Tag Archives: Torah

Finding the Path

September 16, 2013 James Pyles 6 Comments

That God is a redeeming God is a testament to God’s power, but that redemptive power is strangely ambiguous, for if God’s redemptive power will be manifest only at the end of days, then the inescapable implication is that in the here and now God’s power is not fully manifest. The final verse from the prophet Zechariah (14:9), with which we conclude every formal Jewish service of worship…has a significant implication here. The context is a vivid description of “the day of the Lord,” a common prophetic characterization for the age that will mark the culmination of history as we know it. The vision is apocalyptic: the familiar structures of nature will be overturned; there will be neither sunlight nor moonlight, just one continuous day; God will wage war against the evil nations and smite them with a plague. All who survive will make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship the God of Israel. And then “the Lord will be king over all the earth; on that day there shall be one Lord with one name,” or as other translations would have it, on that day, “the Lord alone shall be worshiped and shall be invoked by His true name.”

-Rabbi Neil Gillman
“Chapter 9: God Redeems,” pg 139
The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians

I, John, your brother and fellow partaker in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance, which are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day…

–Revelation 1:9-10 (NASB)

If you’re at all familiar with the imagery presented in John’s Revelation, you’ll notice a number of similarities to my quote from Rabbi Gillman above. Of course, this imagery is also available in several sections of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so it’s not unreasonable or unanticipated that Rabbi Gillman should sound as if he’s channeling the words of the apostle. What may seem strange to some Christians is the idea that Israel is not only involved in the apocalyptic future, but that it is (they are) the conduit by which the rest of the world approaches redemptive history.

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, this bit of news shouldn’t be completely unfamiliar. A number of my reviews of episodes of the FFOZ TV: The Promise of What is to Come television show have touched on this history. These include the topics exile and redemption, the ingathering of Israel, the Gospel message, Jewish repentance and the Kingdom being now. If you put all of this information together, you come up with a startling picture….well, startling if you are traditionally Christian.

Most of the time, in the church, we are taught that if anyone, including Jewish people, want to be reconciled with God, they must convert to Christianity and start worshiping Jesus Christ. Almost no one is teaching that in order to be saved by God, we have to go through Israel.

What? Am I saying we all have to convert to Judaism? Not at all. But we have tended to reverse causality as Christians, believing that Israel has lost significance with God and that the Church (big “C”) has overshadowed if not replaced her in God’s covenant promises. But if you read this blog post and especially the comments section, you’ll see there’s a strong indication that the return of Messiah and the final acts of redemptive history will only occur when Israel corporately repents and returns to God and the Torah! To that end, we in the Church (big “C”, all of us) have a responsibility and a duty to encourage Jewish Torah observance and repentance.

There was nothing preventing me from observing Yom Kippur in a traditionally Jewish fashion, but I chose not to fast this year. I know some of you will think I’m terrible for abstaining from “the fast,” and others will think not a thing about it. I suppose I could have fasted in order to encourage my wife and daughter, but it’s like the reason I stopped lighting the Shabbos candles. There’s little point in the only Goy in the home acting more “Jewish” than the Jewish people in the home.

Fortunately, my wife has started lighting the candles again, so there’s hope that she is participating in the forward flow of Jewish history that will culminate in the return of the Jewish King.

I feel a little guilty anyway, but if I believe that it is Jewish Torah observance that is the key to the coming of Moshiach, then shouldn’t I draw the distinction in my family? After all, my wife always thinks it’s strange of me when I avoid a pork chop or a plate of hot, buttery shrimp (not that such food would ever be found in our home). She’d no doubt have wondered why I was fasting on Yom Kippur (and I’m encouraged because for the first time in years, she fasted on Yom Kippur).

I’m meeting with my Pastor this week for our usual Wednesday night talk. I noticed on my calendar that our 7:30 meeting will also be the candle lighting time for Erev Sukkot. I experienced momentary guilt at this, and then regret that I’d miss my wife lighting the candles again. Fortunately, I just finished building and decorating our sukkah, so it’s all ready for the festival.

I must admit, Sukkot is one of my favorite holidays. Am I being a hypocrite by not fasting on Yom Kippur but building a sukkah in my backyard? I hope not. My wife and daughter won’t be building anything very soon, so it’s one of those gender-specific activities that lands on my side of the fence. I also find that the image of the Word which became flesh and “sukkahed” among us (John 1:14) is eminently portrayed at this time of year, so building a sukkah is my way of participating in the commemoration of the first Advent.

