Moses then convoked the whole Israelite community and said to them: These are the things that the Lord has commanded you to do.
–Exodus 35:1 (JPS Tanakh)
The verb vayakhel – which gives the portion its name – is crucial to an understanding of the task in which Moses is engaged. At its simplest level it serves as a motiv-word, recalling a previous verse. In this case the verse is obvious:
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they assembled around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us.” (32:1)
Moses’ act is what the kabbalists called a tikkun: a restoration, a making-good-again, the redemption of a past misdemeanour. Just as the sin was committed by the people acting as a kahal or kehillah, so atonement was to be achieved by their again acting as a kehillah, this time by making a home for the Divine presence as they earlier sought to make a substitute for it. Moses orchestrates the people for good, as they had once been assembled for bad (The difference lies not only in the purpose but in the form of the verb, from passive in the case of the calf to active in the case of Moses. Passivity allows bad things to happen – “Wherever it says ‘and it came to pass’ it is a sign of impending tragedy”. (Megillah 10b) Proactivity is the defeat of tragedy: “Wherever is says, ‘And there will be’ is a sign of impending joy.” (Bemidbar Rabbah 13)
At a deeper level, though, the opening verse of the portion alerts us to the nature of community in Judaism.
In classical Hebrew there are three different words for community: edah, tsibbur and kehillah, and they signify different kinds of association.
-Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
From the “Covenant and Conversation” series
“Three Types of Community”
Commentary on Vayakhel
Aish.com
There’s a tendency in certain corners of Christianity to struggle with the definition of words like “kahal” and “kehillah” vs. the word “ekklesia.” Does “ekklesia” mean “church” or is it associated with one of the words that has to do with “Jewish” gatherings? Certainly “ekklesia” and “synagogē” although related, tend to be split in our modern world to mean (Christian) church and (Jewish) synagogue. But digging just under the surface, here’s what we find.
At its most basic level, “ekklesia” means “a gathering of citizens called out from their homes into some public place, an assembly.” (see BibleStudyTools.com). This strips the word of all its religious connotation and gives us the “nuts and bolts” understanding. An ekklesia can be any gathering of citizens called out into a public place. They could be football fans or a lynch mob. They don’t have to be “the church.”
Interestingly enough, one definition provided by my source says, “the assembly of the Israelites,” but there’s no way to understand in that context if we are to take “Israelites” as strictly Jewish people or rather to overlay a Christian understanding and include Gentile believers as “Israelites.” Given that ekklesia tends to be considered a compound word made up of “ek” (out of, from, by) and “kaleo” (to call, to invite, to give a name to), it seems more likely that the application in this sense, is recognizing “Israelites” as those called by God in the original “called” or “chosen” manner at Sinai. I don’t see the idea of a “mixed” population of Jews and Gentiles being called collectively “Israelites” here.
By contrast:
A synagogue (from Koine Greek: συναγωγή transliterated synagogē, meaning “assembly”), sometimes spelt synagog, is a Jewish or Samaritan house of prayer (When broken down, the word could also mean “learning together” – from the Greek συν syn, together, and αγωγή agogé, learning or training) that emerged at first essentially within the context of Hellenistic Judaism in the diasporas of Greece and the Hellenized regions of the MENA area (Cilicia, Syria and Alexandria) in the second half of the Second Temple period, then progressively became the typical place of Jewish worship and education after 70 CE, when Roman persecutions accelerated the geographic dispersion process that accompanied the abrupt ending of Temple worship and priestly rituals and traditions.
So synagogue seems to be more related to “house of assembly,” “house of prayer,” or “house of study,” but within a specifically Jewish context (we do see God-fearing Gentiles periodically attending synagogues in the late Second Temple period, but they were clearly non-Jewish guests within a Jewish venue). People don’t typically ever say something like “Christian synagogue” or “Jewish church.”
But why am I delving into all of this and why should you care?
