Tag Archives: God

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Consider the Days of Old

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New WorldOn the verse, “Consider the days of old, the years of the many generations (Deut. 32:7),” the 13th century scholar Nachmanides explains that “Consider the days of old” refers to the Six Days of Creation and “The years of the many generations” refers to the time from Adam forward.” Many leading rabbis who lived centuries before Darwin understood that when Adam appeared on the scene, the universe might have already been much older. Most notably, this is the opinion attributed to Rabbi Nechunia Ben Hakana who lived some 2,000 years ago, which is quoted by many mainstream, medieval commentators such as Rabbenu Bechaya, the Recanti, Tzioni, and the Sefer HaChinuch. Rabbi Yitzhak M’Acco, a student of Nachmanides, suggested based on kabbalistic calculations that the universe is thousands of millions of years old.

With regard to humans arriving on the scene, the Talmud (Chagiga 13b) states clearly that there were 974 generations prior to Adam. The famous Tifferes Yisrael commentary to the Mishnah wrote in 1842 (prior to publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species): “In my opinion, the prehistoric men whose remains have been discovered in our time and who lived long before Adam are identical with the 974 pre-Adamite generations referred to in the Talmud, and lived in the epoch immediately before our own.”

Of course, the key point where Torah and evolutionists diverge is on the question of “accident versus design.” Evolutionists say that life happened by accident; Judaism says that God made it happen.

from the “Ask the Rabbi” column
“Evolution and the Bible”
Aish.com

I know I’m going to get “heck” for this, at least from conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews. Evolution and Creation are supposed to be incompatible in both religion and science, but the Aish Rabbi crafts a response to the question of Evolution that allows for both.

Up to a point.

I just finished re-reading Gerald L. Schroeder’s book Genesis and the Big Bang (and just started reading his more recent book The Hidden Face of God ) and Schroeder seems to believe something similar (also, see my previous blog post For God Rolled the Dice and the Universe Came to Be for more).

One of the problems comes along with trying to reconcile the six days of Creation in the Bible with the 13.7 or so billion years science says the universe has been around. According to present scientific theory, the Earth has been in existence for about 4.5 billion years.

How do six days fit into billions of years and vice versa?

Schroeder suggests a rather complicated interplay involving time dilation and relativity to explain that, from the Earth’s point of view, billions of years passed, but from God’s perspective, it was only six days. Schroeder spent an entire chapter laying the foundation for his belief and I can’t find any way to compress it into a paragraph or two in this blog post and still have it make sense. Suffice it to say that both science and the Bible are right as Schroeder sees it.

But what about life and evolution? According to the Bible, God created all living things as they are known today, including human beings, in just a few days. There were no previous and less developed forms of life, that became more complicated over time as they adapted to environmental changes, resulting in the creatures we have on our planet right now.

The Aish Rabbi refers to the Talmud which states that “there were 974 generations prior to Adam” and that those generations describe the lives of those beings we refer to as “prehistoric man.” Presumably, during that time, other creatures were also created, existed, and faced extinction.

It all makes a sort of sense, but I’m still struggling with seeing Genesis as being able to wholly map to the observations and interpretations we have about our universe based on astronomy, geology, and paleontology.

ancient_skyI admit, that whether you believe the Earth is ten thousand years old or 4.5 billion years old, devotion to God and love and charity to human beings shouldn’t be impacted to any degree in the life of a Christian or observant Jew. Still, it’s a compelling issue because the extreme literal stance on Creation taken by conservative Christians is one of the barriers to evangelizing more educated secular atheists. Educated unbelievers can’t be past the “Christians are ignorant buffoons” factor and I myself feel embarrassed when I hear a Christian trying to convince someone that Earth is a mere ten thousand years of age.

Christians aren’t likely to take the Talmud as an authority but it’s telling that “the famous Tifferes Yisrael commentary to the Mishnah” was written in 1842, prior to the publication of Darwin’s famous “Origin of Species.” Darwin, like the stream of Judaism the Aish Rabbi represents, believes in some sort of evolutionary process but that it was not random. God was always the causal agent, the Master Designer.

According to Dr. I. Prigogine, recipient of two Nobel prizes in chemistry: “The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident is zero.”

Darwin himself wrote in Origin of Species: “…If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications — my theory would absolutely break down…”

The jury is still out regarding the sequencing of how life developed, over what time period, and the mechanics God employed. I believe God made human beings independently and as we are now without prior evolutionary forms, but what about animal life, which was never intended to have the unique position of man?

The Bible is well aware of evolution, although it is not very interested in the details of the process. All of animal evolution gets a mere seven sentences (Genesis 1:20-26). Genesis tells us that simple aquatic animals were followed by land animals, mammals, and finally humans.

That is also what the fossil record tells us, albeit with much more detail than these few biblical verses provide. The Bible makes no claims as to what drove the development of life, and science has yet to provide the answer.

In paleontology’s record of evolution, first came the discovery that life appeared on Earth almost 4 billion years ago, immediately after the molten globe had cooled sufficiently for liquid water to form. This contradicted totally the theory of gradual evolution over billions of years in some nutrient-rich pool. The rapid origin of life remains a mystery.

