If you've enjoyed this account,
please explore the site, and consider buying the book (it can be
ordered here).
The Gregorian Chant on this page
comes from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Joseph de Clairval, Flavigny,
France. CD's are available from the Abbey here
In a few months the author will
have a new book of Jewish convert stories out, titled "Honey from the
Rock: 16 Jews find the Sweetness of Christ", also from Ignatius Press.
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Author's
Conversion Story from Christ to the World
My parents were observant Jews in Europe who fled to the U.S. to escape
the Holocaust. I was raised as a "conservative" Jew, and was
rather pious by nature and very enthusiastic about the religious
instruction I received and the religious activities I participated
in. I went to my synagogue's after-school Jewish
religious
education program ("Hebrew School")
all the way through grammer and high school. By high school it
was
the main focus of my identity and activities, even though by that point
there were only about a half-dozen of us who had continued in the
program.
I was very close to my rabbi and to several of the seminarians who were
my Hebrew school teachers. As Providence had it, my hometown
rabbi
was Arthur Hertzberg. One of the highest-profile rabbis in the
U.S.,
he was president of the American Jewish Congress, advisor to several
presidents,
and wrote a number of best-selling books on Judaism and Jewish
history.
My favorite Hebrew school teacher, with whom I was particularly close,
also
became a very prominent rabbi who later headed the largest Jewish
rabbinical
seminary in the U.S..
Growing up I was unusually devout and passionate about God and Judaism,
although the suburban conservative context I was in did not really
support a life of piety, faith and prayer. In my senior year of high
school I met a very charismatic "mystic" Hasidic Rabbi (Shlomo
Carlebach) who used to go around the country giving "concerts" which
were really prayer meetings over which he would preside, playing guitar
and leading Hasidic worship songs, interspersed with religious
story-telling and teaching. He had a large
following among Jewish hippies and college students. I fell
in with him, and spent the following summer traveling with him in
Israel
in his entourage. I wanted to live my life for God and with God,
and while in Israel I considered abandoning my plans to go to M.I.T. in
order to stay in Israel studying at one of the Jerusalem yeshivas
(which are schools where young men devote their time to prayer and
religious study, the closest thing Judaism has to religious
life). But I was turned off by a certain sterility and coldness
which I saw in them, and which did not speak of real intimacy with God.
So I returned to the U.S. and started at M.I.T. I felt very lost,
because anything which did not have God at its center seemed to have no
point or meaning, yet there was nothing I could "do" which did have God
at
its center. The former Hebrew school teacher with whom I was
close had
also by then moved to Boston, where he started a kind of
counter-culture, hippie-oriented Jewish seminary/commune. During
my first few weeks at M.I.T. I considered dropping out, but he
encouraged me to stay, and I did,
spending much of my free time at his seminary/commune.
Although I tried to maintain my religious orientation, there was a
fatal flaw in it which soon led me astray. I had no understanding
of the relationship between religion and morality, particularly sexual
morality. So my religiosity soon became mixed up in the drug and
"free love" culture which was rampant, and soon degenerated into the
immoral,
vague hippie "spirituality" of the time. My thirst for God
became,
for a long while, sated by the false consolations and delusional
spirituality
of that environment.
For the next fifteen years, I lived my life in a tremendous inner
tension. I had a yearning for transcendent meaning, and a refusal
to let go of
that yearning for more than short periods, but had no knowledge of what
that yearning was truly for, and hence no sense of a direction to go
in. Because a conventional engineer's life in the U.S.
had no "meaning", I moved to Denmark, because I sensed, in the deeper
relationship which Danes had with life and family, a greater spiritual
meaning, but once there it was obviously not my real life so I
returned. For a few years after my
return, while working as a programmer, I lived for rock-climbing, with
the
excitement and sense of danger and accomplishment which it produced
providing
an anesthetic for my thirst for meaning. In 1978 I went back to
school,
to Harvard Business School for an M.B.A., but the momentary feelings of
success
which that produced did not assuage my desperation for real meaning for
long. Anything which I tried, whether a career switch or a
romantic relationship, only produced a momentary illusion of purpose
which soon faded, leaving
me with the desperate sense that there must be something more.
That
is why I never settled in to a career, or married.
At Harvard Business School I did extraordinarily well, winning most of
the available awards in my class, and graduating among the top few with
"High Distinction." Shortly after graduation I was invited to
join the faculty, and did so, teaching the core marketing course in the
M.B.A. program. Yet even the success of being a Harvard Business
School
professor, and a very popular one at that, at thirty years of age did
not
assuage my sense of pointlessness. I loved the teaching and the
students
but did not find much interest in the subject matter itself.
