religions themselves. I am not thinking of Jewish converts to Christianity who continue to identify ethnically with the Jewish people without significantly observing Jewish religious practices (for example, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, who spoke eloquently of his Jewish identity in a March 20, 1983, New York Times Magazine interview). Their religious allegiance is simply and wholly to Christianity. I am thinking, rather, of such folk as the medieval Marranos, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Christianity under duress, and who maintained, some of them, a tense imbalance between a public Christianity and the private, home-bound Judaism they continued to observe.

And so I cannot but feel defensive about my own recent experiment in dual religious belonging to Judaism and Christianity. Let me say upfront and as the leading claim of my defense that the versions of these two religions I have come to practice are among the most leftward-leaning expressions of each of them: in the case of Judaism, its Reform branch; in the case of Christianity, a Quaker meeting (each congregation among the Society of Friends is, in Quaker parlance, a meeting, rather than a church). This constitutes a defense because Reform Judaism has, from its inception in nineteenth-century Germany, borrowed significantly from Christian worship style, and the Quaker meeting I attend is only occasionally overtly Christian. It is a point of discussion among Quakers today whether a Quaker must be Christian (some are, some are not, even within a single meeting). It is not as though I'm trying to be a Hasidic Jew and a Church of God Pentecostal (though these have their Spirit-inspired affinities). Still, for many good reasons, Judaism and Christianity, even in their most radically post-Judaic and post-Christian shapes, do not easily cohabit one spiritual life.

The chief reasons are historical. To quote from the title of a book popular in some Baptist circles, the history of Judaism under Christian auspices may be characterized (with some distortion) as a "trail of blood." It is an unhappy history, for the most part, alleviated by occasional instances of exceptional good will, as, for example, in Thomas Aquinas's respectful references to his Jewish predecessor in medieval philosophizing, Moses Maimonides, or in the friendship between the learned Enlightenment thinkers Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Only in recent decades, thanks in many ways to Vatican II, has Christianity charted a new way to its parent religion that has opened up prospects for each of them to affirm the other's self-conception without unduly compromising its own.

In my own fantasies, I sometimes imagine a different history. The key component of my utopian alternative, which might have unfolded in some parallel universe, is Hellenistic Judaism. This was the Judaism that flourished in Alexandria around the time of Jesus, that translated the Hebrew text of Scripture into Greek, and that, in the hands of its preeminent philosopher Philo, interpreted the biblical stories as allegories of Platonic teaching. The Alexandrian Jews, like those of ancient Palestine, rebelled against the Roman state and suffered catastrophic defeat; but unlike Palestinian Judaism, Alexandrian Judaism never recovered. Instead, the community declined, bequeathing its spiritual treasures to Alexandrian Christianity to such an extent that the cosmopolitan Philo was taken by later Christians for a Christian philosopher. If Hellenistic Judaism had not eased into Christianity and had maintained its own identity, it might have served as a bridge between the second-century religions of church and synagogue. I can imagine a single, overarching religious body, comprising what we now call Jews and Christians, but going by a name we will never know, that allowed for a spectrum of beliefs and practices ranging from what we now call Orthodox Judaism to what we now call Evangelical Christianity, in much the same way that we find, today, among the Quakers (and Unitarians, for that matter) a spectrum of beliefs ranging from pantheism or even atheism at one end to creedal Christianity at the other.

Like Jews and Christians today, all members of that hypothetical alternative religion would reverence Hebrew Scripture, but there would be a range of options of additional texts through which to interpret it: the New Testament, the Talmud, or Greek philosophy; all members would acknowledge a mediating agent between themselves and the one God, but this figure would be variously conceived as either the Jesus of the New Testament, the Shekhinah of rabbinic theology, or the Logos of Philo's philosophy. The language of the liturgy would be multivalent enough to accommodate diverse readings of its referents, just as, even today, Jews entertain different understandings of God and Christians respond in different ways to the figure of Christ. Members would shape worship houses and specific liturgies that spoke most directly to their own understandings of the religion, but would accept the viability of alternatives and take them for different expressions of the same religion, just as Lutherans do Catholicism, or Conservative Jews, Reform Judaism. The mediating philosophical strand, descending from Hellenism, would work to moderate fanatical tendencies within the religion, and the commonalities among the diverse members of it would preclude much of the violence that has in fact characterized Christian relations to Judaism. This single religion, embracing what turned out to be the two distinct religions of Judaism and Christianity, lost its chance to exist in Western history. But the Quakers, who count among their members both Evangelical Christians and noncreedal pantheists, manage a trace of it. For by their breadth of scope, bursting the bounds of historical Christianity, they span a space in which some Jews and Christians can routinely pray together.