This week, I’ve been discussing (complaining) about the interactions and friction that seem to occur between certain groups of believing Jews and certain groups of believing non-Jews (i.e. Christians). One of the questions that comes up in such transactions is how closely those groups are related. Are they a single group with a single identity, differentiated only by a bit of DNA and a slice of culture, or are they defined as more distinct and separate on the level of community and covenant?
Let’s take a look at what we know about “ekklesia,” which is how we commonly think of the community of disciples of Jesus Christ, and compare it to Rabbi Sacks’ definitions for different communities of Jews (and I’m setting “synagogue” aside for the sake of this conversation). First, Rabbi Sacks’ discussion:
Edah comes from the word eid, meaning “witness.” The verb ya’ad carries the meaning of “to appoint, fix, assign, destine, set apart, designate or determine.” An edah can be a gathering for bad as well as good. The Israelites, on hearing the report of the spies, lose heart and say they want to return to Egypt. Throughout, they are referred to as the edah (as in “How long will this wicked community grumble against Me?” Bemidbar 14: 27). The people agitated by Korach in his rebellion against Moses and Aaron’s authority is likewise called an edah (“If one man sins, will You be angry with the whole community?” Bemidbar 16: 22). Nowadays the word is generally used for an ethnic or religious subgroup. An edah is a community of the like-minded. The word emphasises strong identity. It is a group whose members have much in common.
By contrast the word tsibbur – it belongs to Mishnaic rather than biblical Hebrew – comes from the root tz-b-r meaning “to heap” or “pile up”. (Bereishith 41:49) To understand the concept of tsibbur, think of a group of people praying at the Kotel. They may not know each other. They may never meet again. But for the moment, they happen to be ten people in the same place at the same time, and thus constitute a quorum for prayer. A tsibbur is a community in the minimalist sense, a mere aggregate, formed by numbers rather than any sense of identity. A tsibbur is a group whose members may have nothing in common except that, at a certain point, they find themselves together and thus constitute a “public” for prayer or any other command which requires a minyan.
A kehillah is different from the other two kinds of community. Its members are different from one another. In that sense it is like a tsibbur. But they are orchestrated together for a collective undertaking – one that involves in making a distinctive contribution. The danger of a kehillah is that it can become a mass, a rabble, a crowd.
The beauty of a kehillah, however, is that when it is driven by constructive purpose, it gathers together the distinct and separate contributions of many individuals, so that each can say, “I helped to make this.” That is why, assembling the people on this occasion, Moses emphasises that each has something different to give: Take from what you have, an offering to God. Everyone who is willing to bring to God an offering of gold, silver and bronze … All you who are skilled among you are to come and make everything the Lord has commanded …
Moses was able to turn the kehillah with its diversity into an edah with its singleness of purpose, while preserving the diversity of the gifts they brought to God…
And to sum up his definitions, Rabbi Sacks states:
To preserve the diversity of a tsibbur with the unity of purpose of an edah – that is the challenge of kehillah-formation, community-building, itself the greatest task of a great leader.
Kehillah seems to be what God, through Moses, was trying to forge from the Children of Israel. Each type of group had something valuable to offer but those elements needed to be brought together and combined within a single container to result in both diversity and unity being focused on constructive purpose.
How does that compare to our understanding of ekklesia?
In a Christian sense:
- an assembly of Christians gathered for worship in a religious meeting
- a company of Christians, or of those who, hoping for eternal salvation through Jesus Christ, observe their own religious rites, hold their own religious meetings, and manage their own affairs, according to regulations prescribed for the body for order’s sake, those who anywhere, in a city, village, constitute such a company and are united into one body
- the whole body of Christians scattered throughout the earth
- the assembly of faithful Christians already dead and received into heaven
But ekklesia can also mean “any gathering or throng of men assembled by chance, tumultuously.”
It’s as if ekklesia is trying to mirror the Jewish (or at least Rabbi Sacks’) understanding of kehillah. Ekklesia is taking the general understanding of a group of people who are called out, in some sense, who are dissimilar, who can also be assembled by random chance, but who also, when given a purpose by God, gather together from widely diverse backgrounds to be united into one body of believers for the sake of Jesus Christ.
