KIM LAWTON, correspondent: During Holy Week, Christians remember the familiar story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But exactly where does that story take place? The Bible offers only a few clues.

REV. MARK MOROZOWICH (Catholic University of America): The Gospels weren’t really written to record a history. They were written to provide a testimony of faith.

LAWTON: According to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified at a spot outside Jerusalem called Golgotha, which in Aramaic means “place of the skull.” The Latin word for skull is calvaria, and in English many Christians refer to the site of the crucifixion as Calvary. The Gospel of John says there was a garden at Golgotha, and a tomb which had never been used. Since the tomb was nearby, John says, that’s where Jesus’s body was placed. The Gospel writers say the tomb was owned by a prominent rich man, Joseph of Arimathea. They describe it as cut out of rock, with a large stone that could be rolled in front of the entrance.

Father Mark Morozowich is acting dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.

MOROZOWICH: At the time of Jesus, when he was crucified, he was not really a significant feature in Israel. I mean, certainly there was jealousy, certainly he had his followers. But there was no church that was built immediately upon his death or to mark his resurrection.

LAWTON: In the fourth century, as Emperor Constantine was consolidating the Roman Empire under Christianity, his mother, St. Helena, traveled to Jerusalem. According to tradition, she discovered relics of the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified. The spot had been venerated by early Christians, and she concluded it was Golgotha. Constantine ordered the construction of a basilica, which became known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

MOROZOWICH: Now people throughout history have debated was it really there, or was it here? Traditionally in that fourth century time that was so amazing, they found this rock and this tomb not far from one another as we see even today in the church you know they’re just a short distance from one another.

LAWTON: Over the centuries, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed, rebuilt and renovated several times. There have been numerous power struggles over who should control it, and even today, sometimes violent squabbles can break out among the several Christian denominations that share jurisdiction. But it is considered one of the holiest sites in Christianity, a massive place of pilgrimage and intense spiritual devotion. At the entrance, visitors can kiss the Stone of Unction which, according to tradition, marks the place where Jesus’ body was washed for burial. The dark chapel commemorating the crucifixion is in one upper corner, and the place marking the tomb on the other side.

MOROZOWICH: What more of a moving place to walk in Jerusalem, the place of the crucifixion, to meditate at Golgotha where Jesus Christ died, the place where he rose from the tomb. So they are very beautiful and very moving moments when a person can have a very deep relationship with God.

LAWTON: During Holy Week in particular, the Holy Sepulchre is the center for special devotions, such as the Holy Fire ritual, where flames from inside the tomb area are passed among the candles of worshippers.

MOROZOWICH: The bishop brings out the light from the tomb and this illuminates and plays on this whole sense of the light of the world coming forth again.

LAWTON: But despite the history and devotion, some question whether that indeed is the true spot. Some Christians, including many Protestants, believe Jesus could have been crucified and buried at a different place in Jerusalem known as the Garden Tomb.

STEVE BRIDGE (Deputy Director, The Garden Tomb): The tomb was discovered in 1867. For hundreds of years before that it had lain buried under rock and rubble and earth and things had grown on top of it.

LAWTON: Steve Bridge is deputy director at the Garden Tomb, which is located just outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate. He says this site was promoted in the late nineteenth century by British General Charles Gordon, who argued that the hillside with the features of a human skull could be actual crucifixion site.

BRIDGE: When we’re looking, now we’re looking side on, and you can see maybe what looks like the two eye-sockets there on the rock face. The Bible tells us Jesus was crucified outside the city walls at a place called Golgotha, which simply means the skull, and so many people believe that Skull Hill is Golgotha, the place of the skull where Jesus died.

LAWTON: This Skull Hill looms over an ancient garden, with cisterns and a wine press, which could indicate that it was owned by a wealthy person. In the garden was a tomb, hewn from the rock.

BRIDGE: The tomb itself is at least two-thousand years old. Many date it as older than that. But it’s certainly not less than 2,000 years old. It’s a Jewish tomb, it’s definitely a rolling stone tomb. That means the entrance would be sealed by rolling a large stone across.

LAWTON: Inside the tomb is a 1300-year-old marking of a cross with the Byzantine words “Jesus Christ, the Beginning and the End.”

BRIDGE: So there’s burial space for at least two bodies, probably more. That, again, matches the bible description. It was a family tomb that Joseph had built for himself and his family.

