ARTICLES

The Other Counter-culture

Can Hard-core Catholics Learn from Hard-core Jews?

By James McCoy

Yoo-hoo, you counter-cultural Catholics you, you homeschooling mothers, and work-at-home fathers too, you piping children who mesmerize the neighborhood through, luring other kids dancing to your home -- have I got news for you.

Your Ecclesia domestica, your home-church, is free of heresy; you pray the daily Rosary; you only watch videos like The Sound of Music on TV; "climb every mountain" -- not every: for reaching the summit of Catholic life you need something else besides your feet.

This summit is also the source from which the whole spiritual good of the Church springs, is the only source towards which you must swim upstream, as "the culture we are living in becomes an ever-widening sewer," as Paul Weyrich, inventor of the "the moral majority" wrote last February. Doubting whether it existed anymore, Weyrich mothballed the moral majority as a political machine, saying "we are caught up in a collapse ... so great that it simply overwhelms politics." He called for a shift in strategy, holding the homeschoolers up as the paradigm: having "separated themselves from public schools," they "have created new institutions, new schools in their homes."

"I believe that we probably have lost the culture war," Weyrich also wrote. "That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts." To be fought by the home guard, sallying forth from its castle, for a man's home is his castle. But can it be orthodox Catholic family's -- as it can be an orthodox Jewish family's -- almost exclusive place of worship?

"Judaism is centered on the home," said Abraham (not his real name), an orthodox Jew, married with three children. "We spend a very small amount of time in the synagogue."

"The major mitzvahs," said Sarah, "the candle-lighting for the sabbath is done in the home. You bring the light of godliness in our home. The food that we eat is also in the home. For sabbath table -- since we don't have our temple -- we see our table as our temple." The Jews have not had their temple since 70 A.D., when the Romans sacking Jerusalem destroyed it.

"The home is the temple," Abraham emended.

"The table is the altar," Sarah revised.

Sarah, who grew up in "not an observant but a very Jewish house learned about "keeping kosher, the dietary laws," keeping the sabbath and "family purity laws" in a course taught by Chabad of La Jolla, where she and her husband make their home. "It was just like a thunderbolt," she recalls. The rabbi's wife, who taught the course, had the gift of making observant Judaism "seem like a joy and something I could do. The way she described, which was the Hasidic approach, made it seem so possible.... She spoke about holiness: by giving you family kosher food you can bring holiness to your home." What is the "Hasidic" approach? I ask

"The Hasidic movement is part of natural Judaism," Abraham replies. "It is nothing new."

"What is new," Sarah emends, "is that Hasidism started about three hundred years ago. And there are many Hasidic movements, Chabad being one of them. Chabad is different in doing outreach to Jews."

That would explain its presence in Boney's shopping center on Governor Drive, where a few days before I had interviewed Rabbi Moishe Leider of Chabad of University City/La Jolla. His office was part of Chabad's second floor suite, over the drycleaners. (It was Rabbie Leider who set up my interview with Abraham and Sarah.)

Chabad, Rabbi Leider explained, is "an acronym of three Hebrew words that mean wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, and basically describes the more intellectual Hasidim." The Carpathian Mountains range from Poland through the Ukraine, where the Hasidic movement was born. "Lubavitch is the name of the town where the movement settled for 200 years," Rabbi Leider said. Hence Jews in the Chabad movement are also called Lubavitchers. "They left Lubavitch in the early 1900s or around the time of the communist revolution" in Russia.

In 1942 some Lubavitchers, lead by Rabbi Joseph Isaac, settled in Brooklyn, where they have become as numerous as the stars in the sky. "In 1945 Chabad was just a movement of about 10,000 people," Rabbi Leider said. Today there are more than 2,000 Chabad centers worldwide with an estimated 200,000 followers. "Over all in San Diego we're very well liked.... We have a school with over 300 kids in Scripps Ranch; most of the kids are from non-Chabad," he said.

