The bridge between Christianity and Judaism starts in Korea

Wearing her cap and gown, Xinai Kim received her doctoral degree several weeks ago in an impressive ceremony at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. She was so excited, and so different from the other 259 new doctors. Xinai, 43, an observant Christian from South Korea, decided to get her doctorate in Bible studies, of all things. In Israel, of all places.

“I fell in love with Israel and I read the Bible — studied it and learned from it — and found so much depth, so much insight,” she says, her eyes twinkling. “I came to Israel for the first time almost 20 years ago, I was a volunteer at a kibbutz and a university student. I was amazed by the country’s beauty, mainly. I learned Hebrew at ulpan. I truly thank God that I came here.”

“True, I believe in God and in Christ, but more than anything I want to serve as a bridge between Christianity and Judaism,” she says.

We meet at Bar-Ilan University. Xinai displays the kind of decorum and manners that are obviously transplanted from elsewhere. When she realizes that she will be a few minutes late to our meeting, she takes the time to text me and notify me. Her looks give her away immediately, which only makes her fluent Hebrew all the more remarkable. The way she talks is fluid, clear and intelligible. There is not a hint of arrogance or boastfulness about her. On the contrary, she gives the impression that she is slightly embarrassed to be talking about herself as a newly named Ph.D.

“I was very excited during the ceremony. I giggled a lot,” she says. “I was so elated. Quite a few of my acquaintances came to the ceremony, from South Korea and from Israel. I was enormously proud to be standing there with the other Ph.D. recipients.”

She was born in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. “My mother could not get pregnant, and my parents obviously became very concerned. They prayed and read the Bible — the New Testament — and their church constantly prayed for them. My father was an officer in the South Korean army and my mother was mainly at home. After five long, exhausting years, it finally happened. They were really happy when they managed to conceive, and I was born.”

“Even as a little girl, my father always put me on his knees and read to me from the Bible and the New Testament. That is how I was raised. I absorbed it at home,” Xinai says. When she was 5 years old, her sister was born. The two sisters are very close, to this day.

“We grew up together, and sadly we experienced a great tragedy as little girls. I was 9 and my sister was only 4 when our father died suddenly as a result of high blood pressure. Our mother, Honzu, was left alone with us. She was only 34 years old, with two little daughters. She did everything to raise us properly, so that we would have as much as possible and so that there would be joy in the house despite the tragedy and the great loss of our father. We talked about our father as though he was alive. He was very present in our lives.”

After completing high school, Xinai earned a bachelor’s degree in Christian education. Then, 19 years ago, when she was 24, her romance with Israel began. She volunteered to work at Kibbutz Kfar Haruv in the north and was placed in the kibbutz’s laundry department. “I folded and laundered the clothes of all the kibbutz members. I did everything that was required in the laundry department. I stood out in the crowd at the kibbutz. It was the first time an Asian person came to volunteer there,” she says with a smile.

She fondly recalls her days in the kibbutz. “They treated me wonderfully, with true kindness. My boss at the laundry really liked me and she invited me to her house. I encountered a completely different way of life of sharing and mutual support. I was shocked at how beautiful the kibbutz was, and how beautiful Israel was and how warm and loving the people here were.”

Xinai recalls, “I knew about Israel only from the Bible, and suddenly I met the land itself, the earth, and all the power it holds. I was extremely intrigued and wanted to learn about the Jewish people, their suffering, and their relationship with Christianity.

“I loved my time as a volunteer at the kibbutz. I read the Bible — I started with Genesis and read through to Isaiah and Ezekiel. I felt that in this way I was able to connect with Israel and the kibbutz and with Judaism. Unfortunately, I had to return to Seoul after several months because I wanted to continue my studies in Christian education.”

Then, 16 years ago, the big change arrived, accompanied with profound sadness that came all at once. “My mother was diagnosed with cancer. It turned my world upside down. I entered a time of sadness and great tension. I prayed for her to be healthy all the time and begged God to cure my mother. ‘Don’t take her from us too’ I pleaded. Days and nights I talked to God. I never stopped asking God to give us a miracle.”

