Friday night, I felt very conspicuous. Walking home from the library, I was stopped at a streetcorner by a Don't Walk sign. Next to me stood a trio of girls, all sporting knee-length black skirts, black tights, and shiny black loafers with heels, all with broad smiles, sparkling earrings, and shiny dark hair styled in sophisticated coiffures. That I was decked out in a wrinkled flannel shirt and my hair was knotted carelessly at the back of my neck didn't bother me. I felt conspicuous because I was carrying a purse.

Usually, carrying a purse isn't noteworthy. The streets of Manhattan, after all, are filled with many purse-carrying twenty-somethings. But on Friday nights, in my neighborhood, many women don't carry purses, because many women in my neighborhood are Orthodox Jews. Jews are bound by laws called muktze, laws that govern what you can and cannot carry on the Sabbath. You can carry anything you are allowed to use; a spoon, a shirt, a popsicle, a book, a ribbon. But you cannot carry a candle, or a vial of ink, or a dollar bill, or car keys, or a pen, or scissors, since writing, spending, driving, kindling a flame, and cutting are all activities forbidden on Shabbat. And there is another caveat. You cannot carry anything, even a spoon, from a place that's private to a place that's public. You cannot carry a spoon from your house to synagogue, or back again, or even from your kitchen to the kitchen of your next-door neighbor. Only around your living room, into your breakfast nook, into the bathroom, into the den, but not out onto the street.

I knew the three women on the street corner were Orthodox Jews not only because they were purse-less. There were other clues, clues that told me not just that they were Orthodox, but where they fit on the spectrum of Orthodoxy, a spectrum that runs from exactingly strict to daringly lax. These girls were the latter. Their skirts just barely crested the bottoms of their kneecaps, meeting the strict modesty code, but still remaining stylish. Despite some rabbis' opinions that putting on make-up during the Sabbath is forbidden, these three were all wearing fresh, dark lipstick. Their shortish skirt-lengths and their puckered pouts told me these women were In The Fold, but liked to push at the boundaries. They would earn frowns of disapproval in synagogue the next morning from their stricter co-religionists, whose ankles would be covered by long dresses and whose faces would be washed clean.

Most New Yorkers don't recognize all these clues. Sartorial subtleties like skirt length are things only an insider would know. But then, I was an insider. Last time I lived in this neighborhood, two years ago, I was an Orthodox Jew. Then came twenty months in England. When I moved back to Morningside Heights, it was as a Christian. I was changed, but the neighborhood wasn't. Everyone I knew in college was an Orthodox Jew, save for a friend from Maine, a friend from Alabama, and a professor or two. Maine had moved to Brooklyn and Alabama to Tennessee, but my Orthodox friends were still in the neighborhood. They still prayed three times a day, waited six hours between eating meat and milk, and danced whirling, drunken, sex-segregated dances at their weddings.

As it happened, I did not know the trio on the corner. I would guess they are sophomores who came to Columbia after I left. They did not have any idea, as we stood waiting for the light to change, that I knew they were probably heading to East Campus, the dorm where the coolest members of Columbia's Orthodox community gather late on Friday nights, after redolent Shabbat dinners, to drink soda and wine and eat Stella Doro cookies and sing Shabbat songs. We crossed campus together, and, without thinking, I began to hum a Sabbath tune. One girl turned around and stared.

I was not baptized until I moved to England, but Jesus had been tugging at my long, modest skirts well before that. As a teenager, I had been fascinated with Christianity, and my freshman year of college I signed up for a New Testament class and sat for hours in the medieval art room of the Metropolitan Museum. What kept me interested in Christianity was something very basic: the idea that God lowered himself and became a man so that we could relate to him better. In Christianity, God got to be both distant and transcendent (the Father part), and present and eminent (the Son part --I wasn't so clear on the Ghost). Christians, unlike Jews, spent their time talking to a God who knew what it was like to get hungry, to go swimming, to be tempted.

It was the logical culmination of anthropomorphism--of assigning God human characteristics. All through the Torah, God is pictured as having hands, a face. The rabbis say, of course God doesn't really have a hand, but the Torah uses the language of faces and hands and eyes so that we will have an easier time wrapping our minds around this infinite, handless God. That God would then become an actual man to help us understand him even more appealed to both the novel-reader in me and the theologian in me.

Though the idea of God-made-man was fascinating, I didn't believe it was true. The rabbis had said the Messiah would do certain things, Jesus hadn't accomplished them, and that was that. But gradually Jesus wormed his way into my life, never mind what the rabbis said. In the middle of college, I had a dream and woke up convinced the dream had come from God and the dream was about Jesus. The summer before my senior year I read a novel about evangelical Episcopalians--and then re-read it, and re-read it again, three times in a single week--and felt sure I wanted what those fictional characters had. Also, I felt sure that in that dream, as in the fascination with medieval Christian art, God had been telling me where to find it.