After
teaching Harvard offered to support me (very generously) while I
completed
a doctorate so that I could qualify for tenure, but once into my
dissertation
my lack of genuine interest caught up with me, and I went back to
consulting.
It was around this time that I got involved with my last "false
consolation", my last false direction to provide meaning to my
life. As a child I had been an enthusiastic downhill skier, but I
gave it up when I went
to college. I now took it up again with a vengeance,
supporting
myself with consulting while spending most of every winter skiing in
the
Alps. I became very good, and my skiing companions in the Alps were all
professional skiers, "circuit" skiers, Olympic hopefuls,
etc. For a few
years I lived for skiing, finding enough consolation in the physical
excitement, the speed, the aesthetics, the sense of accomplishment, the
camaraderie, to dull the thirst for meaning in my life.
Of course God was using everything in my life to bring me to Him, and
it would soon bear fruit. It was when I was in the
spectacular natural beauty of the Alps that I became aware of the
existence of God
for the first time since college. I remember the scene -- I was
high
up on the mountain, still well above tree line, shortly after sunset,
with
the sky glowing a soft red and the snow and granite glowing blue in the
twilight. My heart opened with gratitude, and I knew that such
beauty
had been created by God. It is worth noting that the area
of
Austria which I was in was still deeply and piously Catholic, with
beautiful
crucifixes everywhere, both inside the houses, hotels and restaurants
and
also along the roads and even trails. Even in the ski town the
Church
was packed for Sunday Mass. (In fact, in the bed-and-breakfast where I
was
staying a carved wooden crucifix, with corpus, hung over my bed.
Every
evening when I returned to the room I would remove it and place it in a
drawer -- I had no desire to sleep under a cross ! -- and the following
day I
would
find it had been rehung over the bed,without comment, by the
devout,
elderly woman in whose home I was staying).
After a few years of living for skiing, that too began to pale, and I
became more and more despondent. The only relief I could find was
spending time alone in nature, trying to recapture a hint of the
consolation which I had felt in the Alps. During the spring of
1987 I took a few days off from work and went to Cape Cod to spend time
in the nature there. I was walking in the early morning, in the
woods just back from the beach, when God intervened, dramatically and
distinctly, into my life to pull
me back and put me onto the right path. As I was walking, lost in
my thoughts, I found myself in the immediate presence of God. It
is
as though I "fell into Heaven." Everything changed from one
moment
to the next, but in such a smooth and subtle way that I was not aware
of
any discontinuity. I felt myself in the immediate presence of
God. I was aware of His infinite exaltedness, and of His infinite
and personal love for me. I saw my life as though I was looking
back on it after death, in His presence, and could see everything which
I would be happy
about and everything which I would wish I had done differently. I
saw that every action I had ever done mattered, for good or for
evil.
I saw that everything which had ever happened in my life had been
perfectly
designed for my own good from the infinitely wise and loving hand of
God,
not only including but especially those things which I at the time I
thought
had been the greatest catastrophes. I saw that my two greatest
regrets
when I died would be every moment which I had wasted not doing anything
of value in the eyes of God, and all of the time and energy which I had
wasted worrying about not being loved when every moment of my existence
I was bathed in an infinite sea of love, although unaware of it.
I
saw that the meaning and purpose of my life was to worship and serve my
Lord
and Master, in whose presence I found myself. I wanted to know
His
name, so that I could worship Him properly, so that I could follow
"His"
religion. I remember silently praying "Tell me your name. I
don't
mind if You're Apollo, and I have to become a Roman pagan. I
don't
mind if You're Krishna, and I have to become a Hindu. I don't
mind
if You're Buddha, and I have to become a Buddhist. As long as
You're
not Christ, and I have to become a Christian!" (Jewish readers might be
able
to identify with this deep-rooted aversion to Christianity, based on
the
mistaken belief that it was the "enemy" which lay behind two thousand
years
of persecution of the Jews.)
Not surprisingly, He did not tell me His name. Obviously, I wasn't
ready to hear it -- my resistance at the time was still too
great.
But I knew, from that moment on, the meaning and purpose and goal of my
life; and that sense has not faded or wavered, although the immediate
state
of perception did.
When I got back home, everything was different. I remember
calling my mother and telling her "Mom, I have good news! It's
all true!
You don't ever die..." only to be met with a sort of stony
silence. It had never occurred to me that she might not believe
me -- after all,
I knew from my own direct experience! Although I went back to my
consulting, everything was now different, and I set out on a focused
search to find my Lord and Master and God whom I had met on the beach
that day.
Because I interpreted the experience as a "mystical" one, I initially
looked towards mysticism, which led me to a lot of blind alleys.
