(RNS) — Imagine the following.
I am in a conference room, in a high-powered meeting with some suits at Max, nee HBO. I cannot believe they have granted me this meeting, and frankly, neither can they.
One of the executives opens our conversation.
“OK, Rabbi Salkin. My assistant says you have an idea for a show. You have five minutes. We’re all ears.”
“Here’s the story,” I say. And I launch into the scene:
The camera focuses on a beautiful church in Brooklyn. It’s a Unitarian Universalist church. The minister is standing at the pulpit, and she is giving her sermon.
At the coffee hour, someone asks her: “When are you going to issue a statement condemning Israel for its aggression in Gaza?”
We see the minister doing some research and some reading. She then turns to one of her closest friends, a rabbi in Brooklyn. They get together for coffee and our Unitarian Universalist minister asks the rabbi about the situation.
A full-blown passionate discussion ensues between the two of them. Long story short: The minister decides she cannot endorse such anti-Israel statements. In fact, she finds herself to be in sympathy with Israel’s plight.
There is something else going on inside her. She visits her mother, who tells her something she had long suspected but had never really confronted: Her late father was Jewish, and covered up his Jewish identity.
The minister knows this means she has a claim on Jewish identity. We see her reading books, meeting with her rabbi friend, meeting with other rabbis.
Finally, she makes the decision: She is going to make a pro-Israel statement from her pulpit. She gets serious pushback, complaints, even hostility.
So she makes another decision: She resigns from the pulpit.
In the next scene, we see her meeting with those rabbis again, and telling them she wants to totally embrace her Jewish heritage, and actually become fully Jewish.
The suits are silent. I have already gone way beyond my allotted five minutes.
“I don’t know,” one of them says. “It’s … too Jewish.”
The other one says: “Maybe it’s too … Unitarian?”
To which the first one responds: “Is that even a thing — ‘too Unitarian’?!? Who ever says that?”
“But wait,” I interject. “There’s more.”
“She totally embraces Judaism. And then, in the next scene, we see her applying to rabbinical school. She becomes a rabbi. In the final scene, she is a rabbi, and her new congregants give her a standing ovation at her first service.”
The suits are silent, again. Then, one of them says: “You know, there’s a lot going on here. Politics, spirituality, feminism … ”
The other says: “Who could we get to play the reverend, um, rabbi? I think Kathryn Hahn is available. She was the rabbi in ‘Transparent.’”
I chime in: “How about Sarah Silverman as her friend, the rabbi? Or Natalie Portman? Um, Mayim Bialik? I mean — if we are going to have someone play the rabbi … ”
They stand up and shake my hand. “It’s a great story. We will get back to you.”
It is a great story and it is a real story.
Well, pretty much. I changed up the sequencing a little bit and some of the details about how she truly encountered her Jewish past. I made up the part about her friend being a Reform rabbi, though it is certainly possible.
It is the story of the Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons, and you can read Debra Nussbaum Cohen’s wonderful article about her in the Forward.
It is an unusual story, but one that is well within the margins of contemporary religious life and contemporary culture.
I drive a Toyota Camry hybrid. That’s not just a car; it’s a metaphor. Many people live with hybrid identities, and yes, sometimes those identities live uneasily next to each other.
Not only that. There is a great deal of religious switching in America today.
To quote a Pew study from 2015:
[There has been] a remarkable degree of churn in the U.S. religious landscape. If Protestantism is treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, which is up six percentage points since 2007. If the three major Protestant traditions (evangelical Protestantism, mainline Protestantism and historically Black Protestantism) are analyzed as separate categories, then the share of Americans who have switched religions rises to 42%. And these figures do not include an estimate of the number of “reverts” (people who leave their childhood religion before returning to it later in life). If the survey had measured this category, the estimates of the number of people who have switched religions would be higher still.
We need to take the spiritual journey of Ana Levy-Lyons with the gravity it deserves. Truth be told: There is a shortage of rabbinical students. Jews need rabbis. Levy-Lyons obviously has the human, intellectual and spiritual skills for it. I look forward to welcoming her as a Jew, and certainly as a colleague.
But there is far more to this story than is readily apparent. This is not only a story about how someone has entered Judaism. It is also a story about how someone left the Unitarian Universalists. The reason for that departure is fascinating, compelling and instructive.
To quote Levy-Lyons:
“It’s ironic, given that my entire life I didn’t think antisemitism was a thing in this country anymore. I never really got it. Then Oct. 7 happened. It was the reaction from the progressive left in this country that has been startling and terrifying.”
Her story is the story of how liberal denominations have moved into closer intimacy with the progressive left — including and especially their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist positions.
This is not new. It has been happening for decades. Some Protestant ministers have protested these developments. A good friend of mine, an Episcopal minister, was the sole voice in his diocese, pushing back against a BDS (boycotting Israel; divesting from Israel; sanctions against Israel) resolution.
He arose and said something like this: “I have immense sympathy for the Palestinians, and I would want to help them in any way possible. I would want us to build schools, playgrounds, build the civic infrastructure in the West Bank — anything.
“But tell me,” he continued, “how does our endorsement of BDS help the Palestinians? Show me one Palestinian life that has improved because of our anti-Israel stance.”
He is heroic, and we need more voices like that.
You want to help the Palestinians?
Sign me up.
You think you can do that by engaging in anti-Israel rhetoric, which only increases hatred of Jews and does nothing for Palestinians?
Expect me to fight back and expect me, and others, to applaud those who do.
The Prophet Isaiah named one of his children Shear-yashuv — “a remnant will return.”
Yes, Ana Levy-Lyons is a remnant — and yes, she has returned.
This is what she said, seeing herself as someone who has inherited:
… this gorgeous tradition of spiritual practices, rituals, music, and texts, dazzling in their breadth and depth…On Oct. 7, my people were slaughtered again…I am two degrees of separation from people who were murdered or taken hostage on that day. Over the months since, I have discovered that I am Jewish for the second time. I have realized that I am heir, not only to the beauty of the lineage, but also to the trauma.
Welcome home, Ana.
Yes, there is trauma in being a Jew.
But here’s what really matters.
The beauty. That’s what really endures.
We cannot wait to share that beauty with you.
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