I know that some people don’t think being gathered together for the sake of Christ is a “constructive purpose.” Certainly the vast majority of Christian history has shown us we haven’t been very “constructive” in relation to the Jewish “kehillah.” Many atheists would also agree that, based on their perception of “Christian bias,” the body of believers is hardly constructive and especially not “progressive.”
But for those of us who authentically and honestly seek out God through being disciples of the Master, being gathered together in the ekklesia of Messiah very much is a constructive purpose. Feeding the hungry, comforting the grieving, visiting the sick and imprisoned is all “constructive purpose” as far as I’m concerned and as far as the teachings of Jesus and the Torah are concerned.
Pulling all this together within the widest possible sense of the body of believers, just how close a comparison can we make between the Messianic Jewish kehillah and the Christian (including Hebrew Roots) ekklesia? I’m unwilling to say that the only difference between Jewish and Gentile believers is a string of DNA or a bit of cultural context and rather, believe that the manner in which God distinguished the Children of Israel at Sinai continues to distinguish their descendants, the Jewish people, even within the community of Messiah. I also believe, going back to Rabbi Sacks and his commentary, that community must be active and not passive, we must live holy lives, not just talk about holiness.
In other words believing Jews and Gentiles are and aren’t different at the same time. We are different in that Sinai is the defining moment for the Children of Israel and always will be relative to their special “called out-ness” from the nations. All Jews are born into this covenant relationship whether they want to be or not. But what believing Jews and Gentiles have in common is that we all had to consciously and willingly hear the voice of Messiah and respond to him, and to accept the good news of salvation from sin and the promise of the restoration of national Israel under her King.
There are groups who want to separate the believing Jews and believing Gentiles completely and have us live in two parallel but isolated silos. There are other groups who want to pour us all into a single silo like so many millions and millions of grains of wheat, completely indistinguishable form one another.
I believe we are more like two sheep pens united in a single flock with a single shepherd. Not all sheep look the same. Not all sheep act the same. Some of the sheep, a relatively small number, have a more specified purpose within the flock than the vast majority of other sheep in the flock. In spite of that, we have one shepherd whose voice we all listen to and who we all respond to in faith and trust. Since we’ve originally come from two separate pens, we have two separate histories and we different sheep have a lot to learn about one another. Sometimes, that means we “butt heads,” so to speak. The shepherd, seeing this, encourages us to live at peace with one another, not as identical drones or dough stamped out from the same cookie cutter, but as sheep from the Jewish pen and sheep from the Gentile pen in the flock of Messiah.
Kehillah/Ekklesia: different and distinct but brought together for a common and constructive purpose, offering our distinctive talents and identities in a unified container all for the sake of Messiah and by the plan of God.
Come together, right now
Over me-John Lennon (credited to Lennon-McCartney)
Come Together (1969)
from the Beatles album Abbey Road
Good Shabbos.
Morning Meditations 
I have an observation to offer, though it is certainly not a new or earth-shattering insight. Simply, it is this: Four decades now of MJ praxis in which the various sheep have been more or less intermingled in the same pen have produced confusion and more assimilation which is not conducive to the preservation of the distinctive Jewish identity prescribed in HaShem’s instructions (i.e., Torah). The recommendation that the different kinds of sheep each should have their own pens is therefore a practical defensive consideration. It is not to be interpreted as rejection or prideful superiority or smugness or any of the other negative ascriptions that often are presumed about Jews who wish to pursue the privileges of being what HaShem called them to be. It is an exercise in self-preservation, which is a practice which Jews have been required to refine to a fine expertise during the course of many centuries. Occasionally, when times and circumstances are seemingly non-threatening, we’re tempted to relax and lower our defenses. Usually, that is just about the time when threats arise to force us again to defend ourselves and to regret that we ever allowed ourselved to become deluded by apparent social progress around us. In modern western civilization we have discovered a new kind of threat to our existence and identity, which is a large degree of comfort and acceptance that encourages assimilation into a larger society. It has taken us several generations to recognize this insidious danger to our existence that threatens to erase our identity even more thoroughly than the Purim blotting out that we were commanded to do for the “name” (i.e., the purposes) of Amalek. In this case, part of what has made it so hard to recognize is that most of those who foster it do not intend harm — indeed, often they are very well-meaning, albeit unaware of the danger they represent. So it is, then, with HR or OL versus MJ. There is a significant difference between the cooperation and potential cameraderie represented by “table fellowship”, and ecclesiologies that erase or ignore all distinctions in pursuit of some sort of “unity” which is really a pursuit of universal uniformity. Is Jewish-styled uniformity to be deemed better than previous historical pagan uniformity? Probably it is better on many levels. But HaShem values diversity (He did, after all, create a lot of it), and Jewish distinctiveness from all the other families of the earth was His idea. Perhaps we should hold onto it.