Prior to my experience I had not had any interest at all in mysticism
or any of the New Age religions or meditative practices or occultism,
and those are what I first came across. I spent a number of
months looking in that, essentially Hindu although disguised,
direction.
Yet every night before going to sleep, I would say a short prayer to
know the name of my Lord and Master and God whom I had met on the
beach. A year to the day after the initial experience, I went to
sleep after
saying that prayer, and felt as though I was woken by a gentle hand on
my shoulder, and escorted to a room where I was left alone with the
most
beautiful young woman I could imagine. I knew without being told
that she was the Blessed Virgin Mary. I felt entirely awake (and
my memory is as though I had been awake), although I was
dreaming.
I remember my first reaction, standing there awed by her presence and
grandeur, was wishing I knew at least the Hail Mary so that I could
honor
her! She offered to answer any questions I had. I remember
thinking
about what to ask, asking the questions, and her answers. After
speaking
to me a while longer, the audience was ended. When I woke the
next
morning I was hopelessly in love with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and I
knew
that the God I had met on the beach was Christ, and, and that all I
wanted
was to be as much of, and as good a, Christian as possible. I
still
did not know anything about Christianity, nor the difference between
the
Catholic Church and any of the hundreds of Protestant
denominations.
It took me another two years or so to find my way to the Catholic
Church,
guided by my love and reverence for the Blessed Virgin Mary.
This image
reminds me particularly of the
appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in my dream.
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I will just touch briefly on some of the milestones which led me to the
Catholic Church. After the dream of Mary, I started going to a
local Protestant Church, but left when I asked the pastor about Mary
and
he made a disparaging remark. I started hanging around Marian
shrines,
particularly a shrine of Our Lady of La Salette which was in Ipswich,
Mass.,
about 40 minutes from my house. On a winter ski trip to the Alps,
I decided to visit the real La Salette apparition site (in the French
Alps),
and ended up spending the rest of the "ski" trip there, in deep prayer
(more
details on that stay can be found here).
Someone
I met there recommended that I make a visit to a Carthusian monastery,
and
I ended up doing so, spending a week there, on a kind of solitary "come
and see" although I was still Jewish! There I became aware, for
the first time, how the Catholic Church was itself an outgrowth of
Judaism. It was unavoidably obvious, given how the monks spent
many hours a day chanting the Old Testament psalms, with their
continual references to Israel, Zion, Jerusalem, the Jewish Patriarchs,
and the Jewish people, visibly identifying with the "Israel" of the
psalms (that is, the Jews). A small illustration: One day when I
was working alone in the fields, an elderly monk came out to speak with
me. He approached and shyly asked, "Tell us, if you don't mind --
We couldn't help noticing that you do not receive communion, so you
must not be Catholic. What then are you?" When I replied
"Jewish", he grinned and with a deep sigh said "That's a relief!
We were afraid you were Protestant!". At the time I had no
understanding at all of the difference between Protestants and
Catholics -- they were just meaningless words to me describing
Christians -- yet I was deeply struck by the fact that in some
mysterious way this monk identified with Jews as opposed to
Protestants. I later realized that in his eyes Jews were "elder
brothers in the Faith" who had not yet received the grace to recognize
the Messiahship of Jesus, whereas Protestants had once had, but then
rejected, the fullness of the
truth.
During that week I grew to feel Mary's central, penetrating presence in
the Catholic Church. I also started to be deeply distressed at being
unable to receive communion. It was my desire to receive
communion
which, more than anything else, drew me to the Baptismal
font.
I had sought out a Jewish priest, Father Raphael Simon, (referred to me
by
the Carthusian Prior) for baptism. He was a former (Jewish)
University of Chicago Philosophy professor and New York City
psychiatrist, who became a Trappist monk (his conversion story is
published under the title The Glory of Thy People.)
When
I first met with him he asked me why I wanted to be baptised.
Since I knew that I couldn't truthfully say (at the time) that it was
because I believed in all of Catholic doctrine, I angrily blurted out
"Because I want to receive communion and otherwise you won't let me
!" I thought he would throw me out on my ear, but instead
he nodded sagely and said "Ah, that's the Holy Spirit at work..."
So in early 1992 I was baptized and confirmed (by a different
priest, as it turned out), just in time for another more extended stay
at
the Carthusian monastery, to discern whether that was my
vocation. It wasn't (although the Prior continued for many years
to be my spiritual director), but the fanaticism which characterized my
pre-conversion life has served me well, now that I have found the true
direction for my life.