I have to admit that as the Days of Awe draw to a close and the next Torah cycle is poised to launch, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. Old friends in the Messianic movement have pulled away from me. Maybe I should have repented to them before Yom Kippur. Maybe I’m becoming too “Christian”. Maybe I just don’t matter in that world anymore. Who knows?

If Judaism is accelerating toward its own redemptive history, what future should I, a Goyishe Christian, anticipate? I believe the Jewish people and Israel (and especially Israel’s firstborn son, Messiah) are the doorway into redemption for the rest of the human race, but is viewing the world of faith through a Jewish lens becoming a closed door for me ? I don’t know.

God’s choosing is beyond our ability to understand. The Hebrew prophet, Amos put it this way:

To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians, declares the Lord.

True, I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir.

-Amos 9:7

To equate God’s redemption of Israel from Egyptian bondage with God’s redemption of other nations — indeed, a nation such as the Philistines, one of ancient Israel’s enemies — is a striking acknowledgment that God loves all peoples equally.

-Gillman, “Chapter 8 God Reveals,” pg 119

Rabbi Gillman is observing Jewish “chosenness” from the point of view of Reform Judaism. I don’t think an Orthodox Rabbi would hold such an opinion. Nevertheless, Rabbi Gillman hits on something important, especially for Christians. God doesn’t just love Israel and He may not even bathe Israel with more love than any other nation. God may love all of humanity in exactly the same way, even as He has chosen Israel for a specific and special purpose that is separate from the nations of the world, including the people of the nations who are called by His Name (Amos 9:11).

For Jews, what precisely was the “content,” the substance, of God’s revelation to our ancestors? Torah can be defined in many ways. It can be understood as (1) the first five books of the Bible (the Chumash, or Pentateuch, both referring to “five”); (2) the entirety of Hebrew Scripture, from Genesis to 2 Chronicles; (3) all of Scripture plus the body of rabbinic interpretation that emerged in the talmudic era (from the first to the seventh centuries C.E.); or, even more broadly, (4) the ongoing interpretation of that material through our very own day. However we define it, Torah is a complex body of doctrines, history, narratives, prayers, and legal codes. It constitutes the entire body of Judaism’s distinctive religious message.

What authority does this body of teaching have for us? Are we to accept the entire body of tradition as absolutely binding on all Jews for eternity? How free are we to depart from it, and how do we decide? The different answers to these questions account for the denominational structures that characterize the Jewish community today, from right-wing Orthodoxy to left-wing Reform and everything in between.

-Gillman, pg 120

If we are all loved and we are all invited by God to participate in His redemption through the history and future of Israel, what then is the Torah to the faithful among the nations? Of course, being loved identically and even having identical access to salvation through faith and grace does not make Jews and Christians functionally identical in terms of all the covenants. As we see from the above-quoted statement, even among collective Judaism, how Jewish authority, teaching, and obedience to God is understood is highly variable. How much more variable should it be when Gentiles are thrown into the mix by our faith in Jesus through a single condition in the Abrahamic covenant?

In addition, Israel’s “daughter religions” inherited the notion of redemptive history, which led them to believe that God’s choice had passed to another, different community. The first Christians understood that God’s revelation in and through Jesus of Nazareth superseded the Sinai covenant with “the old Israel.” (In this post-Holocaust age, however, many Christians have come to question the accuracy of this reading of Christian Scripture and to abandon it.) Islam claimed that God’s revelation to Mohammed in the Arabian desert in the seventh century C.E. constituted the seal of prophecy, God’s final revelation.

-Gillman, pg 118

Christianity tends to believe it is the “lead dog” in the pack, so to speak, so being referred to as a “daughter religion” may be a little disconcerting. However, invoking the perspective of Messianic Judaism, at least as I understand the movement, it’s certainly an appropriate term, as it fixes us in place in terms of sequence, not only regarding where we’re coming from, but in some sense, where we have to return to in order to fulfill prophesy and take our place as the crown jewels of the nations.

Even had he remained a tzaddik, the descent would still have been worthwhile; all the more so now that he has sinned.

He was meant to have confined himself to the permissible; he would have enlightened that portion of the world, healed it and carried it upward. He was meant to remain there, for if he would break out, intending to return, who knows that he could ever succeed in his gambit?

But now that he has fallen, let him return, and in doing so he will transform to light that which the tzaddik could never have touched.

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

I know Rabbi Freeman never intended this, but I cannot help but be somewhat reminded of Messiah, of Yeshua (Jesus), the tzaddik who had fallen but who rose and who will return greater than ever. I’m also reminded that it is not me and it’s not Christianity or even Judaism that means anything to the future and to God. It’s the human desire to encounter God through the doorway of a broken and bleeding heart and spirit. From that encounter, we may not learn everything, but we learn where we are on the path He has placed before each of us.

