From Rome to Jerusalem

FROM ROME TO JERUSALEM

A Non-Jew on the Way

KENNETH GUENTERT

Smashwords Edition

Copyright (c) 2011 by Kenneth Guentert

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be photocopied or otherwise reproduced without written permission from the author.

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Cover Design: Kenneth Guentert

Contents

***

Preface

Chapter 1—Born Catholic

Chapter 2—Raised Catholic

Chapter 3—Taught Catholic: Parochial Schools

Chapter 4—Taught Catholic: The Sem

Chapter 5—Taught Catholic: Notre Dame

Chapter 6—Hired Catholic

Chapter 7—A New Perspective

Chapter 8—Stranger in a Strange Land

Chapter 9—Trying to Integrate

Chapter 10—Time to Decide

Chapter 11—Grabbing the Tzitzit

Chapter 12—A Good Job Is Hard to Find

Chapter 13—The Misfortune of a Good Marriage

Chapter 14—The Messiah Complex

Afterword—On the Way

Glossary

Preface

***

I am in the business of helping authors publish their books. As such, I am often involved in the editing and preparation of memoirs. Even so, I was surprised at the issues that confronted me when I chose to write my own.

Two were critical.

First, there was the issue of memory. Not so long ago, I had the idea that my parents never threw me a birthday party when I was a child. I was disabused of this notion when my sister, quite innocently, sent me a box of old family photos, several of which showed me at different ages, surrounded by friends and blowing out birthday candles. As it turns out, as the oldest of six children, I did quite well when it came to birthday parties. It was my younger siblings, including the one who sent me the box of photos, who came up short.

The weird thing is that I do not even like birthday parties—I am embarrassed by every aspect of them, especially when they are in my honor—but here I was carrying around a resentment based on being cheated out of something I actually received. Memory is like that. The average memoir probably has as much fiction in it as a novel has truth.

Second, there is the issue of fairness to others. Thanks to the above story, I understood immediately that my challenged memory could damage the people in my past. But that is not all. Even if my memory were true in every aspect, which is hardly possible, I could injure others. When I was growing up, I learned from the Baltimore Catechism that gossip came in the form of telling untrue tales (calumny) and true tales (detraction). My chosen religion, Torah Judaism, is even more outspoken and intense about lashon hora (evil tongue), which applies to spreading both untrue and true tales about people. It is considered to be one of the worst sins because it is so hard to repair—the more so, I should think, if the damage is done in print.

Out of this quandary, I returned to the purpose of my memoir, which was to explain my religious transition from Catholicism to Judaism. It is not a journalistic report of people I met along the way, although their reactions to my transition are germane to the story. However, I realized the focus needed to be on my side of the street, to use a phrase common in twelve-step programs, and not on anyone else's convictions or decisions. Memoirs, I am well aware, can be a vehicle for settling scores. I do not want mine to be seen that way. As a result, I tried to go more deeply and honestly into my own thinking and feelings and to pull back from tales I could have told or judgments I could have made about others. That I could not be perfect in this regard led me to decide something else: to use first names only, pseudonyms, or general references to most of the people in the story as well as general references to the churches, synagogues, and organizations mentioned.

There were some exceptions.

—Members of my immediate family are named, just because it seemed impossible to keep them anonymous. I had therefore to take extra care in the way I talked about them.

—Organizations that show up on my resume—principally places of employment—are mentioned by name. Again, I had to take extra care in how I talked about these organizations and the unnamed people in them.

—The Netzarim—as well as its paqid, Yirmeyahu Ben-David ha-Tzadiq, and his wife and daughter—are mentioned by name. The reason for this is that the Netzarim are required to be open about their affiliation, especially when pursuing conversion to Orthodox Judaism. This is in contrast to the deceptive practices of many so-called messianic Jews in their relationships with Orthodox communities and authorities. While this memoir is not an attempt to represent the Netzarim, they in general and the Ben-David family in particular played a central role in my transition from Christianity to Torah Judaism. Not mentioning them by name hardly seemed to be a realistic option.

Finally, I had to make a decision about how much Hebrew to use and how to do so. The Netzarim have a preference for using Hebrew script in their correspondence, but for several reasons, some of which are obvious, this was not an option for this book. However, I decided to use Hebrew transliterations for important words. This led to two problems: 1) how to convey the meaning to readers who do not know Hebrew and 2) how to spell the transliterations with consistency.

The latter problem was particularly thorny, though perhaps not so important for the average reader. Because the Hebrew alphabet is different from the English alphabet, how one transliterates each consonant (and hidden vowel) is a matter of choice. People often ask me how to spell Khanukah—they are asking for the English transliteration, of course, not the Hebrew letters—to which I usually reply, "How would you like to spell it?" Some writers are simply inconsistent. Others use one of the many different systems available. I chose to look to the Netzarim website for guidance. The system used there may look different to many eyes. For example, it uses mitzwot instead of mitzvot or mitzvos, the w in the middle and the t at the end coming from Yemenite pronunciation. However, it is at least a system. Even there, some arbitrariness emerges in the area of capitalization. Because the Hebrew alphabet has no capitals, any choice to use capitals can change with one's mood. Just one reason why the Netzarim do not much care for transliteration.

With regard to the former problem, I decided to put the rough English equivalent in parentheses for words used once or twice and to refer readers to a glossary for a more extended explanation of those words used more often. This seemed the happiest solution.

--K.G

Chapter 1

Born Catholic

***

I was conceived on the Christian feast of Epiphany and born on the second day of Yom T'ruah, better known in the United States as Rosh ha-Shanah.