Then we learned that some 550 million years ago, in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, animals with optically perfect eyes, gills, limbs with joints, mouths and intestines burst upon the fossil scene – with nary a clue in older fossils as to how they evolved. It is no wonder that Darwin, in his “Origin of the Species,” repeatedly implored his readers (seven times by my count) to ignore the fossil record if they were to understand his theory.

The overwhelming weight of evidence tells us that something exotic certainly happened to produce life as we know it. Historically one of the most compelling arguments regarding the existence of God comes from the precision design found in nature. Design implies a designer, and Darwin’s proposal that evolution could have occurred without a Designer (by means of natural selection through random mutations) changed things.

The Aish Rabbi’s opinion is certainly controversial when considered from a fundamentalist Christian position and likely when seen from an Orthodox Jewish viewpoint (my wife says the local Chabad Rabbi believes the Earth is roughly 12,000 years old).

world-of-extinct-mammals

I’m writing all this, not to yank anyone’s chain (though I’m sure it will) but to explore my own thought processes on this matter. I didn’t become a believer until I was past forty years old, so all of my educational foundation is based on Earth being very old and that the basic process of scientific examination of our environment is sound and designed to produce more or less reasonable results (although history has shown that those results aren’t always correct upon subsequent examination).

Religion, for its part, has had to make up some rather fanciful stories to explain the fossil record, to explain our understanding of the size and therefore the age of the universe, to explain our understanding of the age of various geological formations on our own planet, and to explain a myriad of other findings from the world of science that seems to radically contradict an absolute literal reading of the Bible’s Genesis account.

I really enjoy reading about the sciences, though I’m quite the amateur. I enjoy astronomy. I like hearing about the latest “adventures” of the various robotic probes on the surface of Mars. I have an interest in reading about the journey of Voyager 1 at the edge of interstellar space. I think God created us with an insatiable curiosity about the universe around us and a drive to explore it with the intelligence he created in us.

Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

–Genesis 2:15-17 (NASB)

It is said that there was no death before the Fall (which happens in Genesis 3) so how could there have been life on a long-term scale before Adam and Eve? How could life in some form or another have existed for hundreds of millions of years before Adam and there not be death?

When God describes the consequences of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, how did Adam know what “die” meant? How could the serpent convince Eve she wouldn’t die (Genesis 3:1-5) from eating the fruit if dying was unknown to her? Why would she fear death and why would she have to overcome that fear in order to eat?

Reading the various consequences God visited upon Adam, Eve, and the rest of Creation as listed in Genesis 3, none of them say that all life was immortal before the Fall and suddenly became mortal afterward.

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”

–Genesis 3:22 (NASB)

Gateway to EdenIt seems as if the two humans in the Garden were mortal (along with all other forms of life) and only by taking and eating from the tree of life would they become immortal! The presence of death wasn’t dependent upon the Fall. All life in the Garden was mortal.

Why couldn’t any life that may have existed as created within the span (as the Aish Rabbi suggests) described in Genesis 1:20-26 (the millions and millions of years prior to the creation of modern human beings) have been born, lived, and died, and born, lived, and died, and born, lived, and died?

Yeah, I expect to get some static over this blog post, but I’m writing it to explore my own thinking process in this area and also to (hopefully) inspire others to think as well. We need to take a look at the evidence presented by our environment, take a look at the Bible, take a look at our dogma, and struggle with what all that is supposed to mean.

I believe God created us to think, to explore, and to struggle with the meaning of everything we see. I think He wanted us to wonder and to experience wonder. I don’t think He wanted the Bible to be some sort of cosmic solution machine spitting out all the answers to all the questions in bite-sized chunks, like eating from a bowl of Christian-Jewish fortune cookies.

We don’t have to get all the answers from the Bible. God gave us other tools to use as well. Telescopes, microscopes, and the Large Hadron Collider aren’t the enemies of the Bible. They complement it. They are the lens through which we examine the world which reveals God, just as the Bible is the story of the relationship between God and human beings.

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The Evidence of Love

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love-in-lightsThe Alter Rebbe repeated what the Mezritcher Maggid said quoting the Baal Shem Tov: “Love your fellow like yourself” is an interpretation of and commentary on “Love Hashem your G-d.” He who loves his fellow-Jew loves G-d, because the Jew has with in himself a “part of G-d Above.” Therefore, when one loves the Jew – i.e. his inner essence – one loves G-d.

“Today’s Day”
Friday, Menachem Av 12, 5703
Compiled by the Lubavitcher Rebbe; Translated by Yitschak Meir Kagan
Chabad.org

One of the scribes came and heard them arguing, and recognizing that He had answered them well, asked Him, “What commandment is the foremost of all?” Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

–Mark 12:28-31 (NASB)

I would hardly suggest that the commentary I found in an email I received from Chabad.org was intended to map back to the teachings of Yeshua (Jesus), but the comparison really stands out. Perhaps it is one of those lessons that is equally apparent from a Jewish and Christian point of view, except that Jesus was a Jewish teacher talking to a Jewish scribe within a wholly Jewish context. We non-Jews get that point (or should get it) somewhat after the fact, so it would be wise of us not to do away with the Jewish framework in which the Master was teaching. That’s what gives his lessons their full meaning.

