The vast majority of laws relating to Jewish marriage and divorce are derived from verses in the Torah portion Seitzei.
The relationship between husbands and wives is similar to the relationship between G-d and the Jewish people. It thus follows that marriage and divorce as experienced between mortal spouses derives from the “marriage” and the so-called “divorce” between G-d and the Jewish people.
The marriage of G-d and the Jewish people took place when He gave them the Torah, as the Mishnah states: ” ‘The day of His marriage’ — this refers to Mattan Torah. “
The Chassidic Dimension: Ki Seitzei
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson
from Likkutei Sichos Vol. IX, pp. 143-150.
Chabad.org
“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep.
“At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’
“Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’
“‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.’
“But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut.
“Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’
“But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’
“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour. –Matthew 25:1-13
I’m still trying to figure out how God can be married to the Jewish people as a whole while Christ is married to the church. The former is easier for me to comprehend since Judaism as a whole has a relationship with God more so than any individual Jew, based on the Sinai event. Even through there are religious Jews and secular Jews, because each are part of the Jewish whole, regardless of their personal beliefs, God must consider them His “bride”.
Jews are an ethnicity and a community, not just a religion. To be sure, that’s true of other religions, to some extent. Part of what it means to be an Italian, Polish or Irish American is being Catholic, and the Black church is at the core of the African-American community. So Jews are not alone in being partly an ethnic grouping, but community bonds play an unusually prominent role in our religion. I’m a Jew by choice—I converted 50 years ago, and I’m even more satisfied with that choice now than I was a half-century ago. That’s partly because being Jewish is mostly not about beliefs, but about connections with other people, sharing values and a collective destiny. Even for non-observant Jews, Jewish values are embodied in the Torah. Most Jews, unlike most Christians, don’t take the Torah literally, but it’s an exceptional account of the shared history and values of our people. Those values include respect for learning—we’re the “People of the Book”—respect for the individual, and pervasive concern about the fate of the community. It’s not an accident that Jews are among the most generous people in America philanthropically, and not just for Jewish causes; this trait embodies tikkun olam. Sociologically, Jews behave in a way that’s consistent with putting a high value on caring for other people, as well as on respect for learning. Even the atheists among us share those values.
Robert Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.
Quoted from Moment Magazine
Compared to Judaism, there really isn’t a “Christian people”. We refer to Christians collectively as “the church” but Christians don’t comprise a people group in the way that Jews do since Judaism transcends the definition of a “religion” and extends to a community, a people, an ethnicity (depending on how you look at it) and a culture. You can be a devoutly religious Jew or your can be a Jew who is an atheist, but you are always a Jew.
By contrast, a Christian is only a Christian because he or she has made a conscious faith decision. A person can decide to become a Christian and they can decide to surrender their faith and become an atheist. There’s no such thing as a secular Christian and once you leave the church, you have given up that identity.
When people describe themselves as Christian, they imply some element of belief. The beliefs may vary, but it would be hard for them to say, “I am a Christian,” if they don’t believe in God. In Judaism, there is a vibrant Jewish community separate from the theological underpinnings of the Torah. You don’t have to believe God made a covenant with our ancestors—where He gave us the land of Israel and commanded us to live by His teachings—to be Jewish.
Jason Rosenhouse is an associate professor of mathematics at James Madison University, writes EvolutionBlog for the Science Blogs network, and is the author of Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolution Frontline, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Quoted from Moment Magazine
Christians are called “believers” because the essential element for being a Christian is belief; the acceptance of a certain set of propositions with an unerring certainty. It has nothing really to do with who you are, where you were born, who your parents are, or even anything that you do in life. You are a Christian because you believe in Christ. A Jew isn’t a Jew because of what he or she believes, a Jew is a Jew because of who they are. Even a religious Jew isn’t really religious because of a set of beliefs but instead is considered “yare Hashem”:
According to Heschel, “Awe rather than faith is the cardinal attitude of the religious Jew. In Biblical language, the religious man is not called ‘believer,’ as he is for example in Islam (mu’min) but yare hashem (one who stands in awe of God).”
