Faith without works is dead! —James 1.27

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My first best friend was Jewish. He died last month. May his memory be blessed.

Marvin’s obituary described him as a “philanthropic rebbe”—one who viewed charity not merely as a donation but as a pursuit of tikkun olam. That’s Hebrew for “repairing the world.” And to think he might not have pursued tikkun olam if I’d had my way with him.

I once tried to get Marvin to convert to Christianity. I was a precocious foot soldier for Jesus at the time.

All you have to do, my friend, is confess that Jesus is the true Messiah and let him be your lord and savior. Then you will go to heaven when you die, and we’ll be friends up there for eternity. You don’t even have to be good. You just need to be saved. Good works won’t save us; only faith will. It’s that easy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis for his resistance to Jewish deportations, called that silly idea “cheap grace”—a polite way of saying, “bullshit.”

In that spirit Marvin politely declined my invitation. As it turns out, he knew long before I ever did that there are only two kinds of religion: The religion of being right and the religion of being kind.

Marvin was kind. He was also proud to be Jewish. (His parents were Holocaust survivors.) I never tried that nonsense on him again.

Later, I nearly converted to Judaism because I couldn’t figure out what Christianity added to Judaism other than the notion that the sins of the world could not be forgiven unless God’s son was crucified.

I realized I could live without that.

Judaism taught love of neighbor (and alien!)—along with loving kindness, doing justice, walking humbly—at least a thousand years before Jesus was born.

So why be Christian?

Well, why not? The way of Jesus is the way of compassion. Jesus practiced loving-kindness. Nevermind the creeds.

Anyway, becoming Jewish is a bit like becoming Amish. You more or less have to be born into it to get it right.

So I stayed Christian. You know, bloom where you’re planted.

As it turns out, the world needs a lot of repairing. We need all hands on deck. Religious or not. Spiritual or not. Woke or not. Only good work, and lots of it, will save us.

Tikkun olam.