Three years ago, my wife, Rabbanit Leah Sarna — one of the first women Orthodox rabbis — was preparing to play an important role for our lay-led synagogue in suburban Philadelphia, Congregation Sha’arei Orah. Her task was to sell the community’s hametz, or leaven.

It’s something that observant Jews undertake to fulfill the Torah’s commandment to eliminate hametz, or leavened food, before Passover … without exactly doing so: They sell their leavened food to a non-Jew for the duration of the holiday. Despite not being our synagogue’s official leader, Leah volunteered to facilitate the sale. All we needed was a non-Jewish buyer.

That should have been easy. The reason we’d moved to Philadelphia and joined this synagogue two years earlier was for my job as a professor of biblical studies at Villanova University, a Catholic university nearby. I’m the only full-time Jewish professor in a theology department of several dozen Christian colleagues, with whom I maintain relationships of both professional collaboration and genuine friendship. Selling hametz is a rare example of a traditional Jewish practice that not only accommodates but actually requires this kind of community with non-Jews. “Just ask one of your colleagues,” Leah suggested.

I agreed. Yet when I went to reach out to them, I hesitated. Precisely because it includes non-Jews, selling hametz also entails significant Jewish vulnerability: It reveals some of the strangest aspects of Judaism. How would I even explain it to my colleagues? “It’s an actual sale of random food in all these people’s homes — like, you’re really buying it — but don’t........

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