Befriending Outsiders: Table Fellowship, Habits of Mind, and Delight Amidst Difference

A handful of us from a Jewish-Christian Religious Pluralism symposium gathered in the courtyard’s lamplight. Half of us enjoyed the kosher-certified House of Hafiner Queen Esther late-harvest chardonnay, while the other half leaned a bit drier with a Ravenswood Old Vine Zinfandel. Jews and Christians, we were beginning to relax into a fellowship, having found success in collaborative redress of a kosher dispute. My learning? Kosher and kosher-style are not the same thing. The former is assured by rabbinic oversight, onsite; the latter offers no such assurance of the necessary observance. A seemingly small matter, it had threatened to fragment the month-long table fellowship, a condition upon which evening seminar meetings were presumed. I startled at the unexpected sense of belonging and cherished respect as one of the Jewish scholars observed: “You really don’t want to make kashrut your own, do you? I’m not sure why, but this allows me to trust you more deeply than I did before.” He trusted me to honor him and to honor his tradition without fear of Christian encroachment. It was an oblique comment, surely, but it planted a seed for understanding befriending outsiders as a way of deepening faith commitment by stewarding the traditional wisdom of another, in trust. This essay examines befriending outsiders as a tradition-sensitive approach to inter-religious learning in which original identities and cross-traditional companionships deepen because of differences, not in spite of them. This interaction will define the parameters before more systematic reflection expands the theoretical purchase of the argument that considers both food and space as dimensions of encounter for deepening faith journeys in cross-traditional companionships.

My research at the time was an ethnographic study of kashrut observance across populations in New York City and Southwest Ohio, which offered me unusual entrance into the difficulty. As an outsider to Jewish observance I was welcomed as a scholar into the insider discourse amongst the Jewish scholars, sorting out their own observance within an interfaith setting. As a Christian insider, I was, of course, privy to the discourse of Christians who, though scholars and long-standing “experts” in interfaith concerns, seemed to wonder why the kosher/ kosher-style distinction mattered so much. My heart sank when I heard a Christian scholar trying to teach a Jewish scholar how to navigate the difference. Finding the needed level of kosher-supervision in New York City presented little difficulty, of course. Our small cross-traditional coalition advocated for a catering change to insure kosher, not kosher-style. That it took advocacy was disheartening, but the collaboration resolved it well. From that point, the religious-pluralism symposium and its evening meals for discourse went forward easily.

The Circus © Victoria Ivanova

This unbidden conflict spurred my own research that summer as I saw in stark relief the value of being a befriended outsider, by which I mean one who knows, values, advocates for, and even stewards another tradition’s wisdom-practices without identifying or being identified with them as one’s own. Stewardship is fundamental here: to take responsibility for the well-being and wisdom-specifics of an “other” as one would for one’s “own,” while simultaneously relinquishing any ownership or identity with it or them. For four weeks that spring I had delved deeply into keeping a kosher home, primarily to try to understand from a more invested perspective what are the specific challenges to observance in my location in Southwestern Ohio. I fell in love with the wisdom of the practice, its mindfulness and halakhic traditioning, having all the passion of a convert for a time. Then, when the self-prescribed four weeks ended I was relieved to relinquish it. I had learned a lot about how difficult it is to keep any level of kashrut in my town, whether Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, or ultra-Orthodox. Unexpectedly, I also learned that you can fall in love with, even envy, another tradition’s wisdom without needing to become identified with that tradition. You...