I will educate you and enlighten you in which path to go…many are the agonies of the wicked, but as for one who trusts in Hashem, kindness surrounds him.

–Psalm 32:8, 10 (Stone Edition Tanakh)

Whatever I end up doing in the coming year must conform to the path that God has designated for me, not the one being walked by anyone else.

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Did Canon Close for Christians and Jews?

September 10, 2013 James Pyles 23 Comments

When we asked Major General Farkash why Israel’s military is so antihierarchical and open to questioning, he told us it was not just the military but Israel’s entire society and history. “Our religion is an open book,” he said, in a subtle European accent that traces back to his early years in Transylvania. The “open book” he was referring to was the Talmud — a dense recording of centuries of rabbinic debates over how to interpret the Bible and obey its laws — and the corresponding attitude of questioning is built into Jewish religion, as well as into the national ethos of Israel

As Israeli author Amos Oz has said, Judaism and Israel have always cultivated “a culture of doubt and argument, an open-ended game of interpretations, counter-interpretations, reinterpretations, opposing interpretations. From the very beginning of the existence of the Jewish civilization, it was recognized by its argumentativeness.

-Dan Senor and Saul Singer
“Chapter 2: Battlefield Entrepreneurs,” pg 51
Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle

Less widely appreciated, though, is the paradox that in Judaism the canon remained fluid even as it became fixed. The word of God, unlike the language of humans, was deemed to bear an infinity of meanings with the result that canon spawned commentary. Of all literary genres, commentary is the least appealing to the modern temperament with its penchant for speed, novelty, and self-expression. Yet it is the key to Judaism’s singular achievement: a canon without closure. Revelation proved to be expansive rather than restrictive. The right, indeed the obligation, of every Jew is to plumb the Bible for meaning kept the text open, pliant, and relevant in a conversation that spanned the ages.

-Ismar Schorsch
“Introduction,” pp xv-xvi
Canon Without Closure: Torah Commentaries

This is probably one of the fundamental differences between Christianity and Judaism: the belief that it is “normal” to not agree about religion and what the Bible says. Add to this, the belief that Biblical canon is not immutably fixed across time and in fact, that interpretations of the Bible must change across time in order to remain relevant, and you have a tremendous barrier between Christianity and Judaism as religious entities.

Well, sort of.

I’m talking about the various branches of Judaism vs. fundamentalism in Christianity. If you shift to the other end of the spectrum, the view becomes different.

Simply put, the desire for an original source document is one that we’ll likely never overcome because we’ve been taught that a “source” must always exist. We assume that in order for the written word to be valid, it must be verifiable, because we were raised in the era of book reports and footnotes. The Bible, however, is a not a term paper written to appease a persnickety professor. Rather, the Bible is a written collection of generations-old, evolving oral stories as they existed at the time they were written down. Someone chose to record a tiny piece of the evolving oral tales in writing, capturing one solitary moment in the life of the story. Even in cases where the works were copied from other documents, it is probably not proper to wonder where the “source” document is, because the source was the spoken word.

From what I’ve gleaned in the essay written by Fowler and other writers, we erroneously believe that the preservation of God’s Word is the same as preserving each string of words. We also erroneously equate preserving God’s Word with preserving an interpretation of the Word. We spend a lot of time chopping scripture into sound bytes and mining tiny details of our stories, but this is not how ancient storytellers and hearers engaged these stories… We differ in approach because our high level of literacy has made us letter-focused, rather than spirit-focused, when a more faithful use of the text would be to focus on the power of story to bring people together.

-Crystal St. Marie Lewis
“Our Literary Bias: What it is and How it Affects our Perception of Scripture”
CrystalStMarieLewis.com

The blog author is commenting on an essay written by Robert M. Fowler called “Why Everything We Know About the Bible is Wrong.” I’d love to be able to read this essay myself. I commented on Ms. St. Marie Lewis’s blog asking for the source and she was gracious enough to supply the relevant link.

According to her brief bio, Ms. St. Marie Lewis says that she “writes from the perspective of a progressive Christian about religion and how it relates to the world around us,” which should tell you that she’s unlikely to reflect a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint. However, it’s her progressive perspective that is more likely to fold into, at least to some degree, the Jewish idea that canon is not rigidly fixed.

