[Dialogue] 4/22/10, Spong: Rabbi Jack Daniel Spiro

Thu Apr 22 13:23:59 CDT 2010

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Thursday April 22, 2010 

Rabbi Jack Daniel Spiro

Earlier this spring I returned to Richmond, Virginia, the place where I had served as rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, located in the heart of that city, until I was elected bishop in Newark in 1976. There is something deep within me that has, and probably always will, bind me to that church and that city. Some of those ties are easy to identify. My first wife is buried there. My children grew up and went to school there and two of them married into Richmond families and still live in that city, along with two of my grandchildren and all three of my granddogs and one grandcat! The congregation at St. Paul's Church was and is deep in my affections, made up, as it is, of people who were open, expansive, bright and willing to walk in new paths. Many of my most treasured friends are sti ll there, growing old as I am doing. There is, however, one other tie that I had with that city, which involved a transforming and life-changing professional relationship. It was with a rabbi whose name is Jack Daniel Spiro. It is about this man that I write this week so that you might be introduced to this rather remarkable human being.
There have been few lives in human history that have influenced the city where those lives have been lived more deeply and more significantly than Jack Spiro has shaped Richmond. He is Richmond's unofficial, but real, "Chief Rabbi." He is known far and wide in Richmond's religious community, by which I include not just its various Christian and Jewish traditions and its small Muslim population, but also that rising tide of secular citizens who find little meaning in organized religions of any description. He came to Richmond to serve as the spiritual leader of Richmond's Reformed Temple Beth Ahabah and, after doing that with great distinction, went on to become the chair of the Department of Judaic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond's growing and influential urban university. Jack Spiro was respected far and wide as an able scholar. He has not one, but two PhD degrees, the first from Hebrew Union in Cincinnati and the second from the University of Vir ginia in Charlottesville. His range of intellectual interests covered the landscape of human knowledge. He was and is articulate, sensitive, caring and concerned about the humanity that all people share and that links each of us to one another in a common bond and a common destiny. For this rabbi it is this humanity that transcends the traditional barriers of race, ethnicity, creed and culture that appear to form the common walls of division that tear regularly at the humanity of us all.
Jack Spiro is also my rabbi. Every bishop should have a rabbi. I believe it is both fair and honest to say that more than any colleague I have ever had, Jack has been the determinative factor in the course of my professional life. I had been in Richmond for about three years without being aware of him at all, when I received a telephone call in my office that was destined to change the focus of my ministry.
"Mr. Spong, this is Rabbi Jack Spiro of Temple Beth Ahabah here in Richmond." the voice said. We went through the normal identity routines before he got to his point. "I have just finished reading your book, This Hebrew Lord," he said, "and I have never read a book by a Christian that paid such homage to the Jews."
I thanked him, but he continued by saying, "Of course, I disagree with your conclusion."
A disagreement with a rabbi on my conclusion in a book about Jesus was hardly surprising and so I replied, "I'm sure you do." Warming to this conversation, I continued, "If you agreed with me, it would make your life rather complicated. There are very few job openings in synagogues for Christian rabbis." It was probably not the most sensitive of comments, given Christian history in which Jews have for centuries been victimized by Christian imperialism.
Undaunted by this, Rabbi Spiro continued, "I wonder if you would be willing to debate your book with me before the members of my congregation?" I think that we could have a great conversation. Would you have any interest in doing that?
The idea intrigued me and so we set a time within the week to meet for lunch to discuss this possibility. That lunch lasted for four hours! I have never met a person whose friendship I felt as quickly and as deeply as I did with Jack Spiro. The more we talked, the more we found levels of agreement. Both of us had been shaped by theologians like Paul Tillich and Martin Buber. Increasingly as we talked, debate seemed not the right word to use for what we were planning. So our word shifted from "debate" to "dialogue." In that moment something was born that we would eventually call "Dialogue in Search of Jewish-Christian Understanding." This Dialogue was conducted over four Sabbaths in his synagogue and four Sundays in my church. The Dialogue drew Rosh Hashanah-type crowds to Temple Beth Ahabah and Easter-type crowds to St. Paul's Church.