The “Today’s Day” commentary is specifically addressing a Jewish audience as well, which is obvious since it discusses one Jew loving another Jew as being equal to loving God, rather than one human being loving another. The interesting question is, when Jesus was teaching the two greatest commandments, did he mean that loving your neighbor is loving your Jewish neighbor?

That could very well have been the case, if you look at who Jesus was addressing and where this conversation was taking place. I don’t mean that Jesus was unconscious of the larger application of his teaching, but it hadn’t gotten that far yet. He came for the lost sheep of Israel not the lost sheep of planet Earth…well, not at that time. He assigned that job (gathering the lost sheep from the nations) to Paul on the road to Damascus some time later.

As impossible as it sounds, as absurd as it may seem: The mandate of darkness is to become light; the mandate of a busy, messy world is to find oneness.

-Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
“The Mandate of Darkness”
Chabad.org

It’s important to remember that Rabbi Freeman is also addressing a Jewish audience, so don’t go crazy and assume he believes that Jews and Gentiles (particularly Christians) should all be “one.” Except that in Judaism, it is believed that Messiah will unite humanity in peace, not as a homogeneous body of human beings, but as Jews and Gentiles who are all subject to the King, who will come (return) and rule with a rod of iron. We will all be “one” in the sense that we will all be subjects of the King.

Even in the Messianic age though, as I understand it, people will still have the choice as to whether or not to acknowledge and obey the King. On the other hand, it does say that every knee shall bow. But there will still be Israel that is blessed by God and the people of the nations who are blessed through Israel; the people of the nations who are called by His Name.

But what is to be learned from this? Not that those of us who put ourselves under the authority of the King will all be cookie-cutter, carbon copies of one another. What is to be learned is that we will love one another and in fact, all disciples of the Master are commanded to love one another right now.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

–John 13:34 (NASB)

arguing-with-godWithin the context of being disciples of Jesus, both Jewish and non-Jewish followers are commanded to love each other, regardless of our differences. That’s a rather tall order. I once heard a retired Pastor say that he’s seen churches split over what color to paint the walls of the Fellowship Hall. We don’t get along easily, let alone love one another. But if the Baal Shem Tov is correct and loving your fellow human being (I’ll adapt his teaching to be more generalized) is equivalent to our inner essence loving God, then the reverse must be true. Hostility, envy, anger, and hatred toward our “neighbor” must also be the expression of those emotions toward God.

That’s a horrible thought.

I don’t know if it’s true or not but if we were to even pretend it is, our motivation to love should become a great deal more plain. If we say we love God with all our heart and with every fiber of our being (most people tend to exaggerate the extent of their ability to love, but let’s say we are capable of this), then the evidence of our statement is how we treat other people, particularly within the community of faith.

By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.

–John 13:35 (NASB)

See? Love (or lack thereof) of our fellow believer is evidence of whether or not we actually do love God. People will know us as disciples of the Master by how we love each other. God, of course, already knows.

Torah Portion

V’etchanan: What Comes From God

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ancient_jerusalemFor what great nation is there that has a god so close at hand as is the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him?

–Deuteronomy 4:7

Should one only call out for the “big things”? To think that prayer to God is only for the “big things” is a big mistake! We must turn to God for help and understanding in everything we do.

The Chazon Ish, a great rabbi, cited the Talmud which relates that Rav Huna had 400 barrels of wine that spoiled. His colleagues told him to do some soul-searching regarding the cause of this loss. Rav Huna asked, “Do you suspect me of having done anything improper?”

The Sages responded, “Do you suspect God of doing something without just cause?” They then told him that he was not giving his sharecropper the agreed upon portion of the crop.

“But, he is a thief!” Rav Huna protested. “He steals from me. I have a right to withhold from him.”

“Not so,” the Sages said. “Stealing from a thief is still theft” (Talmud Bavli, Berachos 5b).

“Suppose,” the Chazon Ish said, “that something like this would occur today. The search for the cause would be whether the temperature in the room was improper or the humidity too high or too low. Few people would search for the cause within themselves, in their ethical behavior. We should know that God regulates everything except for our free will in moral and ethical matters. As with Rav Huna, nothing happens without a cause.”

Dvar Torah for Parashat Va’ethannan
from Twerski on Chumash, by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski
quoted by Rabbi Kalman Packouz in “Shabbat Shalom Weekly”
Aish.com

I agree that we should turn to God with all our matters, large or small, but I wonder if every single thing that happens to us was caused by God to teach us a lesson. What can we learn from the flat tire we get while driving to an important meeting and dressed in our best clothes? What should we gather from being caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, stubbing our toe, tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, catching a cold? Does every single event that happens, even down to the tiniest detail have to be ordained in Heaven?

