Oct

31

“Jews Demand Signs” | An Interview with Roy Schoeman, editor of Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ

Posted By Victor | Filed Under Quotes & Excerpts 

Carl Olson                      Roy H. Schoeman was born in a suburb of New York City of “Conservative” Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. His Jewish education and formation was received under some of the most prominent Rabbis in contemporary American Jewry, including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, probably the foremost Conservative Rabbi in the U.S. and his hometown Rabbi growing up; Rabbi Arthur Green, later the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who was his religion teacher and mentor during high school and early college; and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a prominent Hasidic Rabbi with whom he lived in Israel for several months.

His secular education included a B.Sc. from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard Business School. Midway through a career of teaching and consulting (he had been appointed to the faculty of the Harvard Business School) he experienced an unexpected and instantaneous conversion to Christianity which led to a dramatic refocus of his activities. Since then he has pursued theological studies at several seminaries, written the acclaimed book Salvation Is From the Jews, helped produce and host a Catholic Television talk show, and edited and written for several Catholic books and reviews. His website is www.SalvationIsFromTheJews.com.

Schoeman was recently interviewed by Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about the book, Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ, which Schoeman compiled and edited.

Ignatius Insight: The sixteen stories of conversion in Honey from the Rock come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and historical eras. How and why did you go about compiling them?

Roy Schoeman: After I wrote Salvation is from the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, I found myself being invited to speak about the book, and to give my witness testimony, in more and more places. When I recounted the, frankly, miraculous events – a direct encounter with Christ, and later an extremely vivid and awake-feeling dream of the Blessed Virgin Mary (my witness testimony appears, in various forms, in both of my books as well as on my website) – people were surprised that such extraordinary graces had been granted me in order to bring me, an anti-Catholic Jew, to the truth of post-Messianic Judaism: that is, the Catholic Church.

Yet I knew from both my reading and my encounters with other Jewish Catholics that such experiences were more the norm than the exception for Jews who come to faith in Christ; after all, St. Paul himself said, “Jews demand signs” (1 Cor 1:22). I thought it would be useful to collect a group of such stories – first person witness testimonies whenever possible – that showed the lengths that Jesus was prepared to go to to bring home those who were first His people – the Jews. This is particularly important today, since we are living in a time when the pernicious falsehood is being spread, even by some Catholic theologians, that there is no need to evangelize the Jews because they are already in their own saving covenant with God. Nothing could be further from the truth – after all, it was to Jews that Jesus said “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”(Jn 3:5) and “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53); it was Jews, and only to Jews, that Jesus evangelized during His time on earth (”Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” — Mt. 10:5-6); and it was for evangelizing Jews that He was crucified.

I thought that a good way to dispute the claim that Jews do not need Jesus was to show the lengths that Jesus Himself–and His Jewish Mother!–were prepared to go to bring home the “lost sheep of the House of Israel”.

Ignatius Insight: In recent years there have been several compilations, some of them quite successful, of stories by Protestants who became Catholic. In what ways are these testimonies from Jews similar and different from the experiences of Protestant converts? In general, what differences are there between such conversions?

Schoeman: The greatest difference that I see is that Protestants are often able to “read themselves” into the Catholic Church. They discover evidence of the truth of the Catholic Church in the Scriptures, the Church fathers, and the early Church history. For it does not take a very deep exploration into the history and writings of the early Church to see that the first generation of Christians after Jesus were already “Catholic” – they certainly believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist and the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was their central act of worship. Rod Bennet’s recent book Four Witnesses, also put out by Ignatius Press, is an excellent source on this.

Such evidence is of no value to Jews, who reject, of course, the authority of both the New Testament and the early Church. Therefore it is rare – although not unheard of – for a Jew to “read” himself into the Church. More frequently it requires extraordinary interventions on the part of Heaven, in the form of miracles, apparitions, or theophanies, to convince them. As St. Paul said, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks [i.e. Gentiles] seek wisdom” (1 Cor 22).

Ignatius Insight: The Mother of our Savior plays a significant role in several of the conversions described in the book. Obviously she desires the salvation of all men, but is there a specific or unique relationship between Mary and the conversion of Jews to the Catholic Church?

Schoeman: I can only speculate, and I hesitate to do so. For of course she is the mother of all mankind, and every soul is infinitely precious in the eyes of God, and therefore in the eyes of Mary. Nevertheless, it is incontrovertible that Mary was born a Jew, spent her life entirely among her own Jewish people, and remained ever faithful to the Jewish covenant, worshipping God as a Jew. The Jews were her one people, in fact the only people she ever knew, and the particular “flavor” of the Jewish spirituality and love of God were her own. Might she not still have a particular “soft spot” for her own Jewish people? It seems logical to me.

Ignatius Insight: You mentioned how touched you were by the story of Hermann Cohen (1821-71), who went from being a wealthy and intellectually brilliant playboy to a Carmelite monk and priest with a great devotion to the Eucharist. What was so striking about his story?

Schoeman: I cannot help feeling that his story is the “centerpiece” of Honey from the Rock. I would love to write a full-length biography of him some day. Three aspects of his story strike me in particular – the depths of his depravity and distance from God; the Olympian heights of his success and glamour in the eyes of the world, and the intensity and passion of his conversion and subsequent extreme mortification of his life, after he came to the truth.

In Hermann Cohen you have a “superstar”, the Mick Jagger of his day. Already as a young teen Cohen was the protégé and constant companion of the most celebrated pianist of his century, Franz Liszt, and an internationally celebrated star in his own right. He was drowning in gold, the adulation of the highest aristocracy, and all of the temptations of “the world, the flesh, and the devil”. (I was a bit shocked to find out that “groupies” are by no means a modern phenomenon!) Yet at the core of all of this luxury, sensuality, and depravity, Cohen found nothing but emptiness. Jesus was able, in an instant in the presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, to cut through that miasma of false glamour and depravity and show Cohen where true happiness and true love are to be found – in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in the Catholic Church.

Almost immediately the young Cohen turned his back on all that the world had to offer to embrace the most austere life imaginable as an itinerant Carmelite monk, traveling throughout Europe preaching and bringing others, including many other Jews, to the light, truth, and joy that he had found. When he became a priest he took a vow to never preach without extolling the Blessed Sacrament. He ended his life as he lived it, a martyr to the sacraments, when he chose anoint a prisoner dying of typhoid using his unprotected finger, accepting the likelihood of contracting the deadly fever as a result. He died a few days later. What a Catholic! What a Jew!

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