The church I attend is Baptist and generally supports a dispensationalist point of view:

Dispensationalism is an evangelical, futurist, Biblical interpretation that understands God to have related to human beings in different ways under different Biblical covenants in a series of “dispensations,” or periods in history.

One of the most important underlying theological concepts for dispensationalism is progressive revelation. While some non-dispensationalists start with progressive revelation in the New Testament and refer this revelation back into the Old Testament, dispensationalists begin with progressive revelation in the Old Testament and read forward in a historical sense. Therefore there is an emphasis on a gradually developed unity as seen in the entirety of Scripture. Biblical covenants are intricately tied to the dispensations. When these Biblical covenants are compared and contrasted, the result is a historical ordering of different dispensations. Also with regard to the different Biblical covenant promises, dispensationalism emphasises to whom these promises were written, the original recipients. This has led to certain fundamental dispensational beliefs, such as a distinction between Israel and the Church.

Dispensationalist don’t see themselves as reinterpreting the Bible from a human standpoint to adjust to the requirements of different generations, but nevertheless, they do take the text and view it as becoming more densely packed with information as it progresses from past to future, making “the Church” the ultimate receiver of the highest and most “evolved” revelations of God, somewhat in contradiction to the level of intimacy that someone like Moses would have experienced at having spoken with God “face to face” (the level of intimacy implied here is that of a husband and wife) as it were.

If dispensationalists believe that God progressively revealed Himself up to the end of the Biblical period and then stopped, that’s one thing, but what if they believe that God’s progressive revelation progressed after the end of the Biblical canon and for many centuries to follow?

John Nelson Darby is recognized as the father of dispensationalism,[1]:10, 293 later made popular in the United States by Cyrus Scofield’s Scofield Reference Bible. Charles Henry Mackintosh, 1820–96, with his popular style spread Darby’s teachings to humbler elements in society and may be regarded as the journalist of the Brethren Movement. Mackintosh popularized Darby more than any other Brethren author.

As there was no Christian teaching of a “rapture” before Darby began preaching about it in the 1830s, he is sometimes credited with originating the “secret rapture” theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove his bride, the Church, from this world before the judgments of the tribulation. Dispensationalist beliefs about the fate of the Jews and the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel put dispensationalists at the forefront of Christian Zionism, because “God is able to graft them in again”, and they believe that in his grace he will do so according to their understanding of Old Testament prophecy. They believe that, while the methodologies of God may change, his purposes to bless Israel will never be forgotten, just as he has shown unmerited favour to the Church, he will do so to a remnant of Israel to fulfill all the promises made to the genetic seed of Abraham.

Um…whoa! As it says at Wikipedia, it seems as if progressive revelation continued to progress well past the Biblical period and into modern times. How else do you get doctrines such as progressive revelation, the rapture, and Calvinism that didn’t exist in Biblical times and were created closer to the 21st century than to the 1st century? Why did God “reveal” these concepts to Christians so much later in history (and after the Christian Biblical canon was theoretically closed) and how does all this compare to the basic viewpoint of Rabbinic Judaism?

The feature that distinguishes Rabbinic Judaism is the belief in the Oral Law or Oral Torah. The authority for that position has been the tradition taught by the Rabbis that the oral law was transmitted to Moses at Mount Sinai at the same time as the Written Law and that the Oral Law has been transmitted from generation to generation since. The Talmud is said to be a codification of the Oral Law, and is thereby just as binding as the Torah itself. To demonstrate this position some point to the Exodus 18 and Numbers 11 of the Bible are cited to show that Moses appointed elders to govern with him and to judge disputes, imparting to them details and guidance of how to interpret the revelations from God while carrying out their duties. Additionally, all the laws in the Written Torah are recorded only as part of a narrative describing God telling these law to Moses and commanding him to transmit them orally to the Jewish nation. None of the laws in the Written Law are presented as instructions to the reader.

The oral law was subsequently codified in the Mishnah and Gemara, and is interpreted in Rabbinic literature detailing subsequent rabbinic decisions and writings. Rabbinic Jewish literature is predicated on the belief that the Torah cannot be properly understood without recourse to the Oral Law. Indeed, it states that many commandments and stipulations contained in the Torah would be difficult, if not impossible, to keep without the Oral Law to define them — for example, the prohibition to do any “creative work” (“melakha”) on the Sabbath, which is given no definition in the Torah, and only given practical meaning by the definition of what constitutes ‘Melacha’ provided by the Oral Law and passed down orally through the ages. Numerous examples exist of this general prohibitive language in the Torah (such as, “don’t steal”, without defining what is considered theft, or ownership and property laws), requiring — according to Rabbinic thought — a subsequent crystallization and definition through the Oral Law. Thus Rabbinic Judaism claims that almost all directives, both positive and negative, in the Torah are non-specific in nature and would therefore require the existence of either an Oral Law tradition to explain them, or some other method of defining their detail.