I don’t know. I suppose it could. On the other hand, maybe sometimes things happen and they have no meaning. If I go down to a ridiculously small level, does it matter if I choose to wear black or white socks today? Is there going to be some consequence one way or the other? Is there a moral lesson I should learn if I get the flu or did I just get the flu? If I’m in business and should have a bad year, is that the result of some moral or ethical fault of which I’m guilty, or is it the consequence of the current economy and all businesses like mine are suffering?

Regardless of the cause of our fortunes or misfortunes (and believers are taught that everything we have comes from God), it certainly wouldn’t hurt to turn to God in good times and in bad, and call to Him for He is always near, even when we don’t feel as if He’s near.

…fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer…

–Romans 12:11-12 (NASB)

Is anyone among you suffering? Then he must pray. Is anyone cheerful? He is to sing praises. Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.

–James 5:13-15 (NASB)

praying-apostleThe verses in the Bible exhorting the advantages of prayer are all but endless, so I offer only a few examples. But it doesn’t answer the question about the nature and cause of each and every circumstance we find ourselves in. When raising small children, we try to make the consequence of misbehavior happen immediately after the misbehavior, so they’ll connect the two and learn to avoid the misbehavior. It’s easy to get the idea that God does the same thing. But then again…

Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil. Although a sinner does evil a hundred times and may lengthen his life, still I know that it will be well for those who fear God, who fear Him openly. But it will not be well for the evil man and he will not lengthen his days like a shadow, because he does not fear God.

–Ecclesiastes 8:11-13 (NASB)

In fact I believe that God deliberately delays providing the consequence upon the sinner, giving him or her time to repent and to change their behavior.

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.

–2 Peter 3:9 (NASB)

In some ways, it might be more merciful of God if He was to discipline and chastise us each and every time we mess up right when we mess up, kind of like swatting a dog on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when it does its business on the living room carpet. Then, like a dog or a small child, we’d see the obvious and inescapable pattern between certain of our actions and the painful things that happen right afterward.

But unlike the commentary I quoted above, God just doesn’t seem to arrange our lives that way, at least not all the time. We are left then, wondering which consequence is a moral lesson and which is only a random event.

We don’t know.

But what if we pretended that everything we experience is an immediate communication from God to us? This could be horribly misused and sometimes people blame themselves without reason because they were the victim of a tragic accident or a terrible crime. You can’t blame a five-year old boy because he was killed in a drive-by shooting while standing on a street corner with his Dad waiting for the light to change. You can’t blame a forty-four year old woman who has lived a life of impeccable health who is diagnosed with breast cancer.

But…

praying_at_masada…but what if regardless of whether we think an event has come from God or not, we turned to Him anyway? What if after having a productive day at work, you turned to God and thanked Him? What if after learning that the cost of repairing your car’s sudden breakdown will empty your savings account, you turned to God and begged for His help? What if, day in and day out, you turned to God, with praise and with petition, in happiness and in anguish?

What if?

Life happens. Sooner or later, something good will happen to you. Sooner or later something bad will happen to you. Sooner or later, nothing will happen to you and you’ll be really bored. You live, you laugh, you bleed, you breathe, you cry, you get angry, you get frustrated, you feel depressed, you are overjoyed, and everything else.

That’s your life. That’s from God. Talk to God about it. Ask Him Why? Ask Him How? Say “Thank you.” Say “I’m sorry.” You know your life. You know what’s happening. You know what to say. Just turn to God and say it.

And then listen.

Good Shabbos.

68 days.

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What Christians See When Looking At Messianic Jews

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sefer-torahFor every complex question, as H.L. Mencken once put, there is usually an answer that is “clear, simple and wrong.” His observation rings true when it comes to a question I get at least once a week. What do Jews believe about Jesus?

Jews as a group rarely agree on matters of Jewish belief. How could we agree on the essence of another? Yet, we ignore the question at our own peril.

-Rabbi Evan Moffic
“5 Rabbis Explain Jesus”
Huffington Post

An MJ friend wrote me describing the resistance he has been encountering from other Messianic Jews about Torah. He gets it. Mount Sinai is an eternal covenant between God and Jewish people.

-Derek Leman
“Do Messianic Jews Really Need to Keep Torah?”
Messianic Jewish Musings

And meanwhile, the Bible from cover to cover is about God’s-plan-through-Israel-to-the-world and yet the “through Israel” part is forgotten by most. Deuteronomy 4:6 is in the Bible. Verify this for yourself.

-Derek Leman
“Why Don’t Christians Believe Deuteronomy 4:6?”
Messianic Jewish Musings

“What is the Torah?”

I’ve been blogging and blogging and reading and reading trying to come up with an answer that will work between my Pastor and me during our usual Wednesday night discussions. Pastor Randy is away for several weeks in association with his doctorate studies, but I sent him a link to Derek Leman’s blog post Do Messianic Jews Really Need to Keep Torah, since it addresses the heart of our conversations. Pastor has no spare time for a long blog post, but he did send me a brief email saying that he believes the Abrahamic covenant is eternal, but the Mosaic covenant is not.

I suppose I should have expected that response, and it surprisingly hit me in a tender spot. So when Derek wrote Why Don’t Christians Believe Deuteronomy 4:6, it did absolutely nothing to improve my disposition.

