A few weeks before reading Lauren Winner's book, Girl Meets God, I heard that Chaim Potok had died of brain cancer. Potok was the novelist who made so many of us Gentile teenagers feel that something was missing in our lives: namely, Orthodox Judaism. We loved The Chosenwith its story of Danny Saunders, the Hasidic boy who struggled to make a life of his own without dishonoring his rabbi father. We didn't want Danny's dilemmas, but we wanted his brilliance and intensity: we loved the rich Jewish history and culture that made his struggles so poignant.

Lauren Winner read The Chosen as a teenager and romanticized Orthodox Judaism from a distance. Unlike most of us, though, she had a doorway into its closed world. Her father was Jewish: non-observant, but religious enough to want his lapsed Baptist wife to send the kids to a synagogue, something she did even after they divorced. Winner spent much of her time during high school at Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was a teenage anomaly: an earnest, devoted student of religion who gradually traded in "lacrosse practice and ballet lessons and field hockey sticks, awkward dates at the movie theater and Friday night football games for more hours at the synagogue."

Winner loved her friends at Congregation Beth Israel, but the synagogue was Reform: liberal in its approach to Jewish law. Her own instincts were different: "Either God revealed all this stuff to Moses on Mount Sinai or He didn't. If He did, then we're bound by it . …Either there was no Judaism or there was Orthodox Judaism."

She lived for a summer with an Orthodox family in New York, learning to make challah and study Talmud, dressing in ankle-length skirts. While at Columbia University, she formally converted to Judaism by going through a ritual bath called a mikvah. Rabbis streamed in to witness the bath, though allowance was made for female modesty:

when I entered the mikvah room, the rabbis all turned their backs, and then, robe on, I plunged into the water. The rabbis heard the splash, and then they filed out of the room. I disrobed, and the mikvah lady supervised my three immersions . …And then I was a Jew.

For Winner, this was a dramatic moment, yet ultimately anticlimactic. Only a few years later, in the antechamber of a chapel in Cambridge, England, she took another ritual bath. An Anglican chaplain asked her if she would turn to Christ and renounce evil, to which she answered "I will, with God's help." The chaplain then poured warm water over her head and wrapped her in a striped bathrobe ("like Joseph's coat"). Her appointed godmother gave her a silver cross, a reminder of the man who had lured her from synagogues and Talmud studies, from Simchat Torah and the Feast of Tabernacles, from the mikvah itself. The convert had converted.

Winner considers from several angles how this improbable second conversion came about. There was a miraculous element to it: she encountered Jesus in a strange dream. (I'm glad to hear that he looks like Daniel Day-Lewis.) Theology played a part. She loved the idea of Incarnation—God entering our world, becoming one of us. Also, she'd encountered blatant prejudice in the Orthodox community, an insular world unwilling to accept converts on equal footing.

Winner is honest, though, in ascribing much of her disaffection to her own failure as a Jew. After her initial love affair with Judaism, she lost her enthusiasm for it. She didn't study enough, didn't keep the Sabbath. "If it was a marriage," she says, "me to Orthodox Judaism, I failed long before I met up with Jesus. I failed from the beginning."

Having failed as a Jew, Winner set about learning to be a Christian. Ever orthodox by inclination, she found herself theologically most in line with evangelicals. But this made her yet another kind of anomaly: an artsy Ivy League grad student with friends who watched The 700 Club. The juxtaposition exposed the snobbery of her academic community, but it tempted her to snobbery of her own. When she overheard a fellow graduate student suggesting that she might be a fundamentalist Bible-thumper, she wanted to tell him, "No, no, I'm not one of them, I'm one of you. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, but I also wear fishnet stockings and drink single-malt Scotch."

Besides the sense of being a stranger in at least two worlds, she faced internal struggles: gnawing loneliness, sexual desire, and doubts about Christianity itself. Then there was her nostalgia for the old life. It turned out that Judaism wasn't so easy to walk away from. It had become part of her:

I gave away all my Jewish books and let go of all my Jewish ways, but I realized, as I spent time with other Christians, that Judaism shaped how I saw Christianity . …I found my heart sometimes singing Jewish songs. I thought I had given away all my Jewish things, but … I'd just given away some books and mezuzot and candlesticks. I hadn't given up the shape in which I saw the world, or the words I knew for God, and those shapes and words were mostly Jewish.

The task ahead of her was to discover what it meant to have Jewish vision from within the Body of Christ. This brought manifold insights, some painful and some joyful. One Palm Sunday morning, her church in New York presented a Passion Play. After watching a mob of actor-Jews cry for Jesus' death, she hoped her priest would comment on the scene, provide some context. (Did the congregation remember that Jesus' disciples were Jewish, too?) But he didn't.

On the other hand, she found much of what she loved in Judaism implicit in Christianity, particularly Catholic expressions of Christianity, where faith is considered through a "scrim" of tradition, just as the Torah is always read within the context of the Talmud. One night she decided to visit a local synagogue on Simchat Torah, the day when Jews celebrate reading: She tells the story in the present tense:

the Torah scrolls are taken out of the ark, and everyone dances them around, scroll by scroll . …As you dance, you pray, Ana Adonai, hoshia na. 'Oh Lord, save us.' … I remember that in two months, Advent will start, and the beginning of Advent is when the church has its own Simchat Torah … when the church finishes one yearly cycle of Scripture readings and begins again . …And I watch the Torah scrolls dance by, and I know that I have already been saved.

I've never read a story quite like this one, where Orthodox Judaism mixes with orthodox Christianity in the crucible of one life. Only God could have brought Lauren Winner into being in the late 20th century. She's an anti-Danny Saunders, a bright and earnest child of pluralism who wants to walk the theological straight and narrow without dishonoring the cultural relativists who made her. She searches for truth within the boundaries of both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy, sucking the marrow of experience right from the bones of tradition. To watch her search is to see a small demonstration of the process described in Paul's letter to the Ephesians: the joining of two bodies (Jews, Gentiles) in one person. Winner herself becomes a metaphor for what occurs in the person of Christ.

As a piece of writing, her book is loose rather than neat. She skips and weaves through time and space and also thematic material, touching on every subject from Ash Wednesday evangelism to the difficult pursuit of chastity to the art of tattooing. It's easy to get lost in the shifting details of her narrative, to lose track of fixed points. I suspect, and accept, that Winner intends this. The story of her life so far—she's still in her mid-twenties—is in good part the story of herself thinking, an activity she engages in more than most, and one that doesn't always follow a linear course. Her view of the past will continue to shift and develop, I'm sure, as she sees her conversions from an ever greater distance, in light of an always unfolding present.

I hope, though, that she won't move far from this good place she's already reached, where she witnesses in life and words so movingly to the kinship between Jews and Christians:

on Ascension Day, I am struck by the deep similarity that lies just underneath that difference. Both Jews and Christians live in a world that is not yet redeemed, and both of us await ultimate redemption. Some of us wait for a messiah to come once and forever; others of us wait for Him to come back. But we are both stuck living in a world where redemption is not complete . …We are both waiting.

Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist who lives in Alabama. Her memoir, Home Is Always the Place You Just Left, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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