It’s true that many of the punchlines would be offensive by today’s standards.
But like the words “knock-knock,” the opening lines often put a smile on my face as my mind scrambled down various paths to come up with the punchline before it was delivered.
The interfaith audience that attended three programs in the sanctuary and social room at Springfield’s Temple Sholom last week shared many thoughtful moments about things religious.
But the bright, inquisitive and playful spirit of presenter Julie Galambush lightened the atmosphere in a way that both opened minds and brought a sense of community to the participants who held the door open for one another as they filed in.
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In a lunchtime gathering Wednesday, Galambush, retired associate professor of Old Testament at William and Mary, discussed her interesting religious life history.
She described how while growing up as a pious Christian in Cleveland, she was disappointed when her mother told her it wouldn’t be right to build and decorate a booth to celebrate the Jewish Festival of Booths because her family were American Baptists.
Later, “I used to argue with my pastor about why we didn’t keep Passover,” she said, and her interest in things Jewish continued on visits to the homes of her Jewish college roommates during religious holidays.
After undergraduate and master’s studies at Yale, and a career as a Baptist minister, the same force seemed to push her into a Ph.D. program in Old Testament at Emory University, a step toward her eventual conversion to Judaism.
Although she told her audience that it’s not necessary to convert, as she did, Galambush argued that familiarity with more than one religious tradition is “a good thing” for those who wanted a broader understanding of faith.
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The lunch meeting included a wide-ranging discussion that touched on conversion; opinions about hell; mention of theological heavyweights Bruno Bettelheim and Soren Kierkegaard; and Jews’ regard for Jesus.
A highlight was a laugh-out-loud moment all shared when she inadvertently referred to a crucial event on her path to conversion to Judaism as a “come-to-Jesus moment.”
Her other presentations, both in the Temple’s sanctuary, were as interesting.
Tuesday night, she discussed a subject covered more thoroughly in her book “The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book.”
She opened by portraying the complex political, social and religious scene of Jesus’ times, including:
— oppressive Roman rule;
— disagreement over whether Jesus was the messiah that would liberate the Jews from that rule or merely make living under it more difficult;
— the greater pull Jesus’ story eventually would have for non-Jewish communities in the Greek world, and
— the historical consequences the Jewish community would suffer as a result of the cultural schism all this produced.
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Galambush’s purpose, as stated in her book’s introduction, “is to represent the New Testament authors as credible Jews, and so provide a sense of ‘what happened’ to make Christianity so different from anything modern Jews recognize as Jewish.”
She goes on to say “Rereading Christian texts in the Jewish context can profoundly affect the way Christians understand their own faith and heritage as well. To rethink the Jewish origins of the New Testament is, to a certain extent, to rethink the meaning of both traditions.”
Her final presentation Wednesday evening wrestled with another sensitive matter: How biblical translators of both faiths intentionally distort texts, often for what they often believe is the good of their communities.
Galambush said the practices, which she opposes, are motivated by fears that modern readers will be disoriented by the vast differences between the modern religious understandings those in the world inhabited by ancient peoples; by the fact that the texts sometimes what most now understand to be the one God as a god among many in Biblical settings; and by translators’ desire to “soften or correct” parts of the scripture they find morally problematic.
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In an earlier presentation, Galambush pointed to Kierkegaard’s remarks that reading the Bible is like “getting a letter from … a sweetheart who does not speak the same language you speak” and caring enough to get out a dictionary to understand “the nuance of what she’s saying.”
Her appearance was cosponsored and attended by members of Temple Sholom, High Street United Methodist Church, Christ Episcopal Church and Wittenberg Campus Ministry, all of whom walked together into the synagogue instead of a bar.
It was funded by a bequest to the Temple by Florence Tenenbaum and is expected to bring the same communities together next year.
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