Quoted from MyJewishLearning.com
I think we can argue that God is still “married” to any individual Jew because that Jew is always part of the Jewish whole. Not so a Christian since a Christian can accept or reject their faith at will and it is faith and belief, and nothing else, that defines the Christian. So it seems that a Jew remains part of the tribe regardless and thus is “married” in a way that they cannot be divorced, but not so the Christian.
I know what you’re thinking. God did “divorce” the Jewish people and we have scripture to prove it. We also have this:
“For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with deep compassion I will bring you back.
In a surge of anger
I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting kindness
I will have compassion on you,”
says the LORD your Redeemer. –Isaiah 54:7-8
God continues to address Israel as a corporate entity rather than commenting on the behavior of any individual Jew. God briefly and temporarily divorced all of Israel and He has promised to gather all of Israel to Himself again.
Paul re-enforces this commitment here:
I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. As it is written: “The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. –Romans 11:25-26
As much as I try to find one, I can’t discover the solution or reconciliation between the two marriage metaphors: the one involving God and Israel and the one depicting Christ and the church. As I read over what I’ve written, it’s almost as if I’m saying that all Jews merit a place in the world to come no matter what they’ve done by virtue of being Jews. However, there are conflicting points of view involved:
And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. –Matthew 3:9
All Israel has a share in the World to Come, as is stated: “And your people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever. They are the shoot of My planting, the work of My hands, in which I take pride.” –Sanhedrin, 11:1
How can I put all of this together in a way that makes sense? How to I reconcile God’s relationship with the Jewish people vs. His relationship with Christianity? I know that what we do, Jew and Christian alike, matters to God and that there are consequences, both in the present and in the world to come, for our behavior, but how can that be applied to the identity of Jew vs. Christian in terms of being a “bride”?
(Yes, I know I could take the Christian “hard line” and say that God replaced Israel with the church, but if I ever believed in such supersessionist nonsense, I’ve long since given it up. There has to be another answer)
I don’t know the answer. I’m inviting comments from anyone who has an opinion to share. I do want to leave you with one more quote for this last morning mediation of the week.
Fire can be dangerous – but nothing is as dangerous as ice.
If a fire burns inside you, keep going, just turn the fire towards G-d.
But if your path is of cold, lifeless intellect, you must stop, turn around, and warm yourself with the fiery coals of the sages.-Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
“Hot and Cold”
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson
Chabad.org
Being cold to our bridegroom is a dangerous thing for anyone as we learn here. But how is it different for a Jew than a Christian against the vista of eternity?
Good Shabbos.
Morning Meditations 
James,
I’am going to attempt to answer that question. God did divorce the Jew, but he died for them. LIke the marrage contract we are bonded to each other untill death do us part. We are not allow to re-marry untill death seperates the tie that binds us. Yeshua died for his Bride the Jew and Gentile.
There is a connection with the scripture ( all of Israel will be saved, when the fullness of the gentiles come in). I don’t understand it all, but there is a reason the marrage contract can be renewed through Yeshua’s death on the cross. That’s my best answer, James, maybe you can elaborate on it.
Michelle
“I’m still trying to figure out how God can be married to the Jewish people as a whole while Christ is married to the church.”
Good post James, James. However, it’s a common and very popular oft repeated misconception from countless pulpits and Christian books that the “Church is the bride of Christ” (as opposed to Israel being the wife of the Father). It’s a wrong teaching. The NT actually never states this. I believe that this teaching is a good example of Replacement Theology that tries to push Israel out of the way and put the “Church” in it’s place.
Who is “the Bride of Christ” then? Revelation 21:9-10 clearly states that the “the bride, the Lamb’s wife” is the Holy Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a common scriptural euphemism for “Israel”. Since saved Gentiles become co-citizens of the Commonwealth of Israel with Jews, they too become part of the bride, that is they become residents of the New Jerusalem by adoption into Abraham’s family through Yeshua the Messiah. So, there’s no dichotomy here.
