David Brooks on the edge

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, is a Jew struggling with DRA: different religion attraction. And not just any religion, but Christianity. That’s tough. Becoming a JuBu or a JuAth—a Jewish-Buddhist or a Jewish-atheist—is socially acceptable among all Jews except the Orthodox. Becoming a Jewish Christian is not.

As a person raised in Judaism, I sympathize with Brooks’ struggle. I became a Christian in 1976, when I was 26 and not in the public eye. Having to make a change on a big stage is hard. Brooks recently told Washington Post reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey that he still has “a tendency to want to be loved universally.” If he publicly expresses his faith in Christ some landsmen will literally turn their backs on him, and that hurts.

Brooks has a deeper hesitation. “Frankly, the thing I struggle with in Christian thought in general is the tension between surrender and agency,” he told Bailey. “Raised as a Jew, I believe that we control our lives, we take action. … In Christian thought, there’s less emphasis on that. It’s more unique redemptive assistance from God. There’s more surrender. The line between agency and surrender, what we can do on our own and what we can’t is something I just don’t understand. I don’t have an answer to that.”

That’s a valuable and honest acknowledgement. I don’t know what struggles Brooks has in his personal life, but it’s clear professionally that he has enormous talent and has achieved much with it. He may never have encountered intellectual or personal hopelessness, the sense that in his own thinking he has utterly messed up, or that he is helpless to change a situation which he desperately wants to change.

I’ve had that feeling twice. In my early 20s I became a Marxist and joined the Communist Party. Brooks has never done anything as idiotic, so he probably has more confidence in his own judgment. When I belatedly realized the evil of communism I lost confidence in my wisdom and realized I desperately needed to surrender to God’s. Brooks may never have been so desperate.

In my 50s I realized my complete inability to change the self-destructive course of a person I loved very deeply. I had to rely on God’s unique redemptive action because my own action was fruitless. Only under duress did I come to understand the line between agency and surrender. Theologically, no pain, no gain. Maybe Brooks has felt that pain. Maybe he has not, and if so I don’t wish it upon him, but his task will be harder.

In 1999 and 2000 I twice criticized Brooks in very public ways, once when he wrote a very negative New York Times review of a new book of mine. I’ve since realized that his criticism was sound, so I want to apologize publicly to him. I’ll now end a column with a preposition, because I hope it’s not over: If I can do anything to help, as one Jewish Christian to a person who may become another, I’d like to.