Can Christians Honor Jewish Customs?
Every year people come into the Church from all sorts of backgrounds and the Church, being Catholic and all, welcomes them into the Big Block Party of Cultures and Ethnicities that is the Church and does all she can to honor the wild mixture of peoples who call themselves “Catholic”. The Church is big on honoring your father and mother, whether Bantu, French, or Kiwi. So wherever it goes, it tends to incorporate local customs and culture into its life. So we get the Knights of Columbus honoring an Italian, St. Patrick’s Day to cheer on the Irish, special Masses on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate America’s culture and so forth.
One of the phenomena we see more and more these days is a number of people from the Jewish tradition becoming Catholic. And in exactly the spirit of celebration of one’s roots above, many people, both Jew and Gentile, will sometimes do things like celebrate a Seder meal in their homes, or make merry at Hannukah as well as at Christmas. When they do, other Catholics will sometimes get nervous and ask if this is permissible for Catholics, or even go so far as to say that celebrating such customs is forbidden by the Church or even an act of idolatry.
So who’s right? Can Christians celebrate Jewish customs? The short answer is “Yes.” The longer answer is, “It’s complicated.”
The complicating factor is that unlike the mere human customs of other nationalities and peoples, the Jewish heritage includes feasts, fasts, and rites which are divinely inspired foreshadows of the One whom Israel was specifically chosen to bring into the world: Jesus Christ. The mission of Israel was essentially ordered toward bringing Messiah into the world. Once that mission was accomplished, the feasts, fasts, and rites of Israel fulfilled their purpose by pointing us to Christ. As Jesus said, he came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them (Matthew 5:18).
So, as Paul points out, circumcision referred us to the need for true “circumcision of the heart” which is given in Baptism (Romans 2:28-29). The New Testament likewise points to a host of Old Testament types that find fulfillment in him. Jesus, not a cute woolly quadruped sacrificed at Passover, is the real Lamb of God (John 1:29). Jesus, and not a stone building in Jerusalem, is the true Temple (John 2:19). Jesus, not the Passover bread or the manna, is the Bread of Life (John 6).
So as a road sign points us to our destination and does not invite us to camp at the road sign forever, likewise the feasts, fasts and rites of Israel urge us on to the destination, who is Christ. The danger is that people can (and have) made idols out of the road sign as they make idols out of every other creature, instead of going where the sign points. That’s what happened in Acts 15, when some Jewish Christians from Jerusalem started telling Gentiles interested in Jesus that they needed to be circumcised, keep kosher and do all the other ceremonial stuff the law required in order to be really truly Christian.
It was a natural enough mistake. After all, Jesus was a Jew. Jesus kept the ceremonial laws. He even said that “not one jot or tittle” of the law would pass away till all was fulfilled (Matthew 5:18). So some Jewish Christians figured that the way to be really extra super duper Christian was to become a Jew first (with the sly self-congratulating suggestion that there were second-class Gentile wannabe Christians and then “real” Jewish Christians).
As we know, the Church rejected this, with Peter declaring in Acts 15 (and Paul thundering it in books like Romans, Galatians, and Philippians) that we are saved, not by “works of the law” (i.e., the feasts, fasts, rites, and rituals of the old law) but by the grace of Jesus Christ received by faith and poured out on us through the sacraments and the common life, worship, and teaching of the Church. So Paul is adamant that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile because all are made one in Christ. The whole nonsense of asking who is “more” Christian, Jew or Gentile, is like asking which patient in the cancer ward is least terminal. The only thing the Law does for us is a) diagnose the particular way that the cancer of sin is eating away at our souls and b) point us, by means of signs, to Doctor Jesus. It’s like an x-ray machine for the soul. But once the x-ray has shown us the cancer or broken bone, its utility is exhausted. Further x-rays will not help heal you. Likewise the Law cannot save. That’s the Divine Physician’s job.
At the time the Church decided that, not everybody was on board with it. Dissent was not invented by Nancy Pelosi. So throughout Paul’s letters, we can see that there were, for want of a better word, reactionaries (called “Judaizers”) who rejected the notion of salvation by grace and who insisted that Gentiles had to keep the Law of Moses in order to be saved. Some of them went so far as to attack Paul on the suspicion that he wasn’t a “real” apostle and were rebutted by him in Galatians with his appeal to the fact that his ministry had been vetted and approved by such figures as Peter, James, and John (cf. Gal 2:1-2). These made an idol of the Law and of Jewish feasts, fasts and rites and insisted that these, not the grace of Christ, saved us. With these hardliners, Paul was adamant and severe, even going so far, in a moment of frustration, as to say he wished the zealots insisting on circumcision would go all the way and castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12). (How much more arresting a papal encyclical might be if the Holy Father chose some of Paul’s rhetorical strategies to get his point across!)