LAWTON: Bridge says Christians are deeply moved by this visual image of where Jesus may have been placed after he was taken down from the cross.

BRIDGE: On that day, as far as people were concerned, that was the end of the story, that was the end of one that they had hoped would be the Messiah, because a dead Messiah is no good. But three days later, we believe God raised Jesus to life and that was the start of what we now call Christianity of course.

LAWTON: According to Bridge, the Garden Tomb is not trying to set up a competition with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

BRIDGE: There’s no doubt that historically, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, has the evidence on its side, and we certainly wouldn’t want to do or say anything that would suggest that we think they’re wrong about the site or that we think that we’re right. What we say we have here is something that matches the Bible description.

LAWTON: And Bridge says, for him, it doesn’t ultimately matter where the actual place is.

BRIDGE: That’s very secondary to Jesus himself, who we believe he is, and why he died, and, you know, on that score us and the Holy Sepulchre would be exactly the same, telling the same story but on a different site.

LAWTON: Father Morozowich agrees that, especially at Easter time, Christians should focus more on what Jesus did, rather than on where he may have done it.

MOROZOWICH: Where he walked is very, very important. At the same time though, we know that Jesus is more than this historical figure that walked the earth, and in his resurrection, he transcends all of that. So he is as real and present in Mishawaka and in Washington, DC as he is in Jerusalem.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Filmed in part on location at New York’s 92nd Street Y.

PROFESSOR AMY-JILL LEVINE (Co-Editor The Jewish Annotated New Testament): Jesus argues with fellow Jews. You can’t be more Jewish than to argue with fellow Jews. It’s not a problem.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At the 92nd Street Y in New York, Vanderbilt Divinity School professor Amy-Jill Levine is making the case that Jews and Christians alike need to pay more attention to the Jewishness of Jesus, and the best way to do that, she believes, is by reading the New Testament from a Jewish perspective.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: If I want to understand Jewish history, the New Testament is one of the best sources that I’ve got.

LAWTON: Levine, who is an observant Jew, is co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, a version of the Christian scripture with footnotes and commentaries written entirely by Jewish scholars.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: The New Testament does have extraordinarily beautiful and profound material in it. Paul’s hymn to love in First Corinthians or the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, or comments such as “God is love,” which is First John. This is magnificent material, and everybody ought to appreciate it. I find for myself the more I read the New Testament, in fact the better Jew I become.

LAWTON: The Jewish Annotated New Testament is one of several new projects urging Jews especially to take a new look at Jesus. Bestselling author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s latest book is called Kosher Jesus. That notion, he says, is a radical departure from what he learned as a child.

RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH (Author, Kosher Jesus): When I grew up Jesus’ name, his very name, was off limits. Jesus was seen as the arch-enemy of the Jewish people. He was really seen as an apostate and traitor to his people.

LAWTON: Boteach believes the time is ripe for a new paradigm.

RABBI BOTEACH: We can’t ignore the 600-pound gorilla in the room, which is Jesus. Christians and Jews come together, and they can never mention Jesus. Christians are afraid of offending the Jews, the Jews are uncomfortable with the mention of Jesus.

LAWTON: Growing up in a predominantly Roman Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts, Levine had the impression that the Christianity of her friends was just a different form of her family’s Judaism, and then she heard otherwise.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: When I was in second grade, a little girl accused me of having killed her Lord, because she had been taught that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. And I couldn’t fathom how this religion that had such beautiful attributes, and a Jewish man named Jesus, and the same Bible, was saying horrible things about Jews. So I started asking questions.

LAWTON: She says her lifelong study has shown her how embedded Jesus was in the Jewish tradition.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He teaches like a Jew. He talks in parables, and Jews then knew that parables were not simple banal little stories. They were designed to shake us up, to get us to see the world in a new way, to challenge us. And Jesus is just a fabulous Jewish storyteller.

LAWTON: She says his teachings, such as in the famous Sermon on the Mount, are expansions of teachings in the Torah.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: He’s going to the law and bringing out the heart of it, which is also what Jewish teaching does. So he says not only don’t murder; he actually says you have to love your enemy, and he’s the only person in antiquity I’ve found who says that. But I think that gets to the heart of scripture.