Really, is there any hope for communication across the aisle, so to speak, or are we doomed to endless discussion and endless disagreements with no middle ground between any of us?

Do I really want to live a life of faith like this, at least communal faith?

But Rabbi Moffic said that “Jews as a group rarely agree on matters of Jewish belief.” Ever since Sinai, the Jewish people have been chosen and called out to be different from all of the other peoples and nations of the Earth, but how do they stand all of the internal dissonance? My guess is that, at some core level, no matter what other disputes and disagreements one Jew has with another, at the end of the day, a Jew is always a Jew.

iron-sharpens-iron-hotOK, I know there are problems with that statement and there are all kinds of disputes between different sectors of Judaism, but when “they” come for you because you’re a Jew, those disputes vanish like a snow cone in a blast furnace. Beyond a certain point, we can even grasp hope based on a Jewish Cantor welcoming even Messianic Jews on Tisha B’Av.

But that doesn’t translate very well if at all to differing groups of Christians.

John the Baptist described himself as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23), and that worked pretty well for him up until his beheading, but I’m not sure how well it’s working for me.

Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

–Proverbs 27:17 (NASB)

OK, I get that. The constant “head-banging” is supposed to sharpen us, but it also can be painful, and frankly, I’m getting a headache.

I know, “if you can’t stand the heat…” Maybe I should get out of the kitchen.

But that’s where the food is.

For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.

–Hebrews 5:13-14 (NASB)

At the end of the day, a Jew is a Jew and like it or not, all Jewish people have been bonded together since Sinai and probably before that. Does that work for Christians, though? Are we bound together so that, when adversity strikes, we’ll join with each other based on our common identity as disciples of Christ?

I’d like to think so, but I don’t know. Jews are bound not just based on belief and theology, but by 3500 years of common experience and even down to the level of DNA. Although Jews don’t think of themselves in terms of being “tribal” anymore, it’s still there beneath the surface. Tribes and clans and families are bonded beyond any unbonding, and God drew all Jewish people to Him under the chuppah of cloud and fire at Sinai and sealed the covenant with Torah.

The Birthright program exists to encourage young Jewish people who have little or no attachment to the Land and to the Torah to experience Israel. I hear there’s something about standing on the ground and breathing the air in Israel that has an effect on Jewish people (and perhaps a few Christians as well). I can’t say from experience, but for the sake of my Jewish children, I hope so.

I can only say that for Christians, a common faith in Jesus is the lynchpin that holds us together, at least in theory. But while it is presupposed that Jews will argue with Jews as an expected behavior, how am I as a Christian supposed to explain to another Christian that being Jewish and the existence of the Torah are inexorably linked and cannot be unlinked. Even an atheist Jew will one day confront the meaning of being Jewish beyond the mere ethnic and genetic identity.

jewish-davening-by-waterI recently wrote about Jews encountering themselves through the mitzvot and some Rabbis hope that encouraging a Jewish person to experience even a single mitzvah will make a difference. At the time, I applied that hope to Christians as well, but we must face the facts that Christians don’t think of themselves in the same way as Jewish think of themselves.

No wonder that we can’t get Christians to see Jews as they want to be seen.

There are days when I just want to scream to the Church, “Just let Jews be Jews! We don’t have to agree with them! They don’t need our permission!” But I suppose that wouldn’t go over very well.

Jews rarely agree with each other on matters of belief. Christians are expected to agree with each other on matters of belief. If they don’t, then it usually means some group will split off from their church to form a different church. That’s how Christians manage the dissonance of disagreement.

I have what I think of as a unique relationship with my Pastor in that we can regularly meet every week, disagree on fundamental issues, and still be friends. Pastor lived in Israel for fifteen years and is intimately acquainted with Jewish life in Israel, so on that basis, he knows what it is like to live among lots of Jewish people. And yet, every week when we meet, I still feel like I’m facing some sort of battle for the rights of Jewish people to define their own identity as Jewish based on the Torah, especially Jews who are disciples of Messiah.

I keep thinking of the venerable 19th century Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein who became a devotee of Yeshua past the age of sixty and yet remained wholly Jewish in his practice, observance, identity, and discipleship. His life as a devout Jew and a Messianic disciple seems so open and clear. Reading The Everlasting Jew showed me how his life made so much sense the way he lived it.

I don’t see a dissonance between what R. Lichtenstein believed and how he lived and the Biblical life of Jesus, Peter, and Paul. I just wish everyone could see what I see, not because I’m so smart, but because I believe I’m seeing what God wants all Christians to see when we look at Messianic Jews.

Why is communicating that vision so hard?

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Gratitude

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gratitudeAs an exercise, make a list of the ideas you regularly espouse, along with the original sources you heard them from. Think of people who gave you wisdom for living. Did a friend set you straight on something? Your brother saved you from doing some stupid things? An employer gave you good career advice?

Acknowledge that you received the gift. If someone took the blinders off your eyes, it’s fantastic, it’s a different life. Say to yourself: “I am now aware of something very important that I wasn’t paying attention to.” Say it out loud. That alone will make you feel genuine appreciation.