Sadly, her prayers went unanswered. “A year after she was diagnosed, my mother, whom I loved so much, who raised my sister and I on her own with every bit of strength she had, died of cancer. Her death took me on a journey of deep, torturous introspection. I asked myself whether there really was a God, and I questioned my faith in God. After all, I no longer had a father or a mother. We trusted God all those years, so why didn’t he cure my mother? I descended into dark thoughts about my faith. I was mainly angry at life and at my great loss in life and my grief. I worked at a church in Seoul and I went to the priest and told him I wasn’t sure of my faith. I needed air and freedom. I needed to do something different in life.”

The church saw Xinai’s distress and granted her special leave for six months. That is how she found herself back in Israel. “I thought to myself, where should I go? Where will I find some peace in this life? I realized that only in Israel would I find some tranquility. I will be with myself, in front of God. It would be my time to be alone in front of him. I had a lot of questions, and one main one: Why did you take my mother?”

Once in Israel, Xinai rented an apartment in Jerusalem. “It was winter time. It was cold and very dark, and it was also very scary. I was alone, a foreigner in a foreign land, I didn’t speak the language, had no family or friends. There were times when I spent entire nights crying. I felt lonely, but I also felt God’s embrace. I felt that he was with me; that I hadn’t come here for nothing. I felt that there was something very special in store for me in Israel.”

She recounts that with time, she began to get to know people. “It was also through the ‘Jerusalem Assembly House of Redemption’ in the city. It is a group of believers from all faiths who believe in the Bible and in the New Testament and in Jesus whom God sent as a messiah. I even randomly met people from South Korea who were in Jerusalem.”

One cold winter day, she says, she was standing alone at a bus stop, crying and missing her mother. The rain fell hard and she felt the loss and the grief with a profound intensity. “Suddenly, as though God sent him to me, a man approached me and started talking to me. It turned out that he was also from South Korea. We became friends, and he invited me over to his house in Jerusalem for some hot soup. Other people whom I met in all kinds of places, at the university too, gave me another space heater and mainly warmed my heart. I also met the Korean priest of the Jerusalem Assembly House of Redemption, whom I befriended. I helped me a lot here.”

After six months, Xinai returned to Korea, but in her heart she wanted to stay in Israel and study Bible. Then, 14 years ago, she decided to return for a third time. She rented an apartment in Jerusalem again and received a scholarship to attend a master’s program in Judaism at Hebrew University. At the same time she learned Hebrew at an ulpan in town. (“Wow! It wasn’t easy to learn Hebrew. But I felt that it connected me to the people here, to the culture, to Israelis.”)

Xinai made quite a few friends, mainly at the university. “There were a few other Korean students with me, as well as from other places in the world. It created a bond and a closeness between us and we would spend time together even after classes were over. It was very important to me. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone and lonely but surrounded by friends.”

About eight years ago, Xinai completed her master’s degree in Judaism, but she really wanted to stay in Israel. “By that time I had already met a lot of people. I was happy here, all told, and I decided to take a few more assorted courses at Hebrew University. I looked for a way to advance academically. I wanted to hone my skills and learn more about the Bible. I decided to look into studying for a doctorate in something having to do with the Bible.”

“I met with Professor Ed Greenstein and Professor Elie Assis at Bar-Ilan University. After many conversations with them and quite a bit of direction I decided to get my doctorate at Bar-Ilan in Bible and in Hebrew.”

“My thesis is about the wisdom literature in the Bible. The books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. It took me six years, and it wasn’t easy. In the end I wrote 320 pages (in English), but getting there was very difficult. It was a long process.”

Xinai said that when she began lecturing about the Bible in Europe “I was told that I am drawn to the Bible and to Judaism because I live in Israel and get my inspiration there. I explained to them that I am not drifting away from Christianity and that the Bible and the New Testament are still fascinating to me.”

As a rule, when asked how she is able to reconcile her Christian identity with her dissertation on the Old Testament, she says “it’s very simple. I believe in the same God you believe in. I also believe in Jesus. Jews don’t believe in Jesus and don’t accept him, and that is the big difference between Christianity and Judaism, but to me that was never a problem. I viewed my actions, my studies and my focus as a sort of mission to unite Christianity and Judaism. I didn’t drift away from Christianity, in my eyes I returned Christianity to its source, and that is the Old Testament. It helped me a lot while I was writing my dissertation.”