So it is, then, with HR or OL versus MJ. There is a significant difference between the cooperation and potential cameraderie represented by “table fellowship”, and ecclesiologies that erase or ignore all distinctions in pursuit of some sort of “unity” which is really a pursuit of universal uniformity. Is Jewish-styled uniformity to be deemed better than previous historical pagan uniformity? Probably it is better on many levels. But HaShem values diversity (He did, after all, create a lot of it), and Jewish distinctiveness from all the other families of the earth was His idea. Perhaps we should hold onto it.
It’s weeks like this when I wonder (I say this tongue-in-cheek) whether or not the Messiah had lost his mind when he asked his Jewish disciples to make disciples of all the nations and if James had equally “lost it” when he ruled that the Gentiles could enter into the Kingdom without having to convert and be obligated to the full body of mitzvot.
The only thing we see of the development of Jewish and Gentile communities of believers in the apostolic scriptures are the very beginnings of transmitting the “Gospel message.” The fully realized and operational communities didn’t appear before the end of the Bible record or if they did, they existed for such a brief period of time that they’re useless as models for building our current communities.
The safest thing to do for the Jewish believers would either be for them to create communities that are 100% Jewish in order to preserve their Jewish identity or to simply enter into and remain in pre-existing synagogues (Orthodox, Conservative, etc…) and be part of those communities of Jews.
The former suggestion isn’t entirely practical since I don’t think there are a sufficient number of Messianic Jews in any single geographic location (maybe in Israel) to justify a synagogue that would completely exclude a Gentile presence (most MJ groups I’m aware of, even if led by Jews, are largely Gentile in membership). The latter suggestion risks “assimilation” of a sort in that faith in Yeshua as Messiah may be lost in favor of a more “traditional” modern Judiasm.
And then what do you do about the vast majority of the body of believers…the Gentiles?
Segregation may be safer and I agree that there are two separate pens, but then how to we actualize the concept of “one flock” in Messiah (John 10:14-16)?
Well, Yakov tended a great many sheep while managing the flocks of Lavan, yet he managed to separate them as needed to control their genetics in order to breed the needed striped, speckled, spotted or streaked models as the conditions of his wages were being continualy “re-adjusted” by his wily father-in-law. At times, they were all managed as one flock, since Yakov’s “wages” would not be paid until the end of the contract. Nonetheless, the subset that was to be deemed as those wages was kept identifiably separate. I suspect that there’s an analogy in there somewhere, that may at least offer encouragement that “one flock” in the Messiah can be managed with the required subdivisions. And the timeframe associated with verse 16 is not entirely unambiguous. Communities of moderns MJs who are immersed in the traditional Jewish religious world would be a suitable and desirable reflection of conditions in the first-century Jerusalem area where their ancient counterparts attended Temple services or synagogues like that of the Freedmen, meeting also in their homes for fellowship and discussion of messianic issues. This occurs in modern Jerusalem, though sub-rosa to avoid irrational conflicts based on misunderstandings by the members of these communities. There are also locations in the USA where enough MJs exist that they could operate a synagogue community without being overwhelmed by non-Jews. There is no desire to exclude non-Jews, although those who choose to enter “Jewish space” must agree to conform with its norms and expectations — hence these take on a “voluntary obligation” above and beyond the license granted them in Acts 15. Thus they could learn Torah and “partake of its nourishment” (as grafted branches), though their actions would be constrained by their respect for distinctive Jewish protocol.