-Rabbi Noah Weinberg
“Way #50: Rewards of Gratitude”
Aish.com

If you ask a Christian who they are grateful to more than anyone, you’ll probably hear “Jesus” nine times out of ten, and rightfully so. Without the grace of the Jewish Messiah and our faith in God through him, we people among the nations would have no connection to the Almighty and His mercy. But Jesus doesn’t exist in isolation. He’s the Jewish Messiah, which Christians sometimes miss. Even when we know that intellectually, we don’t always fully appreciate what it means that he is the Jewish Messiah, the promised Savior of Israel.

I’ve probably said all this before, but in reading Rabbi Weinberg’s commentary, the topic resurfaced for me. Some truths are best restated periodically just to make sure they stay fresh in everyone’s mind.

Make a list of society’s treasures – monotheism, justice for all, universal education, dignity of the individual, preciousness of life. These core values of the civilized world are all from the Torah.

Before the Torah was given, people built their lives on a subjective concept of right and wrong. Then at Mount Sinai, human history underwent a dynamic shift. People understood that there is one God who has moral expectations. You can’t just live as you please; there is a higher authority you are accountable to.

Despite the fact that Jews were never more than a tiny fraction of the world’s population, these ideas became the basis for the civilized world. For example, do you know the source of the idea “Love your neighbor as yourself”?

It’s in the Five Books of Moses – Leviticus 19:18.

The Jewish people are an eminent firm, 3,500 years old. We are no fly-by-night. The world uses our products under different brand names and takes it for granted. Consider what humanity owes to the Jewish people.

If you are living with Jewish wisdom, know it, quote it, and give credit.

There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that isn’t “Jewish wisdom.” All of Christ’s “source material” was the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. It’s what he quoted from. It’s what he taught from. It resonated with his Jewish audience because they had been raised on that “source material” all their lives.

Paul taught from that source material too, when teaching Messiah to Jewish and Gentile God-fearing audiences. Acts 13:13-43 is a perfect example of Paul using Jewish history to explain why Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth was the promised Messiah and the Jewish people in the synagogue understood and agreed, at least to the point of inviting Paul and Barnabas back to their synagogue in Pisidian Antioch on the following Shabbat to speak more.

Apostle-PaulEven the Gentiles among the Jews understood because they had been exposed each Shabbat to the teachings from the Torah and so had the basic background that allowed them to follow Paul’s arguments. They understood so well in fact, that they invited practically the whole town (of Gentiles) to hear Paul the following week (which caused problems of their own, but that’s another story).

The only time when “Jewish wisdom” broke down was when Paul and Barnabas addressed a wholly pagan Gentile audience who had absolutely no clue about Judaism and Jewish history. In that case (Acts 14:8-18), Paul had to give the crowd a crash course in Judaism 101 just to keep them from worshiping him and Barnabas as Zeus and Hermes respectively.

I say all this as a reminder (in case anyone’s forgotten) that we would have no understanding of Jesus at all unless we at least minimally understood something about “Jewish wisdom” (and we reject this line of education at our own peril).

More than all, give credit to the Almighty. He gave us a brain to understand and appreciate wisdom. Other teachers enlighten us, but the original teacher is God. He implanted within us the intuition to discover all there is to know about living.

God is showering us with gifts all the time. Food, air, eyes, teeth. Life itself. He programmed us with an antenna for wisdom. Nothing is possible without God.

This should be a no brainer, but it’s more common in Jewish prayer to praise God than in Christian prayer. It’s just my opinion, but I think there’s a definite advantage to praying with a Siddur since the blessings within greatly praise God and thank Him for His mercy and bountifulness. It takes us just a little more concentration to praise God without a prayer book, since the human tendency is to ask for what we want and need (which isn’t bad, except if that’s all we do when we pray).

The problem is that we don’t want to be indebted to Him, so we deny the gifts. We refuse to believe that He loves us.

I know I’ll probably get some static for this, but in a nutshell, I think the Rabbi has given us the reason why many people don’t come to faith. We don’t want to be indebted to Him. We’re afraid of what that means for us, what we’ll have to change about us, how we won’t fit in to the culture, that we’ll realize we aren’t perfect as self-contained human beings.

It’s probably why even a lot of religious people don’t want to thank God, at least not anywhere near as much as He deserves (and face it, He deserves infinite thanks). That may also be why Christians don’t want to thank the Jewish people and Judaism for what we have. We’re afraid of what it will mean. We’re afraid that Jewish people are still part of God’s plan, that He still loves them, maybe more than the Gentile believers. We’re afraid that Israel will be placed at the head of the nations instead of America or Canada or whatever.

raining1We want to be special because we’re Christians, including our particular denomination, branch, or sect. If Jewish Israel was chosen first, they might still be first or at least very special in God’s eyes. What does that do to we Gentiles who are called by His Name (does that make us jealous and covetous of Jews)?

God loving Israel probably does nothing to us except make us just as loved by God as the Jewish people, but also different from them, like two brothers of a King, both loved but both different.

