The Jewish Bishop

“Two roads diverged in a wood/And I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.”

I recalled Robert Frost’s words when a couple of weeks ago I met a very godly woman. We talked about religion and growing up Jewish; we talked about life and death and mysterious feelings we sometimes get that give direction to our lives. We talked about saying Kaddish for loved ones (I’m doing it now, her turn was a decade ago). We talked about Israel and the Arabs, about choices people make. The woman with whom I shared these thoughts was Geralyn Wolf, the Episcopal bishop of Rhode Island, a woman born Jewish with fond memories of Jewish ceremonial whose grandparents were observant (but not her parents).

Once as a girl of five, Wolf went with her Orthodox grandfather to shul. She remembers asking him, “Grandpa, what were you saying to God?” And he admitted, “I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because God knows.” For Wolf that interaction between a little girl and her elderly grandfather was and remains seminal. What she learned is that in a relationship with God we don’t always have to know everything we are saying to God or God is saying to us but that God knows and God can sift through things we cannot know, things that to us remain mysterious.

As a little girl Wolf was left by a babysitter on the steps of a Roman Catholic church while she looked for her own son in the play yard. No one bothered her, the doors to the church were closed, she could neither see nor hear if anything was going on, but she remembers having “this incredible sense that God was there and that I had heard that the God who lived at the Catholic Church was Jesus.” How do we explain such a thing? Is she a latter day Joan of Arc? No, she doesn’t claim any supernatural voices nor a re-birth, just a feeling which she held on to while still attending synagogue and Passover Seders like any other Jewish girl of her generation.

Again, a few years later, she felt this calling, this time when she went into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and was overawed by the sights, sounds, fragrances, the Latin, the candles, the feeling that God was there, and that their God was Jesus. This feeling was very real to her and it started her on a search for God as Christians worship him. Her parents were not pleased. They were not religious, so this was a challenge not only to their Jewish roots, but to their basic irreligious perspective. Eventually she found a sympathetic response to the English speaking Episcopal Church that did not dwell on sin and Hell as its punishment, but was welcoming. Telling her parents the news wasn’t easy. Her mother was full of guilt. “I should have done this, I have done that, I should have raised you as a Jew.” Her father, who had no use for religion, and certainly not for Christianity told her, that the story of Jesus “is concocted; two young people got in trouble, and this is what they concocted, and for some reason it caught on.”

So she became first an Episcopalian, then a priest and, remarkably, a bishop. One question that pervaded our conversation, though it wasn’t always spoken, was, “Is there any Jewishness left in your view of the world; is there still a Jewish soul whispering to your subconscious core? The bishop might disagree, but I think the answer would be a muted, “Yes, there is.”

When her sister died she asked her non-religious family, “‘Who will say Kaddish for Val?’ They all looked at me dumbfounded, like you have to be crazy. And I said ‘I will, she deserves that much.’” So for eleven months the Episcopal bishop of Rode Island sat in the chapel of Temple Emanu-El, twice a day, and said kaddish for her sister. You can’t tell me that there isn’t a Jewish heart beating in that body. (Once she was away from Providence for a few days. Upon her return, one of the minyan regulars came up to her and said, “Glad you’re back. We were worried. After all, we’re the only shul that has a bishop and a rabbi.”)

The Episcopal Church leans towards support of the Palestinians. “I think the Episcopal Church has been extremely one-sided” she says. “In my mind they have been looking at the situation from the lens of the Palestinian people and they compare the Palestinian people with the Israeli government. But they don’t look at it from government to government or people to people. So we hear about how the Israeli government does such terrible things to the Palestinian people, but then I sort of question, well the Palestinian people have also suffered at the hands of Palestinian leadership.”

As a young woman of Jewish descent Geralyn Wolf decided to take the road less traveled. Where it will bring her is hard to say. I think co-existing with her mitre and her staff, there is still something Jewish about her, something she does not try to conceal or avoid but which makes its presence felt like the unexpected Call she received as a little girl at those Catholic churches. Is she still a Jew according to halacha? Once on a snowy morning, there were only ten people at minyan at Temple Emanu-El, but one of them was the Episcopal bishop, born Jewish. Did she count? No one knew; a teacher from the Schechter school was brought in and the issue resolved that way, by not resolving it at all. It’s not for me to say that this woman who is a leader of the Episcopal Church maintains her Jewishness, but I can say that despite her conversion and her sincere belief in Christian doctrine and practice, that she is a friend of the Jewish people, and in that way her road and ours are at least parallel, occasionally intersecting before diverging again.