A German immigrant recounted his mixed-religion background and how he has combined those religions to make a better hybrid religion for himself last night in the George Sherman Union.
The lecture series, hosted by the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion, addressed the issue of religious dual identity in a lecture entitled ‘Christian-ish and Jew-ish: Childhood on a Religious Shuttle.’ Werner Gundersheimer, director emeritus of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and moderator Michael Zank, a professor of Religion at Boston University, both spoke at the event.
Gundersheimer, on a return from a sabbatical in Germany, recounted his childhood experience of Jewish and Protestant duality to a sparsely attended Terrace Lounge.
Gundersheimer’s personal account began in pre-Nazi Germany. He came from a family of German-Jews on each side, with contrasting lifestyles and views. His family became a refugee of war-engulfed Germany and was sponsored to reside in England in 1939. Gundersheimer conveyed a deep attachment to what he was fortunate enough to leave behind.
‘Those dead souls [of the Holocaust] are the reality; my story is only a trivial footnote,’ Gundersheimer said.
His story continued with his family’s eventual emigration to America and their exposure to the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers. Through their help, the Protestant Tucker family took in a toddler-aged Gundersheimer in 1940 while his parents went to Philadelphia in search of work.
‘The activities of this daily religious family become my central defining trait,’ Gundersheimer said. ‘I did not bring in my stranger’s religion [Judaism] I was three and a half. Nothing had prepared me for life in a clergyman’s household or one where the majority was women.’
And, after a while, the key elements of a Christian family life began to feel normal to Gundersheimer, born Jewish.
‘Holding hands [during Grace], hearing the Word, dying the eggs, hanging the stockings it began to feel like my own [religion],’ Gundersheimer said.
His foster family did continue to remind him of his background in Judaism, but he began to have no recollection of what that really meant. A permanent reunion with his birth parents was joyous, but Gundersheimer had become a ‘familiar but somehow changed child.’ Gundersheimer was moved from the countryside of New Hampshire to urban Philadelphia.
In Philadelphia, Gundersheimer encountered an immersion with Jewish culture and religion.
‘My first Jewish holidays, the rituals of Sabbath were alien … I disliked the melodies, could not understand the words … synagogue observances seemed bizarre,’ Gundersheimer remembered.
Judaism was not a negotiable topic in his household and Gundersheimer felt intense confusion with being religiously and linguistically divided at such a young age.
‘I lived life as a religious double agent,’ Gundersheimer said.
A profound, devotional turn came in adolescence following his Bar Mitzvah, when he found that the ‘stranger’s religion,’ Judaism, had become his own.
‘The connectedness, that meant a lot to me,’ Gundersheimer said. ‘The aesthetic power, the comforts of ritual, of repetition … it was something I just did … when I ceased to have that feeling, when I brought more reason, to use a Aristotelian term, I let go of it.’
As quickly as it came, Gundersheimer let go of strict Judaism and the experience became a ‘vaccination against extreme religious piety.’
This would frame the spiritual thinking for the rest of his life, he said.
‘I did my own spiritual seeking, completely non-denominational,’ Gundersheimer said. ‘Call the good parts [of each religion] and set the rest aside.’
Conventional religion is what distresses Gundersheimer and he used the metaphor of a ‘religious shuttle’ to explain his spiritual situation.
‘The shuttle is an instrument used in weaving to fashion a coat of many colors with the warp of Christianity and the weft of Judaism,’ Gundersheimer said.
Commentator Michael Zank reemphasized his metaphor and its aesthetic qualities.
‘The image of a religious shuttle-interweaving made for a better fabric, conveying greater warmth and beauty … the weaving of a new fabric of religious pluralism, philosophy,’ Zank said.
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