Excerpts from My Jesus Year
from Chapter Four
Welcome to God’s House
The noise is thundering. The floor is shaking. My ears are pounding. It feels as if God is giving the commandments atop Sinai. Yet I couldn’t be farther away from that holy mountain if I tried.
“Give me a ‘Praise Jesus!’” the bishop screams into the mike.
“Praise Jesus!” the crowd shouts back in unison as they rise to their feet.
The woman next to me, swaying to the blaring music, is smashing her hand against a tambourine she brought from home. The guy in front of me, I’m not quite sure why, is moaning and wildly flailing his arms in the air. It’s like being at a rowdy rock concert -- except for the undeniable fact that it is morning, the opening act is a heavyset black woman belting out Baptist hymns, and the main attraction is the Lord Almighty.
Here I am, a five-foot-two bespectacled Jewish kid, in a mosh pit of faith in a sea of fifteen thousand roused African Americans at the New Birth megachurch in Lithonia, Georgia. It’s Sunday, prime time for prayer, and I am just trying to blend in, hoping I won’t stand out too much.
Just as such hopeful -- and unfortunately fleeting -- thoughts are swirling through my mind, one of a dozen camera operators focuses on me. And before I know it, there I am, my face twenty feet tall on the two screens hanging from the ceiling in front of the amphitheater. My Jewish face on Jesus’s JumboTron for all to see.
Oh, God, forgive me.
from Chapter Nine
The Prince and I
At this precise moment in time, I find myself sitting wedged between two princes of the African Hebrew Israelite community in the backseat of a brand-new white Cadillac DeVille winding its way through southwest Atlanta. It’s a chilly November day, and smoke from the exhaust pipe billows out the back as we wait at a red light by some dusty train tracks and what appears to be an abandoned crack house. As the light turns green, I ask Prince Asiel, the royal fellow to my left, if he has any children. He tells me he has fifteen, which is actually not such an astonishing number once you hear what he tells me next.
“Well, you know, from four wives.”
Admitting you’re polygamous is not normally preceded by the casual southern California phrase “you know,” but then again nothing I had experienced today could be described as normal.
He explains to me the benefits of polygamy, including having more people around to help take care of all the children. “Also,” he says looking me straight in the eye, “when one of them is a niddah, you have other wives you can be with.” Niddah is the Hebrew term for the Jewish law that requires a man and wife to abstain from marital relations while she is menstruating.
Here I am sitting next to a guy who’s polygamous, yet versed in the laws of the Torah. And oh, yes, he’s black. And a prince. Of what I wasn’t yet sure.
from Chapter Nineteen
Confessions of a Catholic Pretender
Most everyone in line is quiet, just standing here, perhaps a little embarrassed. After all, we’re here to confess our sins, not to proudly boast of our latest successes. Standing in this line, I feel as though we’ve all been collectively sent to the principal’s office.
Hey, what did you do?
Threw a paper airplane at the teacher. What about you?
Adultery.
To be honest, I expected there to be more people here. Maybe there’s only a small crowd because of the difficult downtown location or because it’s the middle of the workday. Or maybe it’s because people are confessing their sins elsewhere. Like on the Internet. While researching confession, I found a number of Web sites that offer the ability for online confessionals.
The Florida-based and cleverly named ivescrewedup.com gets about a thousand hits a day, where confessions range from the somber -- “I had an abortion and I am sorry, God, for not keeping that baby”--to the silly -- “I have done enough drugs to make Keith Richards envious!!!!!” (sinner’s exclamation points, not mine). This site, which accepts anonymous confessions, is actually sponsored by a real church (although not a Catholic one). Mysecret.tv, another church-run site, boasts thousands of confessions and millions more who have logged on to read them. Another site, Dailyconfession.com, was launched by a former Disney executive.
These guilt-bearing Web sites shouldn’t surprise anyone. According to a recent Pew study, 82 million Americans use the Internet for faith-related reasons. That’s more than the number of people who use the Net for online banking or even online dating. The popularity of GodTube.com, the evangelical equivalent of YouTube, is soaring. And it’s not only Chris tians who are hanging out at the nexus of divinity and the digital world. Muslims have news and information pages, and even comedy sites (check out allahmademefunny.com). In Judaism, we have tens of thousands of Web sites traversing our religious spectrum from blogs and social networks to educational and news sites. A bunch of sites offer practical ser vices such as having your emailed prayers tucked into the crevices of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. But, to my knowledge, no Jewish Web site offers online confessions. And that could be for one very simple reason -- Judaism doesn’t have the same concept of confession as Chris tianity. At least not confessing to another human being. Sure, we confess to God. We do that a lot. In fact, three times a day Jews recite “Forgive us, our Father, for we have erred. ... We have willfully sinned ...” during our prayer ser vices. And on the High Holidays, seeking forgiveness is practically the entire liturgy. The Yom Kippur prayers alone list dozens of potential sins. Eventually they all jumble together and start to sound the same. Forgive me for gossiping. Forgive me for slandering. Forgive me for leering. Forgive me for watching Gossip Girl.
But these forced confessions are so rote and scripted, there’s no room for creativity or personalization. Where’s the scripted confession for journalists who turn in articles past their deadline? Where’s the one for watching too much reality TV? The one for actually enjoying the guilty pleasure that is MTV’s My Super Sweet 16?
At Sacred Heart, we may not be discussing with each other the many sins we committed, but the mere fact that we’re here speaks volumes. It says not only did we do something wrong, but we feel bad enough to take some time off from work, trek downtown, and tell some guy on the other side of a partition our most embarrassing sinful moments. We’ve got a conscience. Or at least the others do. I’m just here for anthropological reasons, studying Catholics in their natural habitat.
My Catholic friend Vince keeps telling me I should actually use this opportunity to confess something. I ask him if I can preemptively confess for conning a priest into believing he’s pardoning a fellow Catholic when, in fact, he’s absolving the son of a rabbi. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that’s probably not something the Son of God would approve of. Thinking about it, I actually begin to feel bad about my con job. That’s another thing Catholics and Jews have in common: guilt.
I should explain that I wanted to be honest with the priest, to tell him I’m a Jew who’s lost his way. After all, that’s what I had done at all the other churches I visited. The introductions were like those at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Hi, my name is Benyamin Cohen, and I’m a Jew. But Vince said I couldn’t do that here. Only Catholics were allowed in these booths, so if I wanted an authentic confession experience, I’d have to do it undercover. Pretend to be someone I’m not. Adopt the guise of a guy who grew up somewhere in New England, graduated from Notre Dame, and made contributions to Ted Kennedy’s many reelection campaigns.
I could do that.