LAWTON: Levine doesn’t shy away from what she calls the “problematic” passages in the New Testament, passages that have been used by Christians over the centuries to persecute Jews.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: We need to know what the New Testament says about the Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus; how the New Testament characterizes Jewish groups, particularly the Pharisees; and we need to know that within historical context. That doesn’t mean we erase them. It doesn’t mean we fudge the translation. It means we deal with them just as Jews have dealt with those problematic passages in the shared scriptures.

LAWTON: Levine believes Christians too can benefit from studying the Judaism of Jesus.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: Jews have been arguing about the law since Moses came down the mountain.

(to audience):Thank you for that “Amen.” That’s lovely. I wish that happened in my synagogue more often.

LAWTON: On this day, she was a guest lecturer at the evangelical Oral Roberts University.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: Unless Christian preachers, teachers, Bible study leaders know about first-century Judaism, often what happens is Jesus gets yanked out of his Jewish context, and he becomes the only Jew who’s compassionate toward women, interested in adapting Torah, interested in adapting the law to the needs of the contemporary community, the only Jew interested in peace among a group of very bellicose, warlike Jews.

LAWTON: She says when Christians don’t understand Jesus’ Jewish context it can lead to misunderstandings about his message, which in turn can lead to harmful stereotypes.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: What I hear in a number of sermons and read in a number of sermons is that Torah is difficult to follow, it’s an impossible burden that weighs people down, and then Jesus comes along and says basically “Don’t worry, be happy.” In actuality, Jews in the first century and Jews who practice Torah today did not find Torah a burden. They found it to be a delight.

LAWTON: Or, she says, many Christians will talk about the angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament in contrast to a New Testament God of love.

PROFESSOR LEVINE: It’s the same God: merciful, compassionate, generous, loving, but not inclined to take sin lightly either.

PROFESSOR BRAD YOUNG (Oral Roberts University): It’s crazy that for 2,000 years Christians have followed a faith in Jesus while rejecting the faith of Jesus.

LAWTON: Oral Roberts professor of Judaic-Christian studies Brad Young agrees that Christians must understand the Jewish roots of their faith. He admits many Christians have been too busy trying to convert Jews to try and learn from them.

PROFESSOR YOUNG: Be honest about your beliefs, share them, but be willing to listen to the other side, and maybe that will change some of your beliefs. Maybe our beliefs will change. We need to share it with one another to go to the next step.

LAWTON: And, he acknowledges, the question of whether or not Jesus was the messiah can’t be glossed over.

PROFESSOR YOUNG: We should recognize when we talk about two great traditions of faith, Christianity and Judaism, that there are very sharp differences, and sometimes understanding the differences are even more important than understanding the similarities.

LAWTON: Rabbi Boteach’s new book does not accept that Jesus was the messiah. Nonetheless, Kosher Jesus has been denounced as heresy by some of Boteach’s fellow Orthodox Jews who worry that the ideas in it could make Jews vulnerable to missionary efforts. Boteach argues that Jews need to reclaim Jesus.

RABBI BOTEACH: Why are we allowing the Christian community to teach us about the Christian Christ in order to convert when Jesus was a Jew and we should be teaching them about the Jewish Jesus in order to enrich their Christian experience?

PROFESSOR LEVINE: For people who are afraid that if Jews were to read the New Testament and find some of this truly magnificent material the next thing we know they’re going to line up at the baptismal font and say, “Please convert me”: I don’t think the way we prevent Jews from wanting to convert is to keep them ignorant of the New Testament.

LAWTON: Looking at Jesus through Jewish eyes, she believes, not only strengthens the individual faiths but can also bring them together.

PROFESSOR LEVINE(lecturing to audience): In learning more about each others’ traditions, we come better to respect our neighbors, and if we are really lucky, for Jews reading the New Testament would give us deeper insight into our own Judaism, and for Christians reading the New Testament with Jewish annotations will give Christians deeper insight into the Lord and Savior they worship. Thank you very much.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

PROFESSOR CARLOS EIRE (speaking to class at Yale University): In 1517, something happens that has happened many times before…

BOB FAW, correspondent: Carlos Eire is at a pinnacle of the academic world. With an endowed chair at Yale, where he teaches religious studies, he’s also written six books, including the memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” which won the National Book Award. But just as remarkable as his rise from Cuban refugee to professor of distinction is Carlos Eire’s spiritual odyssey.