In saying so, I am getting ahead of myself.

In a way, my story begins well before I was born in a little German town of Bohmisch-Eisenstein, where a Catholic seminarian named Johan Hopsfensperger took a shine to a Jewish girl named Johanna Horn. Suffice to say that neither family was tickled with the development. In fact, Johanna's father met with young Johan and offered to pay his passage to America if he would drop his interest in Johanna. Young Johan, having been well trained in ethics by this time, took both the money and the girl. They were married in Lisbon, where they embarked to American and eventually settled in northern Wisconsin and began to raise a Catholic family. They had three children, including a daughter, Helena, who grew up and married Englebert Schueller.

Helena bore Englebert nine children (three sons and six daughters), only one of whom married. Jennie, formally named after her grandmother Johanna, married Joseph Guentert, who had moved from Germany to South Bend, Indiana, when he was twelve. Young Joseph and Jennie would live for a while near Jennie's family in Appleton, Wisconsin, but they would eventually move South Bend, where Joseph could be closer to his family and where Jennie would eventually bear him eleven children, including the last, Frank, who was my father.

Thus, if a Jewish court were to agree with our family story, my father in a legal sense would be a Jew, having been born of Jennie Schueller, who had been born of Helena Hopfensberger, who had been born of Johanna Horn, the Jewish girl. In Judaism, your status as a Jew is determined by the status of your mother, and her mother, and her mother, and so on. So my father is, quite probably, a Jew.

Not that he cares, of course. He was raised Catholic and has been a devout Catholic all of his life.

I, on the other hand, am not a Jew, thanks to my descent from my mother, who almost certainly did not have a Jewish mother.

Life has its ironies.

I was born on the second day of Yom T'ruah, according to the Jewish calendar. The second day of this festival is rabbinic rather than biblical—like the second days in Pesakh, Shavuot, and Sukot. Unlike those other second days, the second day of Yom T'ruah is celebrated in Israel as well as in the galut (diaspora). Why is something of a mystery, except that as a non-Jew committed to Torah, I do identify with the concept of being both inside and outside of Israel at the same time. 

That I was conceived on the Christian feast of Epiphany is speculation on my part, although a reasonable one. The Feast of the Epiphany in the year of my birth was nine months to the day before my birth. As it happens, this feast (which was at the time celebrated on the same day of the solar calendar each year) coincides with my father's birthday. On this day, he would have been married to my mother for little more than a month. It is reasonable to suppose that my mother of blessed memory would have given him a little gift on his birthday. Of course, she had no way of knowing the gift would be me.

Whether fact or not, my conception in Christian Catholicism and my birth in Torah Judaism rather describes the direction of my life and this book. From Rome to Jerusalem. 

Chapter 2

Raised Catholic

***

Truth to tell, I wasn't born Catholic either. Nobody is—or was—at least in those days. You were a nobody, consigned to limbo—the afterlife's version of a bureaucratic snafu—if you died before you were baptized. My parents were good Catholics though, and they made sure I got baptized at the first opportunity, which turned out to be less than two weeks later. At that point, I was bound for heaven, at least until I reached the age of reason and had my first impure thoughts.

My Mother

Arlene Lilly Hayden was neither very religious nor spiritual. However, she was all wife and, having made her commitment to Frank, she converted to Catholicism.

She was the daughter of a not-so-religious father and a fervent Congregationalist mother, who disowned eighteen-year-old Arlene the minute she announced she was going to commit the unforgiveable and marry a Catholic. Whether out of bull-headedness or love for my father, she followed through and did not speak a word to her mother for the next twenty-five years. In this respect, she had a curious resemblance to my ancestor on the other side of family tree, Johanna Horn, who gave up the religion of her childhood to follow her Catholic husband.

Mom went dutifully with Dad to Mass every Sunday, neither showing much enthusiasm nor complaining. That was one part of the Catholic contract in the 1950s. The other was raising a large family. By the time she was thirty-three, Mom had given birth to and was raising six children. She did not carry this burden easily, suffering throughout her life from various ailments, hospitalizations, and finally cancer. But it was her burden, and I don't believe she thought to pray for a different one.

As good mothers do, she tried to raise good children. When I was four, we were visiting a neighbor woman who had a two-year-old boy who was taller than I was. To build myself up, I pocketed one of his toys: a white plastic reindeer with a missing leg. When we got home, Mom recognized the reindeer as a toy that did not belong to me, marched me back to the neighbor's house, and made me hand it back with an admission of guilt and an apology. Lesson learned: Stealing was not going to be in my repertoire.

Another time, I was pushing my sister, Gloria, in my red wagon and rammed the tongue of the wagon through the basement window of our neighbor, who happened to be a police officer. Mom ran out and gave me a whooping—or what passed for one on her end (or rather on my end). Later, when our neighbor could be seen in the basement reglazing the broken window, Dad made me empty my piggy bank and marched me over with a handful of pennies and nickels to admit my guilt and make amends. Lesson learned: Damages done through carelessness must be repaired.

When I was a couple years older, we had a family cat and I had matches. Putting two and two together, I wondered if cat fur would burn. It did, somewhat to my surprise. My mother must have been watching. After I rolled the cat around on the grass in order to put out the fire, she rolled me around the grass and whooped my behind, a little harder than when I was four. The cat quit speaking to me. Lesson learned: I would not be a sociopath who got his start by torturing small animals.

My Father

Frank Guentert, though possibly a Jew by law, has been a devout Catholic for all of my life. His faith might have been strengthened by his experiences during WWII—he served as an infantryman in 1945, was awarded a bronze star for cutting communication lines under fire, and