A Journey Into Faith

Hello, I'm Dick Foth, and I'd like to welcome you to known stories to make sense of it all. These stories are what I call walking books, real-life people, different places, different ages, different cultures, and I want to have some conversations with them across disciplines and generations and cultures in order to encourage a kind of knowing fresh lenses through which to see the world. One of those lenses will be Scripture, or more specifically, Jesus of Nazareth, whose life I believe changed the course of the history of the world. So thanks for listening in. Great to have you with us. You've heard me say this a lot of times on these podcasts, but life is a journey and it can become cliché-ish, but the truth is life is a journey. It's got its ups and downs and its sideways and hills and valleys and all of that. But one of the core questions in our journeys is, so where do we come from? Where do we come from geographically? Where do we come from? Ethically, religiously? Where do we come from? Philosophically or theologic? All of those points of reference are they inform our lives and they become lenses through which we see the rest of our lives. I took up the challenge last year and as I put it, spit in the tube and sent it off to find out my ethnic roots and I go all the way back to, at least they say, in my DNA, I go back to like the 1670s or whatever and I have great grandparents or great, great, great, great, great, panzerone. And one of them was a hundred percent finish. One of them was a hundred percent sardinian that island in the Med and one of them was a hundred percent Native American. I didn't know all of that. So I have those kinds of DNA roots but I have other kinds of roots. I have roots that reflect where I was born and brought up in East Oakland, California, for example, or a stint in India with parents when I was young. This particular conversation we're going to have today talks about one man's trajectory of faith throughout his life to this point. You know I have a bias. When we talk about stories that make sense of it all, I lock my story into this Jewish person. His name is Jesus of Nazareth. Most of many of my heroes, maybe not most, are Jewish people, you know, Abraham and Moses and David and Jesus of Nazareth and Paul the Apostle and it isn't because all of them were perfect. Jesus, I believe, was perfect. But the rest of them were flawed like I am. And when I read their stories and scripture, I find myself in a lot of places. This particular conversation has to do with a young Jewish man in my sense because I appreciate Jesus of Nazareth who was Jewish. I see him as cutting across all ethnicities and all religious structures and all political systems sort of being supra, being above that. And that's how I see it. But let me share this conversation to show you how my friend Steve Kat sees it. We're sitting in a cabin in the Hill country of Texas outside Austin. Good morning, Steve. Hi, Dick. Hey, tell our listeners where you from originally. Who are you? Give us a little bit of Steve and I'll jump in along the way. Sure. I am from the Chicago area, lived in the suburbs, Skokie and Waukegan and from a Jewish home went to a conservative synagogue. If that means anything to. What does that mean? It's kind of the middle of the road Judaism. In other words, we're not too modern and not too traditional. We try to grab from both worlds. And so when everybody else was playing softball after school, I had to go to Hebrew school, which was not too fun, but got through it. You know, had a bar mitzvah at the age of 13 and had three kids in my family. My dad's side was pretty orthodox. I was close with that grandmother. My mom's side was very liberal. I went and married my wife who's not Jewish. We went there for breakfast one morning and my grandfather wanted to give Laura my wife a little lesson on Jewish culture. And this was so funny. We sat down and he said, no, Laura, you know, I want to tell you some about what it means to be Jewish and how we live. And he says, we Jews don't eat pork, only bacon. And it was so funny, Laura, and I looked at each other. But you know, it was it was a generally a happy family, good family. My grandmother, my orthodox grandmother died when I was about 17. I started thinking about life and death. So I just I started thinking a lot about life. I got into Bob Dylan. You know, I was thinking, why are we here? What is life? What is death? Is it make a lot of money? Go get drunk at parties? I mean, why are we here? What what gives it meaning? And at that time, Bob Dylan was the man. Bob Dylan the singer. Yeah, it's interesting. I wasn't in the first wave of, you know, I'm too young to have been into all Dylan and the first go around. But somehow I I discovered him. I think I heard maybe his concert at Bangladesh or so. I don't know what it was. Well, this was around 74. Seven. I mean, probably a year before that I started discovering him. And I thought, this guy is I resonate with this. He's he's he's saying it. He's real. He's not pulling any punches. I'm going to be Bob Dylan. Okay. Yeah. And so I taught myself guitar and harmonica and probably a few other instruments stole a few of them from the music shop where I got a job. But yeah, I was going to jump a box car and change my name. But instead of hopping on a box car and changing his name, Steve kept his name and drove to the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana. He went there with a fascinating goal to start studying and then quit. What's that about? Planning to quit before I got there. I thought I needed to go and then quit. That's what he had done in Minnesota. But yeah, I went up at the University of Illinois