My fascination with that small denomination began decades ago, when as a high-school student I attended the occasional Quaker meeting. Later, in graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Quaker meeting became the first religious congregation that I regularly attended as an adult. I never officially joined a Quaker meeting. This was in part because, over time, my leadings (as the Quakers would say) toward Christianity became suspect in my own mind. I could not be sure if it was the spare aesthetic or the theological substance of Quakerism that moved me. I began to doubt the viability of Jewish flirtations with even so precipitously non-Christian a form of contemporary Christianity as Quakerism. And I began to take seriously, as I had not done before, the religion that went naturally with my given Jewish ethnicity, namely, Judaism. I spent a summer in Israel, studied for two years at the Reform Jewish seminary in Cincinnati (Hebrew Union College), and became active in Reform synagogues as a member, adult education teacher, and occasional darshan (preacher, or better, pulpit interpreter of Torah). And so I have remained. Over time, I have come to understand Jewishness as that inalienable part of my identity that Judaism serves to express. Judaism channels an ethnic identity that does not so much characterize a self as define it. To invoke a hallowed Jewish category, Judaism is the religion that my Jewish ethnicity commands of me. I could no more part with it than with my own soul.

But two years ago, the Quakers came back into my life. The opening was an aching that may come to many on their way to advanced middle age, for an outward manifestation of less, for paring away. I would occasionally talk with friends at the synagogue about the silence of the Quaker meeting I fondly remembered. Some co-congregants had attended Quaker schools or colleges, and had similar memories. In the synagogue, we even experimented with some prolonged periods of silence. But these did not catch on. My unambiguously Jewish partner, who knew my inclinations toward some styles of Christianity, which nonetheless have never quite turned me into a Christian, encouraged me to attend a Quaker meeting. And I began to do so, while retaining my practice of participating regularly in the Friday evening synagogue services.

I represent this dual religious observance to myself by way of a unique status Quakers accord those who, while drawn to their distinct worship style, do not formally join their ranks: the status of attender. Attenders are, according to the book of Faith and Practice of the New York Yearly Meeting (the official guidebook for New York State Quakers) "those who manifest a continuing interest in the life of the meeting." As one Quaker friend explained to me, the attender status offers an avenue of participation in a meeting. And, as another added, it carries no necessary strings of attachment toward ultimate membership. Attenders are included in almost all aspects of meeting life and certainly, where I attend, the gap between them and official members is unnoticeable. There might be any number of reasons why a person who attends a Quaker meeting does not officially join it. And one of those reasons is implied by a further statement in Faith and Practice, that members are "to enter wholeheartedly into the spiritual and corporate activities of the Society." The same might be expected of any member of any religious congregation (including a synagogue), which is where the genius of the attender status shows itself. It allows for a participation that, by virtue of simultaneous commitment to another religion, cannot be unambivalently wholehearted, and will inevitably exhibit some sign of restraint, even fragmentariness. I know of no other expression of monotheism that so formally accommodates and inclusively approves such a permanent status of unexclusive religious commitment to itself within its ranks.

The Quaker meeting I attend is unprogrammed. This means that the worship consists of communal silence, punctuated occasionally (if at all) by the brief messages anyone present might be moved to deliver. I typically begin my weekly hour with the Quakers by conjuring an image from my past, of the Protestant chapel at Brandeis University, where I was an undergraduate thirty years ago. The three chapels at Brandeis--Catholic, Protestant, Jewish--were designed to symbolize religious inclusiveness. The Protestant chapel was my favorite because the least used. I would sit there with my books and studies, or sometimes engage in my own form of contemplative prayer. The decor of that chapel was the simplest of the three: a cross hung in front of a large glass wall, behind the altar, opening out on a view of trees. This is the image I call to mind. The image reinstates for me a time of life--college years--that in retrospect I have idealized; and it lends a subtle support to my alternative vision of Jewish relations to Christianity by recalling, too, the context for that Protestant chapel: a secular university with Jewish affiliations, offering hospitality to Christianity (a kind of mirror image of the Interchurch Center).