So within the early Church there was that tension between grace and legalism. Eventually, the breach between Church and synagogue reached such a polarized pitch that Jewish Christians were forced to choose between the rites and customs of Judaism or the rites and customs of the Church as it increasingly came to be regarded (on both sides) as a rejection of one to practice the other. So over the decades the habit in Christian circles (which became overwhelmingly Gentile) became to regard all practice of Jewish customs as a deliberate act of subversion of the Church’s teachings and sacraments even as Christians were being kicked out of the synagogues as heretics. This came to create a sort of feedback loop among Christians as the Church ceased to be a mainly Jewish phenomenon and eventually came to see Jews first as oppressors, then as competitors, and finally as subversives within a Christian culture. The feedback loop worked, for instance, in medieval Spain when Jews converted under threat of persecution by Christians but then, with understandable defiance, continued to practice their rites and customs underground. Instead of seeing the threat of persecution as wrong and Jewish persistence in their culture as a perfectly predictable response to it, Christians instead saw Jews trying to cling to their own culture (such as the grandfather of St. Teresa of Avila) as fifth columnists and subversives.
This “either/or” approach to the practice of Jewish customs is, then, the result of a lot of bad blood under the bridge, some of it literal blood. But if we go back to the New Testament and the earliest days of the Church we don’t see the Church forbidding Jewish Christians to honor their own culture and traditions. We simply see the Church telling Jewish Christians they can’t impose those traditions and that culture on Gentiles by claiming that salvation stands or falls with the practice of those customs. We further see the Church warning that the practice of those customs does not make you a better Christian, nor does neglect of them make you a worse one. So concerning kosher food, Paul says, “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do” (1 Cor 8:8).
But here’s the thing: Paul also tells Gentiles not to push Jewish Christians around either. Instead, he urges them to respect the ways they honor God, even if the Gentile does not share the custom.
So, for instance, in Paul’s day, some Jewish Christians had a scruple against eating meat because the meat you bought in the marketplace had typically been offered in ritual sacrifice to some pagan god at a local shrine. Some Jews feared that by eating such meat they became a participant in the pagan sacrifice. Paul rejects this and says all food is to be received with thanksgiving to God. He tells his Churches they needn’t sweat this, just as they need not sweat keeping the various feast and fast days or Sabbaths of the Mosaic law. But then he adds this caveat both to those who feel no qualms about incurring ritual impurity and to those who do:
Let not him who eats despise him who abstains, and let not him who abstains pass judgment on him who eats; for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Master is able to make him stand. One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. He also who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God; while he who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. (Romans 14:3-6)
So in addition to Paul telling Jews not to impose their customs on Gentiles as if they were salvific, Paul also tells Gentiles not to reject or despise Jewish Christians who honor their culture’s notions of purity.
More than this, we find that the apostles, being Jews, themselves continued to observe Jewish customs after Pentecost, particularly so as not to give scandal to fellow Jews of tender conscience. So they pray in the Temple (Acts 2:46). They go to synagogue (Acts 17:1-2) (indeed Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, always went first to the synagogue whenever he came to a new town). They observe Sabbath day prayers at consecrated locations (Acts 16:13). Paul makes a temporary Nazirite vow (like Samson) and, at the conclusion of it, signifies fulfillment of this Old Testament rite by shaving his head (Acts 18:18). (Paul does something similar in Acts 21:23, so as to avoid offending the Jews in Jerusalem and persuade them he is not the enemy of the Law of Moses). And Paul even asks Timothy to undergo circumcision, not because he regards it as salvific, but also in order to not give offense to his fellow Jews (Acts 16:1-3). Paul’s rule of thumb, which passes into the life of the Catholic Church is, “In essential things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.”
When it comes to the baptized, what matters for Paul is not so much the observance of the rites and customs of Judaism as the attitude with which we approach them. If we approach them as ways for asserting our spiritual superiority over our brothers and sisters, as though keeping kosher scores you extra brownie points with God, we are doing it wrong, according to Paul. Food does not commend us to God. Circumcision profits nothing. Observing new moons and Sabbaths does not save. Neither does any of the rest of the ceremonial law of Moses.