And God loves even those who reject Him and do not want to be called “sons.”

…your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

–Matthew 5:45 (NASB)

There is no way for the unjust and the unrighteous to acknowledge God and thank Him, but we who are disciples of the Jewish Messiah have no such excuse.

In order to connect with God, you have to learn to appreciate all the good He has done for you. That means giving up the illusion that you alone are responsible for your achievements. It’s all a gift from God. Just as every stroke of Picasso’s brush has his signature on it, everything in this world has God’s signature on it. We have to learn to appreciate it.

Everything in this world has God’s signature on it. Even those people who do not believe, since all human beings have been created in God’s image. We believers know God’s signature is on us. We agreed to that when we acknowledged Messiah and came to faith through the Jewish King.

They asked Rabbi Schneur Zalman:
“Which is greater: love of G‑d,
or love of your fellow man?”

“Love of your fellow man,” he replied.
“For then you are loving the one that your Beloved loves.”

-Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
“Which is Greater”
Based on letters and talks of the Rebbe, Rabbi M. M. Schneerson
Chabad.org

Rabbi Weinberg’s point is that we should publicly give credit to the source of our blessings. Christians usually have no trouble thanking Jesus for our blessings but as I mentioned, Jesus doesn’t exist apart from his connection to Israel. Messiah descended from Heaven for the lost sheep of Israel. When he returns, he will redeem all Israel and restore her at the head of the nations.

We should also give credit to Israel, to the Torah, to the Prophets, to all the instruments God blessed the Jewish people with, because without Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, without the twelve sons of Israel, without their descendants, without the Davidic Kings, without the Davidic King, Messiah, we would have nothing and be nothing.

Thank you.

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For God Rolled the Dice and the Universe Came to Be

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roll-the-dicePhysics cannot describe what happens inside a black hole. There, current theories break down, and general relativity collides with quantum mechanics, creating what’s called a singularity, or a point at which the equations spit out infinities.

But some advanced physics theories are trying to bridge the gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics, to understand what’s truly going on inside the densest objects in the universe. Recently, scientists applied a theory called loop quantum gravity to the case of black holes, and found that inside these objects, space and time may be extremely curved, but that gravity there is not infinite, as general relativity predicts.

-by Clara Moskowitz
Space.com Assistant Managing Editor
“Space-Time Loops May Explain Black Holes”
Space.com

Clara had me at “space and time may be extremely curved, but that gravity there is not infinite.” About forty years or so ago, I took my first Astronomy class at UNLV. Yes, I know. That was back at the dawn of time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, or at least it may seem that way to some of you. It certainly makes my knowledge of Astronomy rather antique compared to the advances science has made since that time. But I still enjoy reading a few popular (that is, easy to digest for the average person) articles on such topics.

In those undergrad days (the first time I was an undergrad), I wrote a couple of papers about areas of Astronomy that particularly interested me. One was the end products of stars. What happens to a star when it runs out of fuel to burn? If the star has a mass of three times or more of our own sun, it collapses into a black hole. When I was going to school, general relativity said that a black hole was a singularity and that its mass was infinite. Today, the latest theories suggest otherwise.

Exciting stuff.

My other favorite topic was Cosmology or the theory of the origin of the universe. I found a small book written by a Swedish scientist that involved Matter and Anti-Matter as active components in the origin of the universe, but it was a minority theory then. Today, it’s non-existent.

But Space.com has a really cool and readable article on what we know to date about the “Big Bang” and what followed afterward.

Probably a lot of Christians coming across this blog post are going to raise an eyebrow or two. At the little church were I worship, both the Head Pastor and one of the Associate Pastors have both told me they don’t believe in an “old universe.” They seem to believe, like many conservative Christians and not a few religious Jewish people, that the Earth is anywhere between about ten to fifteen thousand years old.

All of this millions and billions of years stuff as described in the Big Bang article doesn’t work for them. Why? Because of how they read the beginning chapter of Genesis which is literal. God created the Earth and everything else in six (they believe) literal days. The Hebrew word used for “day” in chapter one of Genesis is almost universally translated “day” as in a twenty-four hour period.

Given an inconsistency between human scientific observation and theory and the record of the Bible, they choose the Bible every single time. Biblical sufficiency pretty much demands it.

Or does it?

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them;
and nothing is hid from its heat.

–Psalm 19:1-7 (NRSV)

sky-above-you-god1Especially the first verse of the above-quoted Psalm tells us that God is revealed by the universe itself. We should be able to look at the stars, examine the heavens, and understand that there is a God. This is known as general revelation or the environment and everything we observe in it reveals the existence of God. The more specific revelation, which gives us lots of other details, declares God as well. It’s the Bible.

But should the two revelations conflict? I would think not. We should see them both fitting together like interlacing fingers of the left and right hand of man. Even if a person has never seen a Bible or heard of Christianity and Judaism, simply observing the universe, all of creation in all of its details, is intended to illustrate that there is a God. The Bible reveals many of the specific details of how God interacts with human beings, using principally the Jewish people and the nation of Israel as a model.