The format we adopted was that in the synagogue, in response to Jack Spiro's questions and later to the questions of his congregation, I sought to explain Christianity to a Jewish audience; and in the church, in response to my questions and to those of my congregation, he sought to explain Judaism to a Christian audience. We worked hard to eradicate timeworn and distorting stereotypes. Both of us studied extensively to prepare the content of our dialogue before we shared it with our respective congregations. We did not work alone, but developed this material with a small group of people who pushed us hard to make sure that we hit and maintained a very high level of excellence that would not slip over the course of the Dialogue. Included in this group were Dr. Frank Eakin, the chair of the Religion Department at the University of Richmond and a first-rate scholar of the Jewish Scriptures, who served as our moderator, as well as a quartet of outstanding women: Carter McDowe ll, Lucy Negus, Robin Valentine and Frances Eakin who guided our research, our public relations, our editing and, ultimately, the preparation of our material for publication. Each of us spent about twenty hours a week working on this project. The results amazed us. The Richmond press covered the Dialogue extensively with major stories, frequently on page one, following each session. The Dialogue was later featured in the Washington Post and, through its wire service, became a national story. WRVA Radio in Richmond broadcast each session in its entirety as a public service a couple of days after each session was held. Richmond's PBS TV channel asked us to continue the Dialogue on public television. Later the Dialogue was published as a book and is in print in Korean to this day. St Johann's Press in New Jersey has recently republished it in English.
It was the impact of that experience that drove me into pursuing with renewed passion the Jewish roots of the Christian story, which has dominated my writing career, culminating in what is still my personal favorite of all my books: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. It also meant much to me that Jack Spiro was a participant in the service when I was ordained as a bishop in 1976. If I pre-decease him he will also participate in my funeral.
What were the results among the people of Richmond as a result of this Dialogue? I can best answer that question by telling a true story. On Christmas Eve in 1974 about a month after the Dialogue had been completed, I was pleased to see a very prominent Jewish couple in attendance at our midnight service at St. Paul's. The two congregations had worshiped together so often that year that this struck no one as unusual. When it came time to receive communion, this couple came forward to the altar with hands outstretched. Since I believe that the altar is God's table at which all are welcome and that the only prerequisite for receiving communion at a Christian altar is that you be hungry, I placed the communion bread in their palms with a squeeze of welcome and received their smiles in return. It was for me a moving moment, but I could not help but wonder what it meant to them. I did not have to wait long to find out.
I met the husband of this couple on the street in downtown Richmond a few days later and told him how pleased I was that he had attended our Christmas service. He responded immediately by saying, "I bet you were surprised to see us come forward to receive communion." I was, but I was eager to hear what he was about to say. 
"Well, Jack," he said, "we did not want to be insensitive to your congregation so we thought about that a lot. Is not the Christian communion service based on the Last Supper which was in fact a Jewish Passover meal?"
"Yes," I said, "that is what three of the gospels assert."
"Well, at that last Supper weren't all of the people around the table Jews?"
"Yes," I responded.
"Had any of them ever been baptized?"
"Not to my knowledge," I answered, fascinated by his thinking and his irrefutable logic.
"Well, if Jewish people could receive communion from the Jewish Jesus at this first Christian communion service, I thought it would not be improper for us as Jewish people today to receive communion from you in gratitude for what the Dialogue has meant in our lives and in the life of this community.
Suddenly for me those human-made religious barriers that separate us from one another faded away and a newly shining set of human values replaced them. My life has never been able to remain inside any religious boundaries since. That was just one among the many life-changing gifts that I received from my rabbi, Jack Daniel Spiro, who remains to this day a close friend, an admired colleague and a treasured soul mate.

–John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Sally and Jon from The Washington Post, write:
Is the news media being fair to the pope? Is the media biased against the Catholic Church or its hierarchy? How would you advise the pope?

Dear Sally and Jon:
The bias in the media is not against the Catholic Church. That is little more than face-saving defensiveness. The bias is against the abuse of children and young people by priests. The bias is against a systematic cover-up on every level of the Catholic hierarchy. The bias is against saying how deeply this abuse is regretted on one hand and on the other promoting Cardinal Bernard Law, one of the most guilty prelates in America, to a position in the Vatican where he will no longer have to answer questions under oath. The bias is against the way Bishop Geoffrey Robinson of Australia was treated by the hierarchy of his own church after his report on clergy abuse in that country was so overt and honest, that it did not serve their cover-up needs.
It is not an anti-Catholic bias but a universal revulsion against this behavior across the world that finds expression in media coverage. There is also no rejoicing among other Christian groups, since this behavior in the Roman Catholic Church diminishes all Christians and hurts the cause for which all Christians work.
For this Church to pretend that they are somehow the victims of an anti-Catholic bias in the media is simply one more aspect of their unwillingness to see the depth of the problem. 

John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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