Parallels between these orthodox Jews and counter-cultural Catholics are several and striking. "Our strengths are that we have a great deal of faith in God and we're really directed," Rabbi Leider said. "We have no doubts as to what we are to do: 'this is the way it is; this is the way it's always been; this is the way it's gonna be.'

"We have very strong families," he went on, "we're very positive and upbeat.... I have eleven kids.... We don't practice birth control, except for medical reasons." Jewish law as found in what Catholics call the Old Testament has 613 precepts. "Maimonides elaborated each one of them," Rabbi Leider said Since many were ceremonial precepts regarding the no longer existing temple and its sacrifices, "today we observe 80 to 100."

In the words of the musical Fiddler on the Roof: "Tradition! tradition! tradition!" I ask Rabbi Leider whether Chabad's devotion to tradition clashes with some dominant American cultural icons (the rock star with his guitar, the president with his cigar, the feminist with her microphone). At first he seems not to understand my question, so I explain that many traditional Catholics today feel that, in a democracy without values, it is they who are actually the iconoclasts.

"I think that's something we definitely have in common," Rabbi Leider said. "As orthodox Jews, we are definitely fighting against the norm." Their way of life has been criticized as "old fashioned ... not living with the times ... bigoted against women -- that's a popular one," he said.

Yet there is one striking difference, and Rabbi Leider admits it's a weakness. For many years the core of Chabad was Rabbi Menachem Schneerson of Brooklyn -- so central a figure was he that today "there are some people in the movement who believe he's the messiah," Rabbi Leider said. "I believe, who knows?"

Since Rabbi Schneerson died several years ago "there's an in-fighting.... There are people who have very strong views; without Rabbi around to clarify things, there are some disputes. It's primarily in New York," Rabbi Leider added. "On the other hand, it hasn't stopped the movement from expanding."

Ironically, this rabbinical leadership role -- "in orthodox Jewish circles the rabbi is the head of the community," Rabbi Leider said, "people will refer to the rabbi in all kind of questions, not just religious questions" -- only ended up highlighting a basic difference between Judaism and Catholicism. For when I remarked to Abraham and Sara that the rabbi's strong leadership role in a Hasidic community seemed analogous to that of a priest's in a Catholic community, he demurred. But first, he wondered, what is the role of a Catholic priest?

A priest is a mediator, I replied, a sort-of spiritual middleman, by turns dispensing the gifts of God to men and offering the gifts of men to God.

"Let me explain what a rabbi is," Abraham responded, "with all due respect, there is no similarity. A rabbi is not a mediator. A rabbi literally, figuratively and every other way means teacher. They are no higher or lower than any other Jew. In fact, in all the practice of Judaism, we don't need a rabbi at all. We can conduct all our Jewish services, each and every one of us, in each and every way."

The Catholic notion of a priest, however, includes teacher -- and a whole lot more. "In the ecclesial service of the ordained minister," the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, "it is Christ himself who is present to his Church as Head of his Body, Shepherd of his flock, high priest of the redemptive sacrifice, Teacher of Truth. This is what the Church means by saying that the priest, by virtue of the sacrament of Holy Orders, acts in persona Christi Capitis ... the presence of Christ as head of the Church is made visible in the midst of the community of believers." While Abraham, a physician by profession, says, "if you had questions about chemistry, you would go to a chemist; if you had questions about Judaism, you would go to a rabbi"; the catechism, speaking of the priest, says, "he has the task ... of acting in the name of the whole Church ... above all when offering the Eucharistic sacrifice." And the Eucharist, as the catechism says elsewhere, "is the source and summit of the Christian life ... For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ...."

And while Sarah, the Lubavitcher homemaker, says, "we just want the Messiah; we'll take whoever it is"; the Catholic homemaker believes that He has already come. But no matter how counter-cultural her family may be, in the end it must take Christ from the hands of the priest. For the Eucharist, there is no home recipe.

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