Ken Guentert

I was born (1948) in South Bend, Indiana, and raised Catholic. My mother came from a “congregationalist” family but converted to Catholicism when she married my father. He was a cradle Catholic (though probably a Jew halakhically, I was later to learn). He, his father, and his brother all worked as printers at Ave Maria Press at the University of Notre Dame. Needless to say, I was born an Irish football fan as well.

The only public school I ever attended was nearby Perley—for kindergarten. After that, my schooling was all Catholic. Three different Catholic grade schools, Holy Cross Seminary (at Notre Dame, of course) for high school, Notre Dame itself for college (B.A., 1970), and Loyola University of Chicago for a Master‘s Degree in Urban Studies (1973).

After graduation from college, I began a career in journalism and publishing. My first job was as a staff writer at The New World, the archdiocesan newspaper of Chicago. Subsequently, I became an editor at U.S. Catholic, then opinion editor at the National Catholic Reporter, and later the editor-in-chief for Resource Publications, Inc., which mainly published materials for Catholic ministers.

Curiously, I had no consciousness at all of Torah until 1980—even though I had been a seminarian for six years and one of my Scripture teachers in college was Jesuit Father John MacKenzie, a renowned Old Testament scholar.

The spark came at a party where I met a fellow who had finished up all his coursework for a doctorate in Scripture at the University of Iowa. We got to talking religion, and he suggested that I view Scripture through a different filter than I had been using. “Instead of looking at Torah as a commentary on the gospel, look at the gospel as a commentary on Torah.” I don‘t remember, but I‘m sure he had to explain “Torah” for me. Anyway, all of a sudden the gospel stories took on a different color—they made much more sense. The hero was a Jew. (That much I had known.) He thought like a Jew. He ate kosher like a Jew. He knew Torah—written and oral—like a Jew. He made pilgrimages to Jerusalem like a Jew. And so on. It all started to make sense, and it was backed up by academic scholars like Geza Vermes and James Charlesworth, who had begun to put him into the context of Pharisaic Judaism.

For the next twelve years or so, I tried to integrate my Catholicism with Judaism. For a while, it seemed to work. I abstained from meat on the sixth day of the week; treated the seventh day of the week as a day of rest; and went to church on the first day of the week. I taught Catholic catechism to sixth graders and spent the whole year on Genesis and Exodus. My wedding, which I planned, was a m?lange of Catholic and Jewish elements. I became known—notorious, perhaps—in the parishes where I volunteered and the publishing company where I worked for my peculiar Jewish take on the Scripture. I even published a collection of my columns for Ministry & Liturgy, most of which put a Jewish spin on Christianity. As time went on, this point of view became more embedded in my psyche. I knew, fairly early in the process, that the historical figure hijacked by the gospel writers had no intention of founding a new religion and would have been offended if he knew his supposed followers were to do so in his name. Still, I hung on—because one doesn‘t leave the faith of his parents lightly—but the disconnect got more painful. I was especially uncomfortable in Catholic liturgy when we sat down for the Old Testament readings and stood up for the gospel readings. This seemed to turn Judaism upside down. (Today, to make amends, I usually stand for the entire Torah reading in beit k‘nesset.)

In the early 1990s, I came upon an article in The Jerusalem Post about Yirmeyahu Ben-David, a former Baptist minister who had grown out of Christianity, started a “messianic congregation,” and gave this up to convert, along with his wife, to Judaism through an Orthodox beit din while continuing to espouse his view that the Ribi of Nazareth could be considered the messiah with the constraints of Orthodox halakha.

I was thrilled. By then, I had become convinced that Ribi Yehoshua was the equivalent of an Orthodox Jew and that anyone who purported to follow him—as master teacher or messiah—had to turn away from the church and toward Torah. I began a long snail-mail correspondence with Mr. Ben David, asking many questions and getting answers, sometimes blunt ones. In the end, it obvious that I was going to have to “walk the talk” and separate myself from the church. I began checking out synagogues, one of which was Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, California, where I lived at the time.

I was at the time editor-in-chief at Resource Publication, Inc., but I was having trouble editing books and magazines focused on Catholic liturgy. My first step was to hire a well known Jesuit to replace me as editor of Ministry&Liturgy, the company‘s flagship magazine, but I continued to write my Jewish-oriented columns. One day, the new editor came into my office with one of my columns and said, “Ken, E*ster is the Christian Passover. If you claim to be a Christian, you must celebrate E*ster. If you claim to be a Jew, you must celebrate Passover. You do nobody any favors by confusing the two. You have to choose.”

This seemed harsh at the time, but rabbis had told me something similar—as did Mr. Ben-David—and the ultimatum reminded me of the directive in Devarim/Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth today to bear witness against you: I have placed life and death before you, blessing and curse; and you shall choose life …” I chose life. Almost immediately I gave up my column, quit attending Catholic services, and began praying regularly at Congregation Am Echad. That was toward the end of 1991.

By then I had immersed myself in the Netzarim Reconstruction of the Hebrew Matiytyahu, which Yirmeyahu Ben-David was just completing. This is a huge work, reconstructing the only biography of Ribi Yehoshua that the Netzarim recognize as legitimate. While the stories and teachings therein had a veneer of familiarity, NHM turned them upside down—or more accurately, right side up—and placed them squarely within the tradition of Torah Judaism. For me, the foundation of Christianity had broken. It no longer made any sense.

Never one to make a sudden decision, I waited until 1992 when I went to Israel with a Noachide group and could make a side trip to meet Yirmeyahu Ben-David. I asked a few more questions and asked if I could affiliate with the Netzarim as a geir toshav.

The transition has had its ups and downs. The early years were especially difficult because my wife was very unhappy with my transition. While she remains a Catholic, she has softened her resistance, grown in respect for what I‘m doing, and surprises me at times with her support (like her insistence that I get off the dime and finish my kosher kitchen), and her enthusiasm for explaining her husband‘s exotic practices to her friends. The ups mostly had to do with being able to associate with a remarkable Orthodox community, who were a great source of kiddush HaShem to me, and to learn from a brilliant rav, who every shabbat increased my appreciation for the jewel that is Torah.

In 2003, I finally separated myself from the financial security of Catholic publishing by buying a business in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which had the unfortunate side effect of taking me away from the wonderful Am Echad community. I have compensated with occasional forays to Denver for services, by studying more on my own, and by raising my level of kosher. It isn‘t easy, but it has always been rewarding.