Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family - Review

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by Paul Elie

That passage suggests the literary qualities of this book: a plain style, flecked with Yiddishisms (I suspect he wanted to call the book Noisy Souls); vivid scenes; a strict avoidance of the documentary voice-over; a sense of humor; and a keen eye for all the ways, from the old New York settings to his attraction to religious absolutes, that his story echoes that of his parents. "These past few years I had worked myself into an unhealthy predicament," he explains at one point. "The more vigorously I embraced Judaism, the more vigorously I was inclined to assault Catholicism - and my parents....I could not accept my choice with a full heart unless I rejected theirs with just as much gusto."

So it is. Faithful to his childhood impressions, he gives Catholicism some hard knocks. In a scene set just after his conversion, he compares Judaism's

sense of history and tolerance of rebellious human nature with the supposedly Catholic notions that God controls all our actions and we all must strive to be nothing less than perfect. And although he suggests again and again that his mother's Catholicism is extreme, he admits that he never sought a different point of entry into the Catholic tradition, one more tolerant of inquiry and paradox, of human freedom and human frailty.

Near the end of the book he recounts an hour he spent with Cardinal John O'Connor, who had admired his Times piece and quoted it from the pulpit on Good Friday. Stephen told the cardinal that his mother was having trouble accepting his decision to be a Jew. In reply the cardinal cited the teaching of the Second Vatican Council about the primacy of an informed conscience, suggesting that "if you will tell your mother that you have tried to study this, that you have prayed about it, this is not just a revolt or a rejection, this is not a dismissal of what you don't understand - that this is where you think God wants you to be, an informed Jew," she would understand.

The doctrine of the primacy of an informed conscience is one of the great doctrinal developments of our time, and many of us could not be Catholics without it. And yet as I read about Stephen's meeting with O'Connor - the climax of the book - I found myself wishing that the cardinal had pressed Stephen harder on the matter of whether and how he had informed his conscience about Catholicism. It isn't that I wish the cardinal had urged Stephen to consider Catholicism one last time. No, it is that the episode made me wonder whether deep down, Catholics, even cardinals, suspect that our faith can't bear the scrutiny of the Stephen Dubners of the world.

Over the last ten years, I watched some of Stephen's story take place - saw him suddenly start dressing like his wife's drama teacher Ivan, "woolen vests over thrift-shop neckties," saw him get an ulcer (just like his father) when he tried to study Latin with Columbia undergraduates at the same time that he was studying acting and Judaism with Ivan. Today, I feel lucky to be able to call him a friend, and I'm not sure which I admire more, his authentic search for God and religion or the wise and moving book he has written about it. It's a book that leaves you with the sense that a life lived religiously is the life most fully lived - that sends you back to your own life, and your own faith, in order to live them more fully. And yet there is something missing in it: there is no scene in which the author encounters the Catholic faith in circumstances apart from his father's death and his mother's piety. There's no exchange with a Catholic counterpart to the friends and teachers who invited him to look into Judaism, if only to deepen his sense of where he has come from and what Catholics and Jews have in common; that's not Stephen's fault, and it's not Cardinal O'Connor's. I wish, as Stephen was in a religious crisis, pinned between Catholicism and Judaism, that I'd been paying closer attention; and I wish that I'd had something to say to hearten him on and wish him God's speed. That's what friends are for, aren't they?