Though a bare cross figures in this image, it merges with the trees that, seen through the window I picture, provide the backdrop for it. My worship in this particular setting is not Christian any more than it is noticeably Jewish. If a single word can capture the messages the Quakers deliver at the meeting I attend, it is not Christ, but Spirit. That term enjoys a rich history of its own. It can be interpreted through Christian, Jewish, or even philosophical eyes. For the early Quakers, and for Christian Quakers today, that Spirit is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Christian Quakers understand the messages they deliver to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, who is as close to them as Jesus was to his disciples. But for non-Christian Quakers, a range of interpretations inform the idea of Spirit. For my part, the apophatic tradition within philosophical Judaism, whose chief spokesman was Maimonides (1135-1204), provides my own interpretive lens on Spirit. Maimonides, whose thoughts on God were more ascetic than Thomas Aquinas's, taught that no positive predicates applied to God, but only negative and relational ones. The Spirit I understand myself to worship in Quaker meeting went, in the NeoPlatonic Judaism of Maimonides's day, under the name of Active Intellect. Intellect here was not what we commonly understand by that term, but rather the means by which human knowledge rose to its highest intuitive levels, where knower and known were one. It was that expression of the incomparable and indescribable deity that lent itself to human approach and, indeed, to union with the upper reaches of the human soul. The silence of the Quaker meeting is an appropriate expression of the teachings within apophatic Judaism (and Christianity, for that matter), on language's poverty before the transcendence of God. With the medieval Jewish philosophers, what I find myself seeking in worship is a fulfillment that is simultaneously an extinction. When, after twenty or thirty minutes of silence, the meeting enters into what the Quakers would call its "state of being gathered," it is as though we are sitting in the presence of something that is One and common to us all.

On rare occasions, I break the silence to offer my own messages. A delicate decorum informs Quaker thinking on rising to speak in meeting for worship. Whatever is spoken, it's understood, comes from beyond the confines and exclusive interests of one's own self. The classic Quaker criterion offered for identifying words that constitute a message meant for speaking is that they present themselves inwardly with an irresistible force that induces an emotional tremor (or quaking) if suppressed. But just as Judaism informs my inner state of worship at meeting, so it does the messages I might deliver there. I must couch them in biblical verses. I take this for a sign of my Jewishness, which, in normative Jewish settings, would most likely find expression in the context of Torah study, where the words spoken are not prescribed by prayer books but prompted, inwardly, out of response to biblical texts that, Judaism would say, preoccupy the mind.

But it is mainly for the silence that I appear most Sunday mornings at Quaker meeting. It is not that Judaism does not value silence. We have many appreciations of it in our Scripture, our liturgy, and our philosophy. Apart from the verse from the 65th Psalm, "Silence is praise to you O God," we have the marvelous suggestion from Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed that, just as spoken prayers superseded the animal sacrifice of ancient Temple Judaism, so at some advanced future moment, contemplative silence will succeed the spoken prayers of the synagogue. And the Reform liturgy, as though to anticipate that time, incorporates some moments of communal silence, just after the central prayer of multiple blessings, the Tefillah. But the Quaker meeting is the only form of Western religion I know that positions silence at the center of public worship. In light of that silence, I become more acutely aware of the places in Jewish ritual where a kindred silence breaks through. Modern Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) taught that liturgical language was itself a form of silence. As a sustained address to God, liturgical language is silent between the human beings who speak it. Both the form of it (ancient Hebrew and Aramaic), and the content (prayers), disqualify it from serving any communicative function between me and my companions in synagogue. But it nonetheless unites us before the shared focus of address. I can even imagine that if, in my selectively observed Reform Judaism, I fail to keep the Jewish Sabbath, I nonetheless experience an echo of it in the silence of the Quaker meeting, where the ultimately irrelevant social distinctions between human beings fall away, and a stance of attentive listening replaces the busyness of the work week.

This at any rate is my apology--I use the word in its technical theological sense--for my inevitably suspect dual religious observance.

Victor Turner, an anthropologist of religion, taught about the spiritual import of liminality (from a Latin word meaning threshold). Liminal states occur within rites of passage. When a child becomes an adult, or a single person coupled, in the time before the change of status they lack the identifiable social position that exists at either end of the passage. That in-between station invites a surge of spiritual energy, according to Turner. It is as though, in the absence of accustomed supports of social identity, a space opens up for nothing to sustain but God. Can it be that the spaces between religious traditions are liminal, too, attracting a divine attention and support uniquely their own? Can expressions of Judaism and Christianity learn to cohabit in one religious life, after the pattern of Buddhism and Taoism, perhaps by channeling different spiritual needs within a single life? I hope so.

When my partner and I visited London in 2003, we enjoyed a tour of the oldest synagogue there, Bevis Marks. I was intrigued by the building itself because, as it happens, its master builder was a Quaker--which, our guide explained, accounted for the hard, wooden pews. I wanted to know what sort of relations that Quaker builder had with the seventeenth-century Jewish community in London. Was there, I wondered, some special understanding between them, belonging as each did to the margins of London society? But there was no answer. And so I was left to reconstruct the relationship for myself in the alternative religious history of the parallel universe that I like, from time to time, to imagine.

Ernest Rubinstein is the librarian of the Ecumenical Library at the Interchurch Center in New York City.