Assis, dean of the Jewish Studies Faculty, says proudly: “I immediately recognized how special, smart and hardworking she is. She is the type of person that everyone immediately likes. I guided her throughout her doctorate both academically and personally. I strongly believe in cultivating personal relationships between lecturers, or deans in this case, and the students. That’s how it was for me with Xinai. She needed a lot of support and encouragement because she doesn’t have any family here. She had several bouts of loneliness when I felt like we were her family. We, as religious believers, she and I, found that we have a lot in common. In actuality, her origins as an observant Christian is the Bible, or the Old Testament, and she also believes in the New Testament. It was from this place of faith, at Bar-Ilan University where faith and religious are out in the open, that we developed inspiring dialogue.”

Assis recounts further that Xinai has become very attached to Israel and has turned into an “avid Zionist.”

“Suffice it to take one look at her Facebook page to see how much she loves Israel and how attached she has become to our land. It was astonishing to see how deeply she delved into things, and how well she integrated throughout her doctoral work with all the Hebrew reading material and the other doctoral students. I was with her several years ago in Korea. I gave a lecture in English there and she translated to Korean. I was amazed by her enthusiasm for what I was saying and how she presented it to the audience.”

“Several weeks ago she gave a special lecture, in Hebrew, to other doctoral students from my department. She spoke fluent Hebrew, her language was rich and everyone was riveted. How deep, how serious, what wonderful Hebrew. It warms the heart to see how she is thriving despite the difficulties with the language and life in a foreign country, school, work, everything.”

Xinai beams at the praise. “My adviser, Professor Ed Greenstein, is world renowned. He is one of the world’s foremost professors on wisdom literature in the Bible. He and Professor Assis did not leave me alone for a minute. They made sure all the time that I was moving forward and completing my doctorate. I had some rough patches. It wasn’t easy. I became depressed in the face of the challenges and the difficult material and my loneliness, and they, along with others, gave me a lot of support.”

Xinai has yet to find her one true love. She says that she has been on dates and has tried to find love, unsuccessfully. “There were a few guys who loved me, and I really wanted a family of my own, but I also had some problems. I am a Christian, and according to Judaism, if I marry a Jew my children will not be considered Jewish. That bothered me,” she says with great candor.

“Until I was 40 I was very worried and I always wondered when it would happen for me, when I would have a husband and children of my own and a good family, but I was also a little afraid to have a family. Maybe it was the trauma of losing my father as a little girl. I thought about what would happen if I got married and had children and my husband would die, heaven forbid. It stopped me; it blocked me. I also saw that people in Israel are really quick to divorce. It posed some questions: what if it happens to me? How will my family work? I know that I let a few people down, but I just never found the right love for me.”

About a six weeks ago, Xinai left Israel and returned to South Korea. Three weeks ago, Dr. Xinai Kim began teaching Bible at Methodist Theological University in Seoul, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Soon she will begin teaching at other universities in South Korea. “On the one hand, I was sad to leave Israel. To say goodbye to so many wonderful, warm people who accompanied me along the way throughout my years there,” she tells me from Seoul. “All the people from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University, the kibbutz where I lived and all the many good places I visited quite a bit. On the other hand, I have no work in Israel. I am not a citizen, I can’t teach Bible. I am returning to Korea, to my country, and I am returning with a doctorate and with maturity. I am going to live in the place where I was born, with my language and my beliefs. I am returning to be at my sister’s side, who is herself a professor of education. I am very happy,” she says.

“My students are enjoying studying the Bible and are receiving the lessons well. Upon completing the course they will be ordained as priests — it is a part of the university curriculum there. It is like studying at yeshiva to become a rabbi. I was very excited to return to my alma mater as a Ph.D. I will never forget the fascinating and challenging process that I undertook in Israel, which allowed me to get to this point in my life, both academically and personally.”

In conclusion, Xinai says that “a lot of good people were there for me in Israel. I miss them already. In six months, I plan to visit Israel with a group of doctors and professors from the university where I now teach. I will take them on a 10-day tour of Jerusalem, the Galilee and all of Israel. I want them to see how beautiful this country is, how inviting, warm and caring it is.”

The bridge between Christianity and Judaism starts in Korea