My late partner Lenny was in some sense a quintessentially lapsed Jew. He did not keep kosher, he didn’t formally observe a lot of holidays, and he was an atheist. (rather the quintessence of “lapsed.”)

But in a phenomenon a lot of Christians find puzzling, he continued to attend synagogue. He wasn’t “faithful,” but he went often enough for it to be a regular part of his life, and he took me with him after we got together.

He was a gregarious man and popular in the congregation, one reason being that his Yiddish was fluent, which made him something of a cherished resource in a community where the language was dying out. (His Hebrew on the other hand … let’s just say he didn’t make it to his bar mitzvah.)

All that to say that I became friends with plenty of observant Jews, including rabbis and cantors, and had the opportunity to take part in many theological and spiritual conversations.

As an ex-Evangelical, I was floored by what I heard. Judaism seemed to bear little resemblance to what I had learned about in church, even though my various Evangelical congregations had considered themselves quite pro-Jewish in that special Evangelical sense that has a lot to do with eschatology.

The practice of anonymous charity was just one thing I loved so much about what I was learning. It didn’t take me long to learn that entire Jewish organizations exist to lift people out of poverty, and they don’t care if the people they are helping are Jewish. They have no desire to convert anyone, evangelism not being an element of Judaism.

Instead, charity is a spiritual gift, and as more than one rabbi has told me, one doesn’t have to be Jewish or even believe in God to practice charity for spiritual fulfillment.