James,
Although the Jewish fears of “disappearing” are understandable given the history, and the well laid out comment from “Proclaim” above, is it possible that God has this under control, and that He actually intends for us to “bump in” to each other, affect each other, wrestle with these issues, and finally, realize that He will never let His precious people “disappear”?
As the book of Ruth attests (and all the other examples of Gentile inclusion among Israel) life springs forth from Jewish/Gentile union. Of course, there has to be some trust mixed in too.
Shabbat Shalom
@Sojourning – Ruth’s example can only be generalized to converts rather than to any other category of non-Jews. She was exceptional in other ways also, as an intermarried spouse, widowed, and making aliyah with her returning-citizen (also widowed) mother-in-law (to put it in modern terms). Her legal status was what might be considered “unusual”. This is why the closest relative kinsman-redeemer had to decline the role in favor of Boaz, because of inheritance regulations conflicting with those attached to Ruth’s deceased husband’s family and hence to her. Her marriage to Boaz was not deemed a Jewish-Gentile union, because she had already joined herself to the Jewish people and had already a legal staus within the community thereby.
As for HaShem’s protection and guarantee that the Jewish people will be preserved in order to fulfil His promise to Avraham, that’s a little like Mordechai’s warning to Esther that if she declined to act, salvation for Jews in general would arise from somewhere else but she and her family would surely perish. Or, to use a different analogy: I’m reminded of a StarTrek episode in which a Good-versus-Evil conflict was in progress, and one combatant taunted the other with a question about believing that Good would always triumph over Evil. Dr.McCoy offered a “sotto voce” observation that in his experience Evil often had its way unless Good were to be very,very careful. Hence there is a bit of Jewish folk-wisdom that cautions every Jew to consider each action for its possible impact on the Jewish people, for good or for ill, immediately or in the long term.
And, back @James – no analogy is perfect (spoken sheepishly), and any can be stretched ultimately far enough that it cannot cover some aspect of the situation over which it was invoked.
I hadn’t thought about the flocks Ya’akov tended for Laban as an example that could be applied to the “Good Shepherd” verses before. Ultimately though, the sheep that belonged to Jacob’s were Jacob’s and Laban’s flock was Laban’s so there was no lasting unity.
I have no problem with this and I expect that in the Messianic Age, that is how Jews and Gentile believers will enter into community with each other. I don’t expect the current “culture” (cultures, really) of the “Christian church” to remain unchanged relative to the Jewishness of the Jewish King and the primacy of national Israel which, after all, is also part of the Gospel message.
Although the Jewish fears of “disappearing” are understandable given the history, and the well laid out comment from “Proclaim” above, is it possible that God has this under control, and that He actually intends for us to “bump in” to each other, affect each other, wrestle with these issues, and finally, realize that He will never let His precious people “disappear”?
Ruth, as a matter of faith, I believe that no matter what happens, God will not allow the Jewish people or the Jewish nation to perish and vanish from the world. I keep beating my head against a brick wall when I suppose I should just wait around for the Messiah to come back and “fix” our broken world and a broken humanity.
I don’t know if I’m just stupid and stubborn or driven by forces beyond my control to keep tilting at the “community” windmill, but I keep giving it a whirl. One “extra meditation” coming up in about 30 more minutes then I’ll stop for the approach of Shabbat.
“Her marriage to Boaz was not deemed a Jewish-Gentile union, because she had already joined herself to the Jewish people and had already a legal staus within the community thereby. ”
Correct, since if this were not so (if Ruth was not a convert to Judaism, worshiper of the G-d of Israel and observer of Torah, i.e. “Jewish” from the legal point of view), Boaz would have been in violation of the Biblical prohibition of intermarriage with surrounding nations.