EIRE: It is an incomprehensible and in many ways an indescribable experience. What had been scary to me, what had been frightful, suddenly turned into the most beautiful thing.

FAW: In pre-Castro Cuba, Eire’s was a life of privilege—the festive holidays and lavish birthday parties at grand estates befitting the son of a wealth and influential judge and a gorgeous mother. But their Spanish Catholicism terrified young Carlos.

EIRE: There was no place in the world scarier for me as a child than a church. Actually my worst nightmare was being locked in a church all night long, because the images were so frightening.

FAW: What tormented him most, Eire recalls, was his father’s collection of icons of Christ.

EIRE: The crown of thorns on his head bleeding. It was in his study, right near the Jesus plate with the eyes that followed you.

FAW: Eire’s comfortable life came crashing down when Fidel Castro seized power. Only 11, Eire knew his life had changed when the new regime prevented him from seeing a Walt Disney film, “20000 Leagues Under the Sea,” that he had already seen seven times.

EIRE: That was the turning point for me. I really felt like someone was trying to steal my soul, not just invade but claim it as their own, some authority outside of me, and that’s when I just began to see everything in a different light.

FAW: Fearful, their world collapsing, Eire’s parents sent him and his brother, Tony, to the United States in 1962, two of 14,000 Cuban children airlifted from Cuba in an operation dubbed “Pedro Pan.” Like many of the other children, Carlos and Tony lived with foster families. Never again would they see their father, and their mother would join them only years later. When Carlos left Cuba, his parents gave him a book which they said would bring him comfort.

EIRE: It was “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis—for centuries had been a very popular text in Spanish-speaking cultures. It’s all about self-denial. It’s about not being part of the world. It’s very monastic in its outlook.

FAW: You wrote in the Miami book, “It scared me half to death. It is the most depressing book ever written by any human being in all of human history.”

EIRE: From a child’s perspective, yes, definitely.

FAW: But in Miami, living with foster parents who were Jewish but who made him go to a Catholic church every Sunday, Eire was unshackled for the first time from the Catholicism of Cuba and its troubling images of pain and suffering.

EIRE: After I had come to the US and seen churches that were free of such images, I realized that Spanish Catholicism and Latin American Catholicism was very different from American Catholicism in that respect and sort of put a less scary pall over religion.

FAW: Later, when Eire and his brother moved in with his uncle in Illinois, there were no more gory images of Jesus.

EIRE: My uncle had this very Protestant image of Jesus above his armchair—totally unscary, a friendlier, more accessible Jesus.

FAW: Though liberated from the demons of his youth, Eire says he was still plagued, even crippled by what he calls “the void.”

EIRE: It attacked me, because it seemed to come from outside of me. it was a feeling of utter abandonment and emptiness and having no connection to anything or anyone, and having no one or anything beyond one’s self. Everything was turning dark.

FAW: But as Carlos Eire so movingly writes in his second memoir, “Learning to Die in Miami,” that overwhelming despair was shattered on Holy Thursday 1965 in a profound religious experience.

EIRE: It was at that period when I started reading “The Imitation of Christ,” not just little passages, but actually getting into the meaning, and it brought me to this experience, a profoundly religious experience. I think it’s fair to call it a conversion experience.

FAW: “Everything changes,” you wrote. “Everything changes from top to bottom. A void rips loudly and light pours through.”

EIRE: Up until that point I always thought that spirit was insubstantial. It’s with that experience that I realized that spirit is more substantial than matter, because it is connected to eternity. Time stops. All there is is now, and this now is forever.

FAW: After experiencing what he calls “that presence,” Carlos Eire says religion became his salvation and he was able, he says, “to let go.”

EIRE: Thinking that there’s something beyond this life helps one immensely in letting go. Without some other dimension, letting go, to me, is too painful—impossible.

FAW: You wrote, “He who knows best how to let go will enjoy the greater peace, because he is conqueror of himself.”

EIRE: Letting go of your attachment to things and even your attachment to your own will and your own attempt to make sense of the world your own way and kind of open yourself up to something higher.

FAW: Not all those haunting images from his past have been excised. He anguishes, he says, over what is happening in Cuba today.