This is as true today as it was in Paul’s day. For the temptation to feel spiritually superior is a constant throughout the Church’s history. What we feel superior about can vary widely, of course. Sundry subcultures in Christian circles get enthused about all sorts of things ranging from speaking in tongues to the theology of the body to the Latin Mass to peace n’justice to some favorite apparition. Some make their particular object of enthusiasm a litmus test for “true” Christianity. And in certain non-denominational circles (and even, on rare occasions in Catholic circles) you can find people enthused about the Jewish roots of the faith. They can, within reason, prize special knowledge about knowing Hebrew or various Jewish cultural practices or kosher food preparation and how to celebrate a Passover. And if they get carried away and out of balance about that enthusiasm, they can likewise start to idolize Jewish culture, customs, feasts, fasts, and rites as the thing that separates the “real” Christian from the supposedly “second-class” Christian. If the idol becomes a law so powerful that a believer seriously asserts that failure to worship the idol—be it speaking in tongues, or worshipping in Latin, or observing a Seder—bars us from salvation, they (as Paul warns) “nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose” (Galatians 2:21).
But (and here is the point), if a believer celebrates a Seder, or honors the custom of kissing a mezuzah (a small fixture near the door with a bit of parchment bearing the Shema prayer), or honors some other tradition from Jewish culture, not in order to feel superior to Gentile believers, nor to assert that the grace of Christ in the sacraments is inadequate, but in order to honor that cultural heritage or to contemplate the ways in which Christ is prefigured in the Old Law, he no more sins than the apostles did in meeting to pray in the Temple or in keeping other aspects of the law. He is simply honoring the Jewish culture at the root of the Christian revelation and meditating on how the revelation hidden in the Old Testament is fully revealed in the New. He is not trying to be extra-super-duper more saved, nor denying in the slightest that Christ is the savior. He’s just being grateful for that culture, as we all should be—particularly since that culture was the one God chose to prepare for the revelation of Christ.
Moreover, he can well be doing it for catechetical, pious and orthodox purposes. A Seder can, for example, be celebrated as a sort of living tutorial in how the Old Testament rites foreshadowed the realities of the New Covenant. So the bishops remark (in their document “God’s Mercy Endures Forever: Guidelines on the Presentation of Jews and Judaism in Catholic Preaching” a Seder “can have educational and spiritual value.”
The only caution the bishops add is this:
It is wrong, however, to “baptize” the Seder by ending it with New Testament readings about the Last Supper or, worse, turn it into a prologue to the Eucharist. Such mergings distort both traditions.” … Any sense of “restaging” the Last Supper of the Lord Jesus should be avoided …. The rites of the Triduum are the [Church's] annual memorial of the events of Jesus’ dying and rising (Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy Newsletter, March 1980, p. 12).
In other words, they essentially restate the point made above: that a Seder is not a replacement for or supplement to the Mass to make it “more valid”. It does not supply “more grace” or make you a superior Christian or help God’s well-meaning but inadequate efforts to give us the grace of Christ in the sacraments. It can show us where we come from and it can point to Christ and his Church’s saving sacrament as a road sign points us to our destination. But ultimately the point of the road sign is the destination, not the sign.
Relatedly, the Church also, out of respect for our Jewish brothers and sisters, discourages attempts by parishes to add Christian scripture readings to Seders, for much the same reason that Catholics would not much appreciate the local synagogue celebrating an ersatz Mass. But in private, I see no reason why a Christian (and particularly a Jewish Christian) could not, with the proper attitudes mentioned above, celebrate a Seder and offer commentary relating it to the types of Christ in the Old Testament and the Passover.
To those who would pretend to read the hearts of participants and tell us they are committing idolatry or sacrilege, the proper response is “How do you know this unless the person celebrating it says that observing this rite or custom is necessary for salvation?” If they say rather that they are doing it in order to learn about our heritage in the Old Testament or understand how the rites of the Old Testament prefigure Christ, then the accusation of idolatry or sacrilege is a grave injustice. Such people are simply doing in action what the New Testament does in words: looking at the rites of the Old Covenant to discover how Christ is hidden there. If Christians can honor the customs of every other culture in the world that the Christian revelation has touched, there is no reason they cannot, with proper understanding, honor that culture to which the Church owes an incalculable debt.
(Reprinted from Catholic Answers Magazine)