Although I have no religious or priestly vocation, there is (please
God) nothing in my life which is not for Him and around Him. In a
number of small ways I am active in the Church, with daily Mass and
prayer being at the center of my life -- writing, teaching or speaking
whenever asked, producing and hosting a Catholic TV talk show. I
have just completed a book on the role of Judaism in salvation history,
Salvation is from the Jews, which is being published this year by
Ignatius Press. It should give Christians a deeper understanding
of Judaism as the religion which
God created to bring about the incarnation of God as man, as well as
the
religon into which He incarnated. To Jews it should reveal the full
glory
and importance of Judaism, a glory which can only be recognized in the
light
of the truths of the Catholic Faith. My hope is that by
illuminating
Judaism with a deeper meaning and significance than Jews see from
within
their own faith, their pride in being Jewish will draw them towards,
rather
than away from, the Catholic Church. (More details on the book are
given
elsewhere on this website)
I will never know, this side of Heaven, whose prayers and sacrifices
purchased the graces for my entirely unsought after and undeserved
conversion, but I can only thank them profoundly, and exhort others,
too, to pray for the conversion of the Jews; that the people to whom
Jesus first made Himself known may come into the truth and into the
fullness of their relationship to Him in the Catholic Church. How
tragic that we to whom God first revealed Himself as Man should be
among the last to recognize Him! In the words of the Postulatum from
the First Vatican Council, signed by the Fathers of the Council and
endorsed by Pope Pius IX (but never formally promulgated due to the
Council's premature termination upon the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War):
"The undersigned Fathers of the Council humbly yet
urgently beseechingly pray that the Holy Ecumenical Council of the
Vatican deign to come to the aid of the unfortunate nation of Israel
with an entirely
paternal invitation; that is, that it express the wish that, finally
exhausted
by a wait no less futile than long, the Israelites hasten to recognize
the
Messiah, our Savior Jesus Christ, truly promised to Abraham and
announced
by Moses; thus completing and crowning, not changing, the Mosaic
religion.
The undersigned Fathers have the very firm confidence that the holy
Council will have compassion on the Israelites, because they are always
very dear to God on account of their fathers, and because it is from
them that the Christ was born according to the flesh!
Would that they then speedily acclaim the Christ, saying: Hosanna to
the Son of David! Blessed be He who comes in the name of the Lord!
Would that they hurl themselves into the arms of the Immaculate Virgin
Mary, even now their sister according to the flesh, who wishes likewise
to be their mother according to grace as she is ours!
Our Lady of Zion, pray for us!
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Since Jan. 20 is the Anniversary of the
Apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Alphonse Ratisbonne (see my "They are all Jews" page), and Jan.
10 to 25 is the week dedicated to prayer for Church Unity in the
Catholic Church, the following prayers are presented :
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PRAYERS FOR THE
CHURCH UNITY OCTAVE
(January 18 through 25)
OFFICIAL OCTAVE PRAYER
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SEVENTH DAY OF THE OCTAVE
(January 24th)
Intention of the Day:
Conversion of the Jews
Prayer for the
Conversion of the Jews
Priest:
Let us pray. O God, Who dost manifest Thy mercy and compassion towards
all peoples, have mercy upon the Jewish race, once Thy Chosen People.
Thou didst select them alone out of all the nations of the world to be
the custodians of Thy sacred teachings. From them Thou didst raise up
Prophets and Patriarchs to announce the coming of the Redeemer. Thou
didst will that Thine only Son, Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior,
should be a Jew according to the flesh, born of a Jewish maiden in the
Land of Promise. Listen to the prayers we offer Thee today for the
conversion of the Jewish people. Grant that they may come safely to a
knowledge and love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah foretold by
their Prophets and that they may walk with us in the way of salvation.
People:
Amen.
Prayer of the
Congregation of Our Lady of Sion
Priest
and People: God of all goodness and Father of mercies, we beseech Thee,
through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and by the intercession of the
Patriarchs and holy Apostles, to cast a look of compassion upon the
children of Israel, that they may be brought to the knowledge of our
only Savior, Jesus Christ, and may partake of the precious fruits of
the Redemption. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Amen.
Priest:
Our Lady of Atonement, intercede for us.
People:
That there may be fulfilled the prayer of thy Divine Son, “That all may
be one.”
Prayer to Saint Paul
Priest:
O holy Apostle Paul of Tarsus, from your glorious place in heaven, look
down upon the race you loved so well. True it is that many of them
remained deaf to your ringing words of truth, and that some of them
even stirred up persecution against you and your fellow believers, but
you were so devoted to your people that you willed to become a castaway
for the sake of their conversion. Now that you are glorious in heaven,
obtain for your brethren the grace of repentance and conversion, so
that they may finally take their rightful place in the great family of
the Catholic Church.
People:
Amen.
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