by Zoë Pollock and Matthew Sitman
Joanna Brooks, a Mormon who married a Reform Jew, describes the perils of her church's easy appropriation of the Biblical stories of ancient Israel:
I hear Mormons describe ourselves as a “chosen people” who made an “exodus” (across the American plains) to build our “Zion.” In the American West, some Mormons even call non-Mormons “Gentiles.” And I now understand the hazards—big and small—that come with presuming too much familiarity between Mormons and Jews, hazards that reveal a disconnect in many LDS minds between Israelites as an abstract conception and the reality of contemporary Jewish life. The big hazards we witness every time posthumous LDS baptisms of dead Jews cycle back into the headlines. The small ones I observe whenever my husband sets foot into the world of my observant Mormon friends and relations.
She hopes that more Mormons will take a cue from contemporary Jewish people and acknowledge religious faith's complexity:
If some of my fellow Mormons don’t get contemporary Judaism—especially other-than-Orthodox ways of being Jewish—perhaps it is because we have yet to acknowledge other-than-orthodox ways of being ourselves. Through the framework of Mormon experience, early 21st-century Mormons have become accustomed to thinking of a religion as a monolithic institutional power rather than a multidimensional tradition, as a set of fixed truth claims rather than a set of evolving questions. Candid, self-aware, and critical examination of our own theology, history, and culture—that work is just beginning in Mormonism.
Check out Brooks' memoir of growing up Mormon here.
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