“As for HaShem’s protection and guarantee that the Jewish people will be preserved in order to fulfil His promise to Avraham, that’s a little like Mordechai’s warning to Esther that if she declined to act, salvation for Jews in general would arise from somewhere else but she and her family would surely perish. ”
ProclaimLiberty, this is exactly what I always remind those who are unconcerned about either their own assimilation or assimilation of their fellow Jews into Christianity, secularism or elsewhere. Yes, Jews will survive as a people – but you and your progeny may not survive as Jews.
PL said: I’m reminded of a StarTrek episode in which a Good-versus-Evil conflict was in progress, and one combatant taunted the other with a question about believing that Good would always triumph over Evil. Dr.McCoy offered a “sotto voce” observation that in his experience Evil often had its way unless Good were to be very,very careful.
The Omega Glory. Yes, I remember it (I’ve been a fan since the original series premiered in 1966). In the 1960s, TV could still talk about God, Jesus, and faith without being censored or ridiculed. Bones was a realist with just a tinge of idealism.
I’m not saying that Judaism can lay on the railroad tracks, so to speak, and tempt God by waiting for the next freight train to come along and cut Judaism in half. I do believe that what we do matters so that means I do believe in protecting Jewish identity (and my myriad blog posts should testify to that).
I also believe that what we can’t do, God can and will.
@Gene: Yeah…I know. 😦
OK, OK. The last, last, very last commentary on this topic of community..for this week, anyway.
@Proclaim: “Her marriage to Boaz was not deemed a Jewish-Gentile union, because she had already joined herself to the Jewish people and had already a legal staus within the community thereby.”
My point wasn’t to get into the particulars of “conversion” and how that was seen then, as opposed to later developments. Ruth was a gentile woman belonging to a group of people who Jews were expressly told NOT to marry and even if you hold to the later developments that claimed she had converted, she didn’t do so until after her Jewish husband had died and she was *always* called a “Moabitess” which points out she kept her status as a Gentile.
Yet, life sprang from this union. How far can you go in the Biblical account before finding Gentiles mixed in? Moses, Esther, Joseph, and lots of others, had Gentiles in the mix.
I believe it’s the picture of life. Jews and Gentiles each fulfilling their roles and serving the God of Israel.
Your Star Trek analogy is unfortunate because it paints Jews as being better off with no Gentiles in their vicinity and that Gentiles are evil. I don’t think the Biblical account can bear this out.
@Sojourning (Shavua Tov!) – I suppose not everyone appreciates StarTrek analogies; and you’ve rather miscontrued my intention with this one. It certainly said nothing like your inference that “Gentiles are evil”. Nonetheless, let’s talk about “evil” a little bit. The Hebrew word for “evil” (“r’a”) has additional meanings of “destructive” and “wild”. You may find in some older Bible translations references to an “evil beast”, meaning a wild animal (which is also likely to be destructive of life or property). When the subject under consideration is circumstances which are destructive to portions of the Jewish people, the word “evil” is certainly applicable. Now, Jews are just as capable of bringing destruction in large or small measure upon themselves, without non-Jewish help. But it is undeniable that non-Jews have frequently had a detrimental effect upon Jews, sometimes even when they had no intention of doing so. Biblical history can demonstrate the former negative impact, post-biblical history even moreso. But it is in rather recent post-biblical history that the latter also has been demonstrated, by the overwhelming desire of non-Jews seeking their biblical faith-roots to find them in the MJ movement. When two different peoples have overlapping goals, working together can help to further them insofar as they overlap. The danger is a loss of the portions that do not overlap. So it has been with MJ. There is no intent to accuse non-Jews in the movement of any intention for evil — far from it — but that their sheer numbers have overwhelmed the somewhat fragile embryonic development of Jewish messianic restoration and thereby inhibited that development. Thus a potential good, which is intended to be a positive and favorable impact on Jews who do not understand Rav Yeshua’s value, has not been realized. MJ has not been able to present clearly or unambiguously the testimony that Rav Yeshua represents good news for Jews. I’d like to think it hasn’t been destroyed altogether, but instead has been merely delayed for a generation — however, we must ask how many Jews of this generation have been harmed by the loss of a corrective message regarding Rav Yeshua.