and wasn't too into school. I had a Jewish professor for a rhetoric course and I remember one day he gave us a Charlie Brown cartoon and wanted us to extemporaneously just kind of analyze what was the message of this cartoon. And I was pretty not into it. And so I was kind of I don't know if you remember James Joyce and you wrote a stream of consciousness. No punctuation, no grammar. Just kind of let your thoughts flow. So I wrote in that style and I was real critical of him and I was just all over the map. And he gave me my paper with lots of lots of four letter words and said get out of here and you don't want to be here and flunked me on that. And so he assigned us a major research paper and met with a few of us in his office. It was going to be probably 80% of our grade. And he says, you know, some Mr. Katz, how you doing on your paper? I said and he knew we'd buy that. I had a long hair. I had a beard and I said, you know, I I've been chosen a subject and you knew I didn't care. So he said, all right, just sit there wait your turn and he starts talking to a few other students. And it was at that point I get this literally was a crazy thought and it came out of nowhere. I thought now I know it came from somewhere. But I interrupted him. I said, hey, I got an idea. I know what I'm going to write on. I'm going to write on why the Jews at the time of Jesus didn't leave you with the Messiah. And he said, okay, wait your turn. But he came back around and I think the other guys left and he said, well, you know, you've got to see what were they expecting. Why didn't they think Jesus fit that portrait? He says, now I've looked into that myself. So let me warn you, I'll be more critical on your paper than the rest. I didn't have a Bible but I had to see that was the source. So I actually stole my first Bible. Well, there you go. Yeah. Why not? Why not? I didn't I took it from a hotel. I didn't know these guys name Gideon's. Gideon's want you to steal that. That's right. Yeah, they planted it there. You know, they so I took one and boy, I did I get into that paper. I was reading books by Jews and Christians and secular historians and I just had a lot of questions. So that's when that that brought us to me. I made appointments with two rabbis and two Christian pastors. The reason I looked you up, my girlfriend at the time, her brother Joel was the bus driver for a music team who had sung at your church and he told my girlfriend who had turned her back on faith and her family and we got together at that point. She was safe with this Jewish boyfriend. But he told her, Laura, if you ever need help or any kind of advice or whatever, I met this pastor. He's a good guy. You know, look him up. So when I wanted to interview people, Laura said to me, well, my brother mentioned this one guy. Why don't you call him as one of the pastors? I never knew that. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah. If they had sung at the church, I guess. So I called you, made this appointment, as well as, you know, the other day guys I had met them too. All four of you tried to be helpful, but you were the only one who really was to be honest. Now let me just pause the conversation right there and say this that some things in life make us a bit more uncomfortable than others. And this next segment is going to sound a bit self-servingly and I'm only leaving it in because it's his story. It's Steve's perception. I hadn't talked to Steve in many years and when I heard him start talking about this, I was touched because you never know, do you, how what you say or how you act might affect positively or negatively, someone else. I'm sure that I've done a lot of things in my life that are negatives for other people. This one happened to be a positive and in spite of my embarrassment, I'm going to let you hear it. And your first question, I think, or right in the beginning as I was coming in, he says, you said, you know, do you want to ask me these questions for your paper or for Stephen Katz or Steve Katz? And I got honest with you, I said both and I think maybe that tipped you off, you had a live one, I don't know, but yeah, it had become a real search and I was getting really intrigued by what I was discovering because in my house, Jesus didn't exist. When my mother said Jesus Christ, you knew it was time, yeah, you knew, but get out of the room because she was mad. That's the only time I heard his name. So your journey of faith or into faith, yeah, and sort of began in those in those days before, the whole Dylan thing, yeah, what's the meaning of life? Yeah, what counts? Yeah. And and I don't know how all of that works. Right. I don't know God's ways that well, but he broke into my world. He, I guess, no, you know, whatever he does his thing. Yeah. And that thought that came into my mind for the subject of the paper was actually in my life, I consider that to be really a supernatural moment. I do. Well, yeah. So later on then, a few months later, some months later, you decided you thought Jesus was Messiah? Yeah, that about nine months later, something like that. And I mean, there's a whole lot of details between point A and point B, but I wound up receiving him as my Messiah, my Lord, my Savior. Yeah. And you were seeing this thing last night when we were talking about you were baptized and then yeah, yeah. So well, okay, that's about that. Sure. So I became a believer in Jesus received him in May, the end of the month of May. And thanks had been rocky with my folks. I wasn't very express. So I was withdrawing. I was cynical. I was not a nice guy. So I figured, let me, let me see if they notice if Jesus makes any difference in my life. So I went, I was living away