“God did divorce the Jew, but he died for them. LIke the marrage contract we are bonded to each other untill death do us part. We are not allow to re-marry untill death seperates the tie that binds us. Yeshua died for his Bride the Jew and Gentile.”
michellejay2, that’s, I am afraid, is another common muddled teaching, unfortunately. Who died? Did G-d die? No, G-d cannot die. Did Israel die? No, Israel is still very much alive! Now I have to ask this – If Yeshua died for his “Bride the Jew and Gentile” (vs Messiah’s Bride actually being the New Jerusalem), how can that Church be married to him if death is what breaks up the marriage contract? I think people misunderstand what point A. Paul was trying to make because it had little to do with marriage, brides, etc. and had very much to do with justification and US DYING to sin.
Gene,
It’s all very unclear to me too, I’m just trying to make sense of it myself.
Who died on a cross?
Please forgive me for sounding stupid, but I thought Yeshua died and YHVH raised him from the dead?
Please forgive me for sounding stupid, but I thought Yeshua died and YHVH raised him from the dead?
I’m going to need some help with this, Michelle. Yeshua (Jesus) died and three days later (depending on how you count days), he rose again. The way you worded your comment, it’s as if one person died and a completely separate person rose from the dead.
When we are baptized into the Messiah, the person we were, enslaved to sin, “dies”, and we are “reborn” as a disciple of the Master and adopted into the kingdom of God. We don’t literally become a different person. In fact, most people (me included) don’t feel a bit different after professing faith and trust in the Messiah and being baptized into his salvation. The change happens over a long period of time.
I’m saying this to illustrate that, in my opinion, Jesus didn’t undergo a supernatural transformation into a separate and more spiritual being than he was as a person born of flesh. We don’t really understand everything about his nature (the “mechanics” of the virgin birth are beyond us), but he was still fully human after resurrection (he ate, for example).
I’m still chewing on the whole “bride” thing. Gene, your explanation seems plausible, but I have to consider it for a time and think about other “bride-of-Christ” scriptures.
Thanks to the both of you for your comments. I appreciate the feedback.
James,
I don’t think a different person rose from the dead. Maybe I didn’t word it correctly. I do believe in the trinity. God’s son died on a cross and his Father raised him up three days later. I don’t understand the whole wife/bride issue, but I believe Israel is still God’s choosen people and will remain his people. God is not finished with Israel. I believe the true peace we are told to pray for,
when we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, is that his people the Jews will accept their Messiah.
The parable says “the kingdom of heaven is LIKE” – it’s an analogy.
Is there really even supposed to be a “church”?
It’s too big of a mess for me; I think a lot of it is bs. Forget Paul!
Michelle, the Trinity, or more specifically, the deity of the Messiah, is another matter entirely, and one that I don’t think we can comprehend without delving into Jewish mysticism and whether or not God *is* the Word that was made flesh. I’ve blogged on this topic before, mainly at my old Searching blogspot, and I probably should do so again here, just to gather all the information in a more current form.
The resolution to this quandary is probably found in how the Jewish and the Gentile disciples can be made “one new man” without losing their separate ethnic and covenant differences. In that, it may be possible to “add” the adopted sons and daughters of God into “brideship”, so to speak, as Gene was mentioning earlier.
Hi Tikvah. Yes, I know it was an analogy. Jesus used a lot of them to get his point across. Ephesians 5:21-33 seems to speak of a relationship between husbands and wives and Christ and the church, casting Christ in the role of husband and the church as the bride. If you link that to Revelation 21:9, we have to ask ourselves who is the bride in John’s vision? In this week’s Torah portion commentary, which I quoted from in today’s blog, we see God’s relationship with Israel being described in very similar terms to those Paul uses in Ephesians. If replacement theology isn’t an option, then there’s another answer. Either the Jews and only the Jews comprise the “church” and are the bride, as they have been all along, or as Gene suggested earlier, we Gentile disciples become co-heirs and become part of the larger group that makes up the bride of the Lamb.
I know this is a struggle, but I certainly don’t see how we can throw Paul out the window, when most of the NT writings are based on his letters.
I just wanted to return to this conversation. Forgive me for saying God had divorced the Jew., because I’m just not so sure about this. That’s all I wanted to say.
Pray for Israel, they need your prayers especially at this time.
Indeed they do, Michelle. I agree. God has not abandoned Israel (see Romans 11:26).
Blessings.