The Christians I knew, though, didn't seem to agree. After returning to campus after that novel-reading week, I attended a lecture where an Episcopal priest told the audience that Jesus was our cultural expression of the divine truth that all people lust after, just as Kali was the Hindus' cultural expression. During the Q&A, I raised my hand. "Probably I missed something," I said, "but if Jesus is just our cultural expression of a universal divine impulse, why do we say the creed?" The creed, explained the priest, is our culture's vocabulary for giving voice to divinity.

I called a Presbyterian minister I had known, casually, since I had been a freshman. We met at a local pastry shop and I drank cider that scalded my tongue as I told him I thought I was beginning to believe in Jesus. Scott's response was that I was Jewish, and I should stay Jewish. "You can't just divorce Judaism," he said, urging me to make an appointment with the campus rabbi. Later Scott said to me, "I had no idea when you told me you wanted to get together that you wanted to talk about Christianity. I thought maybe you were going to come out to me as a lesbian"-- a coming out that, in this era of identity politics, probably would have been more acceptable to him than a Jewish student talking about Jesus Christ.

It took God sending me to England before I found a community of Christians who actually believed anything. Just as well: I don't think I had the personal fortitude to do anything more than flirt with Christianity in this neighborhood where my entire identity was bound up in Orthodox Judaism. It has been trying enough to move back, Christian identity established, and explain to people who knew me in that earlier dispensation why I'm in class on Rosh Hashana, why I wear sleeveless tops, why I eat at non-kosher restaurants, and why a small silver cross hangs around my neck. Even my professors, understandably, look uncomfortable, and weakly hazard "Didn't you used to date a guy who wore a yarmukle?'"

But I have found that Jews are not the only ones who ask questions. Scads of my evangelical acquaintances have said to me, "Don't you regret all that time you spent studying the Talmud? All those hours poured into making sure your kitchen was kosher? All the teeth you broke trying to master Biblical Hebrew?"

The professors' questions are much more reasonable than the Christians' questions. To put it plainly: no, I don't regret a minute spent over the Talmud, piecing together rabbinic minutiae about dietary laws; nor do I regret the time spent implementing those laws in my kitchen.

Scott spoke with prescience when he said I couldn't divorce Judaism. The first time I ate non-kosher food my senior year of college--it was a bowl of clam chowder--I felt like I was filing for divorce. It was the only metaphor that I could come up with. Once I entered the church, I fled from all things Jewish. I traded my Hebrew siddur for a Book of Common Prayer and sold all my Jewish texts to a used bookstore in Chapel Hill, donated my havdalah set and one of my tallisim to a synagogue. I gorged on lobster and drank the driest, most expensive bottles of Amarone I could find. The only Jewish habit I couldn't give up was baking challah, which I kept at every Friday, two, misshapen braided loaves, made with whole-wheat flour from the recipe my friend Latifa taught me when I was 13.

But Scott was right; I couldn't divorce. I am as bound to Judaism as my parents are to one another. They aren't married anymore, but they have two daughters together, so they still talk, still see each other at graduations and weddings, still see the other's eyes and nose in their daughters' faces. I find myself forgetting the rabbis' words, and needing them, so I am reconstituting my library, and trying to put myself back together. Judaism has conditioned everything. It has conditioned how I read Scripture, and how I pray, and who I think Jesus is.

This is not to say that my understanding of Jesus and my reading of the Bible is somehow better than those Christians who don't know the first thing about Judaism. But I do think the church could stand to learn a few things from Judaism--starting, perhaps, with a deep knowledge of the Torah. I would go so far as to say we have a lot to learn from some of the rabbinic commentary on the Torah, too, but I'd settle for a sermon every now and again that acknowledged the Bible doesn't start with Matthew.

Or consider the Sabbath. I would never advocate Christians embrace the curious and confining laws of muktze: Jesus knew whereof he spoke when he talked about the burden of the law. But for all its legalism, the Jewish Sabbath--a time utterly set apart from the six days of work that precede it--seems more in line with what God meant when he told us to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy than dashing from church to the mall. Or to a soccer game. Or to a conference call. And Christians in non-Christian universities--or at least the Christians at my university, starting with me--have something to learn form the Orthodox Jews at Columbia. Within days of my freshman orientation, all my professors, hallmates, and fellow middle-school tutors knew I was an Orthodox Jew, because of the skirt and the dietary restrictions if nothing else. I wonder, with some shame, how many of my fellow first-year grad students know that I am a Christian.