April Webinar Q&A and Resources
If you missed the April Webinar on "The Prophetic Witness of a Jewish Priest: The Life of Fr. Alexander Men," you can now watch it on our website or our youtube channel.
There is never enough time for Q&A, so we are providing additional interaction with our April panelist below. We also want to provide you with two resources to complement our webinar about Father Alexander:
Question: Michael, how do leaders/bishops in the Orthodox Church relate to Jews like yourself who are part of their Church? Are you accepted for who you are?
Fr. Michael Meerson:
It is well known that the Orthodox church is basically an ethnic church, immersed with ethnic national cultures & history. But each nation has its Jews, and they are welcome in as much as they play down their Jewishness. But I was ordained and belong to the Orthodox Church in America, a self-governing church that is not dependent on the Orthodox church's oversight. It gathers many converts from various backgrounds so that the ethnic factor becomes less important. Bishops may like it or not, but they also depend on church growth, so everyone is welcome. Moreover, the church inevitably shares the features of our society with its pluralism and toleration of otherness, as well as the basic congregational character. Therefore, a lot depends on a particular congregation. I have been serving mine for 43 years, totally new people joined it including quite a few Jews. The congregation is small but rather intelligent, and praying together makes one family. When Jews pray with non-Jews, antisemitic feelings, if they were there, melt away. Also in the presence of one's Jewish brothers, who pray along, one feels uneasy to use antisemitic passages from the old Byzantine time liturgical texts. My wife (philologist and a choir director) together with our deacon (both are Jewish on both sides) edited completely the services of the Holy Week, notorious for their anti-Jewish remarks, cleaning all of them out. We serve these edited services for years. They in our usage became known via the Internet, and four Orthodox priests, two from Russia and two from Ukraine, asked my wife to share these edited texts with them. Now, they also perform the Holy Week services following these edited texts. As you can see, it takes time and effort, and obviously active participation of Jews as Jews in church life, to clear out, albeit slowly, the antisemitic component of Christian worship.