Thus, at Yale I was getting a Jewish education, whether or not I was aware of it. At some point, however, I noticed how many Jewish course offerings there were in the Religious Studies department, and it struck me that they might outnumber the Christian ones. I counted up the courses offered by the department, and found that indeed, Jewish courses outnumbered Christian ones, not including courses like Sarna’s or Metlizki’s, which I had wrongly assumed would be Christian. How odd, I thought, for a school founded by Christian clergymen, in a country where there were reportedly 40 times more Christians than Jews. One of the Christian-themed classes I took in the Religious Studies major was a seminar on Christian monasticism. We took one field trip as part of that class, to the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where we met an elderly nun named Mother Jerome, whom I still remember vividly. She had been born into an aristocratic German family and was living in Munich during World War Two when the city was bombed by British and American planes. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed and wounded, but what she described to us was the aftermath of their bombing the library. Walking out by the river afterwards, she saw thousands of pages of paper flying in the air, caught in tree branches, and falling into the river. I bought a book of her poems, Things That Surround Us.