learning experience

[cellio]

A post in a community for Jewish converts (and converts in training) raised this question: the poster has a disabled sibling and has in the past been the person who accompanies said sibling to church on Christmas. (The rest of the family is in the choir.) Is this behavior permitted, required, or forbidden of a Jew?

Much of the feedback so far weighs in on the side of "required -- family is family". Someone cited honoring one's parents (the source of the request), and a couple people mentioned protecting a life (the sibling is apparently in real danger of injury without someone there).

I, on the other hand, am leaning toward "forbidden", though "permitted" is a possibility. Definitely not "required", though.

The issue is complex. While the sibling needs a caregiver, that's a service that can be hired -- so there's no apparent need for the poster to do it personally. Of course it's important to honor one's parents (this comes up a lot in text), but the talmud also teaches that if a parent asks you to transgress the Torah, you must decline (Bava Metzia 32a). This raises the question of whether attending another religion's worship service -- on its second-holiest day, to boot -- is avodah zara, forbidden worship. Is it enough if you don't intend to worship? What if you don't participate? What if you don't listen? That is a complex question with varied answers depending on circumstances, ranging from exactly what will take place to the strength of your own Jewish education and commitment, and you really need to ask your rabbi for a personal ruling.

I think the experience of facing this issue is valuable for the conversion candidate, actually. As a member of a minority religion (that sometimes faces hostility from others), sometimes you are going to have to make choices between your religion and your family/friends/society -- things like this, or resolving Shabbat issues with your employer, or various other matters. Finding out how you will handle those choices before it's "too late" -- before you convert and acquire new obligations -- seems useful to me.

I assume that most conversion candidates face some sort of religion-vs-world-at-large test during the process, but I don't actually know.

Comments

[geekosaur]

That's likely to be the Orthodox Christian denominations I mentioned earlier in this thread; they disapprove of icons (one of the early dividing issues between Orthodoxy and Catholicism being the latter's insistence on having a cross on the altar), and their rejection of the Trinity makes "communion" meaningless to them.

However, I'd not point to genuflecting as a problem; we have our own version, after all. And, unfortunately, one can stretch a point (possibly too far) to claim that we've invested perhaps a bit more iconography in Torah scrolls than is justified by the need to show proper respect for them. (On the other hand, we're not perfect either; maybe we need to do some self-examination on that issue.)

I will agree that the whole business with the cross is unjustifiable iconography, as is the "fish" that is increasingly common, and other icons used by various denominations (many Protestant branches use an icon of flame with a cross motif worked in, and then there's the Catholic "sacred heart").

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity, which Orthodox branch are you thinking of? IIRC, icons are even more popular in the Eastern Christian churches than they are in the Roman Catholic one, and having been to the local Greek Orthodox church, I'll vouch for there being no shortage of icons and images.

[geekosaur]

Interesting. I'm mostly thinking back to the research I did involving the original Byzantine Orthodox church (from which the others broke off after the Byzantines were forced to accept Catholic doctrine), and the iconography issue was fairly key to that. I admit I don't have much experience with current Orthodox Christian practice so I probably shouldn't be surprised at creeping iconography; but Greek Orthodox I would expect to be thoroughly contaminated by Catholic influence as the price they paid to get support from Rome after the fall of Constantinople.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I recall iconography being an issue, but I could have sworn that it was actually the other way around, that the Byzantines had to convince the Romans that all the icons were okay. Perhaps this is a period difference and it went both ways at points--one datapoint I recently acquired by going to an exhibit of the works of the artist El Greco, who started life in the Rennaissance as an Eastern Orthodox iconographer, was that his work in Spain (after he stopped painting icons but still painted religious figures) was fairly controversial because it invested too much realism at the expense of teaching utulity, which was the prime reason that icons were allowed at all in the Roman countries.

Also, afaik, Greek Orthodox is the Eastern church that ignores Rome, and Byzantine Catholic is the Eastern church that follows Rome. It would seem that the former should be the less influenced of the two, being, I'd guess, made up of those broken-off factions you mentioned, if they still exist. (It seems to make no sense that the Romans would just let half the Eastern church leave if they had managed to take them over when the Byzantine Empire fell.)

[mishtaneh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and sorry for switching userids on you; I need to decide which one I'm using when posting.... :/

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

No problem--because the user-pictures are the same, it took me about ten minutes before I noticed that the userids were different. :)