A few years ago I remarked on a necklace a woman in my Bible study was wearing:  a Star of David with an embedded cross.  I confess I’m fascinated by symbolism, in a way that I’m not fascinated by slogans.  I can be totally distracted when I come up behind a car with a fish swallowing a fish with feet. 

In this case, I was fascinated enough that I went home and told my husband, who remarked, “Don’t you think that would be offensive to Jews?”

Well, duh.  However, I was intrigued enough to do a little research on the Web site for this woman’s church, which unsurprisingly had Zionist leanings.

Some time after that I started receiving e-mails from an organization called the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.  I’m not exactly sure how I ended up on that e-mail list.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t sign up for it.  The group was disturbingly like the woman’s necklace.  There were links in the e-mails to sermons by Rabbi Yecheil Eckstein.  One sermon claimed that Jesus’ calling the Pharisees names like “brood of vipers” was all in fun.  Jews often called their fellow Jews nasty names, all in the name of brotherhood, of course.

There was an “us” vs. “them” mentality, “us” being conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews.  “Them” being liberal Christians and Jews.  “They” were the ones who believed the first five books in the Bible were written by various authors.  “We” are the ones who know those books were written by Moses.  Please write your check to...

It was like Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union except without black hats, side-locks and a red heifer.

I wanted to be one of the “we” Eckstein referred to.  I wanted to be in that in-crowd who believed Moses existed and wasn’t the product of legend.  More than that, I wanted to be accepted by this rabbi, who seemed to validate my religious beliefs.  A shiksa during my dating years, I longed for emotional acceptance as well.

But only if it was sincere.  And not just to get me to write a check for whatever Israeli cause.  

I read a Jewish apologetic a couple years ago.  I’d never before realized how many hoops Christians had to jump through to conclude that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah.  Even something so basic as the virgin birth is the product of a mistranslation to Greek of a word that in the original Hebrew simply meant “young woman.”  The term Judeo-Christian is almost an oxymoron.

Still, I believe in God.  I’m not so sure about organized religion, though.   

A few months ago I was considering returning to church, after an almost three-year hiatus.  One night I dreamed I walked into a building I believed to be a church.  It didn’t look like a church on the outside.  On the inside, the building was gutted.  There was no furniture.  It was totally empty.  No crosses on the wall.  Not a soul inside.  

As a former charismatic, I place a lot of stock in dreams, maybe more than I should.  I saw the dream as a sign God was telling me not to go back to church, that there was nothing there worth returning to, which is why I’m writing this on Sunday morning. 

So much American religion and foreign policy is inspired less by Christ than by a book that’s rife with errors, by empty buildings we’re led to believe hold God, by religious symbols that make us feel good, even if they have no basis in reality.