EIRE: I could not, in a sense, stop feeling the pain. The so-called free education and free medical care come at the cost of slavery. Cubans right now are no different than slaves in a plantation in the American South before the Civil War. Europeans and Canadians who go to Cuba to have a good time—I can’t understand it. It would be like vacationing in the Third Reich and having a good time and ignoring Auschwitz.

FAW: And while Cuba, he says, “is a wound that will not close,” the scars from his earlier religious trauma have healed.

EIRE: Yes, there is pain and suffering, but it can be transcended, and it can be redemptive. I was able to let go of everything I had lost, including my parents, and I was able to focus on what the purpose of life should be. Not as regaining everything I had lost, but rather giving one’s self to others.

FAW: Carlos Eire—a long way from Cuba, but waiting no more.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in New Haven, Connecticut.

Tweet

MARY KARR (speaking to students): Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Mary Karr talks about her love of poetry with students at a writers’ conference in Michigan.

KARR (speaking to student): Hello, honey-bun.

VALENTE: Karr was known mainly as a poet until her coming-of-age memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” became a bestseller in the 1990s. It was the vivid story of a sometimes hilarious but often brutal Texas childhood.

(speaking to Mary Karr): Here’s a snapshot of your past, the past that you write about: troubled family life, unstable childhood, alcoholism, divorce, depression, near suicide. Who is Mary Karr today?

KARR: Well, it’s really been uphill since all that.

VALENTE: Karr reveals the rest of her story in a new memoir, a story summed up in its title “Lit”—as in lit from within by the literature she grew up with, by alcohol and drugs, and finally lit by a faith she found unexpectedly in the Catholic Church.

KARR (speaking to writers’ conference): No one in the Catholic Church hired me as a spokesperson, nor would they. I’m sure I’m not the pope’s favorite Catholic, nor is he mine.

VALENTE: Karr grew up amid the hardscrabble oil fields of East Texas. Her father drank himself to death. Her mother was married seven times.

KARR: I’m somebody who really does feel like I was snatched out of the fire and found something in myself that’s luminous and gives me ballast.

VALENTE: The road to faith was a long, hard climb for someone who once described herself as an “undiluted agnostic.” By her mid-thirties Karr’s life had begun to unravel. Her marriage was failing. She drank heavily, wrecked the family car, was hospitalized for an emotional breakdown. In desperation, she took a friend’s advice and reluctantly began to pray.

KARR: I would kind of bounce on my knees, and I would say, “Higher power, please keep me sober today”—whatever they told me to say—and then at night I would say, “Thank you for keeping me sober today,” and then I started to express myself, which was often, you know, with obscene gestures, double-barrel at the light fixtures.

KARR: Karr was newly separated and trying to stay sober when her five-year-old son asked her to take him to church.

KARR: And I said why, and he said the only sentence he could have said that would have gotten me to church. He said, “To see if God’s there,” and I thought, “Oh. Okay.”

VALENTE: Karr took her son to various churches, a process she dubbed the “God-o-rama.” She would sit with a paperback and a cup of coffee while he searched for God.

KARR: We got out, and we got in the car, and he’s buckling his seatbelt, and I said, “So was God there?” And he’s like, “Well, yeah,” like where were you? So that was when I decided that, for him, we would find a place of worship.

VALENTE: Karr says she still equated most organized religions with something people just did socially. Then one day she passed a Catholic church in Syracuse, New York, where she was teaching. She was struck by a banner out front. It said, “Sinners Welcome.”

KARR: I thought I had a better shot at becoming a pole dancer at 40, right, than of making it in the Catholic Church, and I think what struck me really wasn’t the grandeur of the Mass. It was the simple faith of the people. For me this whole journey was a journey into awe. I would just get these moments of quiet where there wasn’t anything. My head would just shut up, and I knew that was a good thing. And also the carnality of the church: there was a body on the cross.

VALENTE: Father. Bruno Shah, a Dominican friar, is a close friend who has written about Karr’s work.

FR. BRUNO SHAH: In the Catholic Church above the altar one sees the cross with the body on it. The body is there. The corpus of Christ is there bleeding, still in the midst of the world, and that’s I think really what got to her—her experience of being a sinner, her experience of being a sinner and recognizing that this does not distinguish her from anybody else in the world.

VALENTE: Many of her recent poems reimagine the life of Christ. She sees in poetry a form of prayer.

