The words of Elie Wiesel still echoed in my brain: "Jesus was born a Jew, and he died a Jew."

Born a Catholic and still a Catholic, I embraced this message with a revolutionary fervor. Only by confronting the Jewishness of Jesus would I find a resting place along the path of my spiritual journey.

Peace of mind came in the person of Charles Hirsch, a psychiatrist from St. Petersburg, Fla. A mutual friend introduced us, and what followed were several conversations, dinners, and interviews about the bonds between Christians and Jews.

Charlie is a charmingly eccentric Jewish doctor. He carries medical instruments in a bag that looks a hundred years old. During one interview, he wore a striped tie over a blue denim shirt decorated with Looney Tunes characters.

However whimsical the shirt, Charlie practices psychiatry with great seriousness and high moral purpose. He works hard to protect the privacy of patients and respects their dignity. He never misses a chance to express his deep and abiding love for his wife and son.

I was intrigued by a comment he made one day about the Jewishness of Jesus. He put it in a therapeutic context, something like: "A number of my Christian friends have benefited from seeing Jesus in the light of Jewish history and teaching."

I shared some of my favorite books with him, and he returned the favor by giving me a text entitled Sayings of the Fathers. Written in Hebrew, with English translation and commentary, the pages read from right to left. Rather than think of the book as "backward," I took the unusual structure as a symbolic invitation. To understand Jesus in a new way, I would go back in time, (from right to left, if you will) to review what I had learned about the man Christians worship as the Son of God.

My training in Catholic religious studies ranged over 16 years of parochial education and another four of graduate work on the literature and culture of Medieval Christianity. Rarely, in all these years, was I asked to consider the Jewishness of Jesus.

I learned, instead, how the teachings of Jesus "transcended" the Jewish tradition, how Jesus fulfilled "the Old Law" and "replaced it with a New Law." From an early age, I came to see Jewish law as negative and rigid, filled with the "thou shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments.

Hollywood's Biblical epics of the 1950s and '60s reinforced the idea that Yahweh was a wrathful and vengeful God. While Jesus taught the Golden Rule, the moral teaching of the Jews boiled down to "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

Our teachers pointed to the stories of the New Testament to show how the teachings of Jesus stood above Jewish tradition: Love your enemies. Be good to those who hate you. Pray for those who persecute you. Love your neighbor as yourself.

I carried this vision of Christian and Jewish law to my reading of Sayings of the Fathers, the moral and religious teachings of the rabbis who lived in the centuries immediately before and after the beginning of the Christian era. I found it impossible to come away from the lessons of these teachers without thinking of Jesus as one of them.

"The world at large is unaware of the fact that the sublime maxim of morality, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself' was first taught by Judaism," wrote Joseph Hertz, chief rabbi of the British Empire, at the end of World War II. "Not only is it Jewish in origin, but, long before the rise of Christianity, Israel's religious leaders quoted it, either verbally or in paraphrase, as expressing the essence of the moral life."

I rushed to the copy of the Catholic Bible I had used for college study, and there it was, right where Rabbi Hertz said it would be, in the Book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18: "You shall not bear hatred for your brother in your heart. Though you may have to reprove your fellow man, do not incur sin because of him. Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your fellow countrymen. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord."

In my reading, I discovered the many ways in which Jewish teachers, over the centuries, expressed the Golden Rule:

"Honor thy neighbor as thyself."

"A man should not do to his neighbor what he does not desire for himself."

"Whatever is hateful to thee, do it not unto thy fellow."

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself is a fundamental rule of the Torah."

"All men are created in the divine image, and, therefore, all are our fellow men, and entitled to human love."

So whatever else I may believe about Jesus, I saw him now with new eyes as a rabbi teaching in the Jewish moral and cultural tradition. His circumcision and naming (literally Joshua) initiated him into the Jewish faith. As a child, he studied in the Temple. As a rabbi, he taught there. On the day before his death, he celebrated, with his closest friends, the feast of Passover. On the cross, he prayed from the Psalms: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

And still, over the centuries, and to this time, Jews have been persecuted in the name of Jesus.

Such contemplations culminated in 1994 with an invitation from Charlie Hirsch to join his family for a Seder supper to celebrate Passover. My wife Karen and I gladly accepted. We have celebrated Passover each year since then, partaking of the unleavened bread, eating bitter herbs and lifting glasses of sweet wine. We pray for justice and peace. We remember victims of the Holocaust. We sing songs in a language we don't understand. And we open the door for the prophet Elijah.

At such moments, I look down at my grandmother's wedding ring on my left hand. Twice since my marriage 25 years ago, I've asked a jeweler to polish the golden circle. The act brings back its luster and reminds me of my own marriage vows, but also of the formative power of family.

I take the ring off so infrequently that, when I do, the finger itself reveals a pale indentation, Sadie's lasting mark.

Some people said Grandma Sadie looked a little like Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. She is about 50 years old here, and she is holding her first grandchild, me. You can see my little paw in the lower left corner. It is odd to think I am writing this at the ago of 50, near the 100th anniversary of Sadie's birth.

At special moments, she appears to me in dreams. She speaks directly to me in a tender manner, sometimes laughing. When I awake, I never remember her exact words, or even the content of the message. But I am still, somehow, reassured. My faith in God feels renewed, if only for a moment. I feel stronger ties to my family, living and dead. I feel a bit patriotic. I feel the need to read another book, or to write another one, because learning was so important to her.

Sometimes, my responses are more down to earth. I'll eat a toasted bagel for breakfast, so maybe I won't be so skinny. Or I'll use a swear word in honor of her salty speech. Or maybe, for no apparent reason, I'll whistle "Stars and Stripes Forever," her favorite song.

I imagine Sadie and Jesus in heaven, chatting like cousins. She is, no doubt, stretching the truth about the accomplishments of her children and grandchildren. Or maybe she is sitting with Mary, the mother of Jesus, for surely the two of them would get along.