from home, but I would call them that summer. I love you. I was communicating with them and they're, they definitely noticed. So I went home for my birthday in September. I told them on my faith. That's a whole other story. How that went. It was, it was pretty tough. You know, they thought I was brainwashed. They thought I was trying to avoid anti-semitism, all kinds of things. But then I chose to get baptized after I want to tell them first. So I'll go back down to Champaign Urbana. And I don't remember October, November by then. And I got baptized. Oh, it must have been October. Wouldn't have been as ladies number because the high holidays, Jewish high holidays were rolling around. So I get baptized on Colnidre. It's Aeroviom Kippur. That is when the day of Atonement starts in the evening, the night before, like all Jewish holidays. So and that's called Colnidre. Colnidre, which means all vows. It's the name of a prayer, a very beautiful melody. It's a prayer that's chanted. And actually, it's a kind of a renunciation of vows. And in some streams of Judaism, they think that it's almost for those that were forced to convert to Christianity in the Middle Ages. They could say this prayer and kind of come back. And it would all be undone, like they didn't mean it. But it probably means other things as well. So there's a little bit of irony there. Ambiguity. Ambiguity. So I stood up. I remember the night I was baptized. And you baptized me. But you gave us each a chance to say a couple words to the congregation. And I said, tonight, my family, all over, they're all in services for Colnidre, for Yom Kippur. And if they take it at all seriously, they're looking to God to forgive them for their sins. And I'm standing here tonight because I know in Jesus, the Messiah, my sins are forgiven. I had that certainty. And so anyway, so I get baptized, tall dry my hair for a second, and race across town to the Jewish service, the Colnidre service, because that's just what I do. That's who I was. And I was learning, well, I don't know what it means to be a Jewish guy who believes in Jesus, but this is, I guess, how I work it out. Why not? Yeah. Wow. So what if just in wrapping this up, Steve, you're, you're married, you have three children, all adults, four children. Yeah. All adults. Yeah. Pretty much. Pretty much. Out of good day. Yeah. And looking back over the last 43 years since we met, which that's a long time. I know. But just in terms of takeaways from what you have discovered about yourself and about God over those years, just, just, you know, it doesn't have to be 17 things. Just maybe one or two things that, that, that continue to move you. Thoughts. Yeah. This, this can be stream of consciousness without commas. Okay. Go for it. It'll be the stream of consciousness as well. One thing is I sometimes feel like God's grace is like water. And then I swim in it because I just know how, I just know how I mess up and how I'm just so human and I'm not some holy man. And I visualize it like it's like it's water. Okay. And I just live in it. Yeah. So I, you know, I'm so grateful for God is so much bigger than I can envision him. Yeah. And I, I, you know, I just, I've seen things that could be called miracles, I suppose, but a lot of times I've seen times where I wish there was one and there wasn't one. And I've, you know, there'd been a lot of, it's not an easy walk, but it's a, it's a fulfilling, it's, it's, it's answered my deepest questions. My faith, I was looking for meaning in life. And he showed me meaning in life. And it's, you know, it's loving him. It's loving people. I remember the conversation with you. I don't remember the parts. Right. You remember the parts. Yeah. But to sit with you 43 years after the fact and say, what a, what a delightful thing. These, these, like an airplane touching and going when they're practicing that to have a touch and go moment that counts for now and for the long haul is so wonderful to reflect on. And I'm grateful for you. Well, thank you. I'd still like to be here with you. Yeah, this is great. Thank you, Steve. All right. You too. Bye-bye. So there you have it. One man's journey, one man's journey of faith. And the roots that he comes from are unique. All of us are rooted uniquely, whether it's our ethnicity, our political fabric, our religious or theological constructs, the geography from which we come, the size of the family and the kind of family, whether it's whole or broken or fractious, whatever. It all shapes how we see ourselves. And that's really the question of this podcast today. Where do I find the essence of my identity? Steve and I have found ours in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, this Jewish carpenter cumrabi executed by the state 2,000 years ago, but who still lives in our hearts, if you will. But my question for you, as we end this time, is so who are you? I had the privilege of speaking to a faculty group a few weeks back up in the northwest. It was a university that's faith-based and I said, I have a question for you and I have a statement for you. And my question was, so who are you? And the statement was, I believe this school year you individually will be answers to some students prayer. That's what I believe. There is something about having our identity rooted beyond us, beyond this world, that gives a range and a reach and a power that is like no other. Steve Katz found that out, sitting in the office of a rhetoric professor at the University of Illinois when he decided on a topic for a paper. I think that's a unique way to start authenticating one's identity, but all of us can have similar stories. So thank you for listening. It's been a great time with you. See you.