KARR: Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

VALENTE: Karr has been sober for twenty years, but she still prays to keep her demons at bay.

KARR: I don’t have very much virtue now. It’s really all of it is grace for me, all of it is given. I’m a very venal. I want to eat all of the chocolate and snort all of the cocaine and kiss all the boys.

FR. SHAH: The fact that this person would turn around so drastically is compelling. She sees all the alcoholics who don’t make it. She sees all the good chances that have been given to her for no good reason, and she asks in wondering thanksgiving to God, why me? And that’s a great testimony to her faith and to the authenticity of her conversion.

VALENTE: A conversion she says transformed every aspect of her life.

KARR (speaking to writers’ conference): My goal in writing about my faith wasn’t to proselytize, even though I did feel called in prayer to write about it, but to try to make a bridge between people who had been, like myself, completely unbaptized, completely without faith, a bridge between that and to bring them into the experience of faith.

VALENTE: Karr says she hopes her turbulent past provides more than just a good story but also sends out a message of hope to others. With her characteristic wry humor, she still refers to herself as a “black-belt sinner,” but a lucky one nonetheless.

KARR: I’ve never contended that I had a really horrible life. I feel like Jesus does like me better than he does all of you.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Tweet

Originally published April 20, 2010

BENYAMIN COHEN (Author of “My Jesus Year”): I grew up in the heart of the Bible belt in Atlanta, Georgia, one of eight children, the son of an Orthodox rabbi. I’m the only one that didn’t go into the family business. They are all rabbis or married rabbis.

I was always jealous. I grew up across the street from a Methodist church, and literally my bedroom window looked out at the church parking lot, and every Sunday morning I would see it was packed, and living in the Bible belt there are churches on every street corner, and their parking lots are full every week. Maybe I could go to church—not to convert to Christianity. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to go to find out what got people excited about worship, what got people excited about their religion. Maybe I could go and tap into that spirituality and find out the secret that I was never taught growing up, and maybe I could bring that back and apply it to my own Judaism.

Here’s one thing that I learned. I haven’t even walked into a church, and here’s already one thing I could write down and tell my rabbi—first-time visitor parking. I’m not talking about bringing Jesus into the synagogue. It wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t kill you to put a little first-time visitor parking sign in the parking lot.

I didn’t know going to church that they talk about the Old Testament. I assumed Jews have the Old Testament and Christians have the New Testament. I didn’t realize they have both, and this pastor got up and started giving an Old Testament sermon, and the way he was describing his interpretation was completely antithetical to what I had learned growing up. What came out of that moment was that I didn’t realize I cared so much about my own Bible.

At this Episcopal church they had a ritualistic service every week, and they had these nice traditions, and I was like that’s such a nice, sweet thing to have traditions and ancient rituals. I was like that sounds familiar. We have that in synagogue, and it kind of made me look at my own rituals with a new, fresh perspective.

Orthodox Jewry and Mormonism have a lot in common. We are both minorities in America. We both have special dietary—they can’t drink caffeine, and we have to keep kosher. They wear special undergarments, we wear special undergarments. There’s a lot of laws that dictate all their lives, and so for me I felt a real kinship with the Mormon community, and I went knocking door to door with these two female Mormon missionaries, and their conviction, these are girls 19- and 20-years-old, and their conviction for their religion was just awe-inspiring to me. I’m sure the woman whose house we were visiting, I’m sure she’s wondering why the Mormons brought their accountant with them. You know, what is he doing here?

I was feeling guilty at the end of the year that I kind of strayed from my own religion, and so I wanted to cleanse myself of that guilt, so I did what any good Jewish boy does, and that’s go to confession. I asked my Catholic friend, Vince, if I could do this, and he said, “No, only Catholics can go to confession, but I will sneak you in.” It was a very meaningful spiritual experience, and an interesting postscript to that whole episode is that the priest, now that the book has come out, the priest actually knows that I went to confession with him, and he called me and thanked me. He is so happy that I had a meaningful experience with him.

I for one feel a lot closer to a religious Christian than I do a non-religious Jew, because we have so much in common. People ask me if I found Jesus in church, and I personally did not, so to speak, find Jesus, but what I did find was true spirituality. That’s what I found in these places: the lack of cynicism, the openness to the experience, and the belief in God, whoever that God may be.