As for Ruth: Don’t be misled by the references to the land of her origin which continued to call her a Moabitess. They do not mean that she was still a non-Jew after her conversion. Some folks also question the behavior of her first husband Ma’hlon in marrying a Moabite girl in the first place, because of the prohibition against Moabites. Rabbinically, that ban has been interpreted as being applied only against the men of Moab and not the women. Nonetheless, it does appear that Orpah and Ruth were still free to return to Moab, and expected to do so, after the death of their Jewish husbands. As of that moment, whatever process might have constituted the equivalent of conversion to Judaism or absorbtion into the Jewish people apparently had not been applied (or yet completed) in their case. Only Ruth’s determinations to cling to Naomi and to the G-d of Israel illustrate the completion or validation of that process. One can hardly say that Ruth was “fulfilling a Gentile role” in doing so, thus her subsequent marriage to Boaz cannot be construed as producing life from a joining of Jew and Gentile, or as some idyllic picture of what life should be like in general. For them, the issue was one of resolving Ruth’s status as a Jewish widow, not one of absorbing a non-Jew into the Jewish community or of joining a Jew and a Gentile together for some greater humanitarian purpose. While biblically-famous Jews have interacted positively with non-Jews, and some even intermarried with them, only the non-Jews who actually joined the Jewish people officially show any later positive contribution. Alternative negative examples include Yosef’s wife Asnat, who is never heard of again and whose sons Menashe and Ephraim were adopted by Yacov in order to incorporate them into the Jewish people. Moshe’s wife Tziporah also drops out of the picture rather early. Ruth the convert is the exception. Esther’s husband king Ahasuerus also has a very limited role, which is remarkable for a significant personage like a king. Ezra forced Jewish men returning from Babylon to put away (i.e., divorce) their foreign (i.e., non-Jewish) wives, lest they bring idolatrous influences “into the mix”. The biblical record is not especially favorable toward such mixing.
Let me emphasize again what I posted before, when I said that there is no intention among MJs to exclude non-Jews, other than for the purposes of protecting ourselves from being overwhelmed, trampled underfoot, or otherwise harmed. However there are consequences for non-Jews who enter Jewish space, and for the Jews who try to accommodate them; thus there are also constraints and limitations. Among the tens of thousands of ancient Torah-zealous MJs around Jerusalem in the first century, the continuation of normative Jewish praxis might have presented some difficulty for any would-be non-Jewish participants who were not already proselytes or otherwise accustomed to Jewish space. However, at the time when that observation was reported to Rav Shaul, the issues related to incorporating non-Jews into the MJ community had not yet been thoroughly considered. Many MJs at that time presumed that Rav Yeshua’s instructions to “make disciples” (viz:Matt.28:19) would require conversion of any non-Jews to Judaism as part of their discipleship process. Rav Shaul saw this idea as potentially damaging both to the MJ community and to the non-Jews who would miss-out on the blessings of demonstrating the fulfillment of prophecies about the redemption of non-Jews also as representatives of all humankind. If they were to convert, they would no longer be non-Jews who could demonstrate this marvel. Further, conversion would also place an unnecessary cultural burden on these non-Jewish G-d-fearers (and we can see historically that it could also overwhelm Jewish identity to try to absorb so many newcomers into Judaism all at once). The (MJ) Jerusalem Council debated the issue and agreed to what we see in Acts 15, recognizing that the requirements for Jews should not be required for non-Jews and summarizing a distinctive minimum set of simple principles for the non-Jewish segment of the “ecclesia”. Different sets of rules make for separate communities, though that doesn’t mean they can’t work together on common purposes. They may even split a pizza (a modern example of breaking bread together), provided the pepperoni is omitted and a few other kashrut considerations are observed. [:)]
They may even split a pizza (a modern example of breaking bread together), provided the pepperoni is omitted and a few other kashrut considerations are observed.
There is such a thing as turkey pepperoni but then there’s still the mixing of meat and dairy. I suppose a good cheese pizza is in order. 😉