So what do we do when the Genesis story and our astronomical observations and theories conflict? What do we do when the Bible says that the Earth (and presumably all of the universe) was created in six literal twenty-four hour periods, and astronomical observations and theories conclude that our solar system wasn’t formed until the universe was already nine billion years old?

A Bible literalist will say that the Bible is always correct and human scientific observation and theory is wrong. A scientist (one who is not religious) will conclude that the Bible is full of hogwash and our best scientific observations and theories present the facts accurately to the best of our ability to interpret them.

But what if they’re both right?

If we believe God and David as he wrote the nineteenth psalm, then the universe is supposed to be a revelation of God even as the Bible is, so they must agree.

But how can they both be right when on the one hand, we have a matter of six days and on the other we have billions and billions of years?

I don’t know.

Ultimately, I don’t have to know, but like Albert Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Actually, all that means was Einstein believed the universe should be founded upon solid, deterministic laws. He was probably thumbing his nose at Quantum Mechanics (QM) which is much more dependent on probably and uncertainty in the universe. But he sells the point that the universe should make some sort of sense, at least as far as communicating to human beings that only God could have brought the universe into being. The “Big Bang” was a “spoken Word” (If you’ll read the Big Bang article, you’ll see that the initial tiny, tiny fraction of a second of the start of the universe wasn’t an explosion as we think of such a thing).

Actually, it’s not the awesome vastness of the universe that communicates God to me but the incredible weirdness that QM describes. The idea that “atoms exist in quantized, discrete states, loop quantum gravity posits that space-time itself is made of quantized, discrete bits, in the form of tiny, one-dimensional loops” inside a black hole is beyond bizarre and this, more than anything, tells me there is a God, one whose mind is incredibly and infinitely creative. His universe is shouting at us to pay attention. None of this happens by accident and no human being could have cooked this up.

The more we look, the more incredible and the more surprising the universe gets. We used to think that the universe was composed pretty much of ordinary atoms, the stuff we can see all around us every day. Now, we think that only about 4.3 percent of the universe is made up of atoms (75% hydrogen and 25% helium, with just an itsy, bitsy fraction of the rest being heavier elements, including the stuff that makes you and me), while the rest if full of much more exotic energy and matter.

According to an article by Stephen Hawking, God may well “play dice” with (or introduce uncertainty and some randomness into) the universe (there’s a notice at the beginning of the article that says I can’t reproduce any portion of the content, so I can’t include a quote…maybe Hawking’s cranky over his rather sad boycott of Israel…but I digress). It’s this uncertainly that, rather than suggest the universe came about through a random or unguided (uncreative, unintelligent) process, was built into the universe, and was the product of an infinitely creative mind and force…God.

I have no problem believing that the universe is more or less as we experience it; extremely old from the point of view of a human time scale. Why should God care? He exists outside of His creation, He’s timeless. Theories vary widely about how old modern human beings are, but I think the story of those early humans, our Adam and Eve, are the record of God’s creation of us and the creation of His relationship with us.

black-holeMaybe the only meaningful or reasonable historical record of God’s interaction with people is what we’ve experienced over the past ten or fifteen thousand years.

Everything I’m saying along these lines is highly speculative and I’m most certainly attempting to reconcile what human beings know about our environment and ourselves with my faith and trust in the God of Israel. If that’s being more than a little self-serving, so be it. It helps me sleep at night, and God knows I can use the rest.

I once heard an attorney use the phrase “hide the ball.” At the time, I thought she was referring to a children’s game, but I recently found out it’s a legal term. It means to withhold legal evidence. Legal teams sometimes “hide the ball” or withhold evidence from the court (a big “no-no” which could get an attorney disbarred) if that evidence could result in them losing their case.

Rather than refer to dice, I prefer to say that God doesn’t play hide the ball with the universe. That is, God doesn’t withhold evidence. What we see in our environment, from the tiniest particle to the largest galaxy (to the best that we can understand what we see), is what we get. Otherwise, God created the appearance of the universe to tell us a tremendous lie, and why would He do that?

He wouldn’t. But if God didn’t lie about the universe and He didn’t lie about the Bible, and if six literal days is different from 13.7 billion years or so (the estimated age of the universe), then God didn’t screw up, we did somewhere along the line. Biblical literalists assume scientists have screwed up, but I have to say, that’s pretty unlikely unless the entire scientific community devoted to cosmology for the last century or so are idiots or liars. I don’t think Biblical literalists are idiots or liars either, but I do believe that the beginning passages in our Bible cannot be interpreted with absolute literalism. Genesis One isn’t God’s “cookbook” containing the recipe for Creation.

Like Stephen Hawking suggests at the end of his article (although there’s no indication that Professor Hawking believes in a God of any sort), God may have a few tricks of His sleeve. Bible sufficiently just means that it contains enough information for us, not that it contains everything. The Bible fills in blanks in our knowledge of God that the universe doesn’t supply. I think the process works both ways.

For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

–Psalm 33:9 (NRSV)

One more thing. Please don’t imagine that I literally believe God rolled dice in order to create the universe. I just “warped” the above-quoted scripture to make the title. It sounded “creative.”