I know that Christian progressive revelation in the post-Biblical period and the development of Rabbinic Judaism in the post-Second Temple period don’t seem particularly related, but look at the core of what they both accomplish. They both state that the various authorities in each of these religions take the Bible as the base source material and interpret it (either via the Holy Spirit in Christian understanding or under the authority God gave the Rabbinic sages) across time in order to meet the requirements of each generation. Although Christianity likes to believe it has closed the canon at the end of the book of Revelation, the fact that many doctrines have been created in post-Biblical times that would have been alien to Jesus, Peter, and Paul attest to the opposite.

Judaism, if anything, is more upfront with what it has been doing. The Bible may be a fixed document, but it’s how we interpret it at any given point in history that gives it a lived meaning in the Christian and Jewish worlds. Are any of us truly living “Biblical lives” or are we actually living “Doctrinal lives” as interpreted by our different denominations, sects, and movements?

Torah Portion

Ha’azinu: Rain On Me

September 6, 2013 James Pyles Leave a comment

Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter! May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass.

–Deuteronomy 32:1-2 (JPS Tanakh)

God’s word is like rain in a dry land. It brings life. It makes things grow. There is much we can do of our own accord: we can plough the earth and plant the seeds. But in the end our success depends on something beyond our control. If no rain falls, there will be no harvest, whatever preparations we make. So it is with Israel. It must never be tempted into the hubris of saying: “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me” (Deut. 8: 17).

There is only one Torah, yet it has multiple effects. It gives rise to different kinds of teaching, different sorts of virtue. Torah is sometimes seen by its critics as overly prescriptive, as if it sought to make everyone the same. The midrash argues otherwise. The Torah is compared to rain precisely to emphasize that its most important effect is to make each of us grow into what we could become. We are not all the same, nor does Torah seek uniformity. As a famous Mishnah puts it:

When a human being makes many coins from the same mint, they are all the same. God makes everyone in the same image – His image – yet none is the same as another. (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

-Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks
“Ha’azinu: Let My Teaching Fall Like Rain”
Commentary on Torah Portion Ha’azinu
Aish.com

Torah is a lot of things including its teachings being like rain and dew. It’s nourishing and helps living things grow. Without it, all life dies. I suppose it’s even possible to immerse in Torah and drown.

But although it is highly variable in purpose and use, it is for everyone.

Question: Why do the Jewish people needs a covenant/Brit with G-d. Why do we have to be commanded to follow his Mitzvos? Why is the commitment necessary? Please let me know if you have any suggestions on further readings as well.

Answer: The Talmud asks your question, in a way. First, note that the Torah gives commandments to Gentiles as well, so evidently it is the Torah view that all humans need these. In fact, Adam, the 1st man, was commanded.

Second, you have to define Mitzvah. What is a Mitzvah? You say it’s a “commandment.” I say that’s a fine 2nd-grade answer. An adult definition is “an opportunity to create a spiritual connection to God.”

So you ask, why do I need specific Mitzvot rather than just to create my own? Answers the Talmud: it gives you a greater connection when you are told what to do than if you create your own. This is due to human nature. It is human nature to resist instructions. If I have to overcome that resistance, the spiritual connection is greater.

-Rabbi Seinfeld
“Commandments and Covenants”
JewishAnswers.com

No, I’m not saying that the Torah is applied to Gentiles in the exact same way as to Jewish people. Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks says we’re not all the same, and Rabbi Seinfeld says that we all need Torah to create a spiritual connection to God, but the Torah isn’t the same for everyone.

Rabbi Seinfeld admits that even we Gentiles need Torah. But in what way? Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks replies:

On this, Rashi comments:

Why is this expression (“God of the spirits of all mankind”) used? [Moses] said to him: Lord of the universe, You know each person’s character, and that no two people are alike. Therefore, appoint a leader for them who will bear with each person according to his disposition.

One of the fundamental requirements of a leader in Judaism is that he or she is able to respect the differences between human beings.

And the prophet Joel says:

It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind…

–Joel 2:28 (NASB)

The Apostle Peter quotes the Prophet in Acts 2:17 to describe the giving of the Spirit to the twelve who had been waiting. We also know that “all mankind” wasn’t limited to Jewish apostles and disciples:

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were listening to the message. All the circumcised believers who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also.

–Acts 10:44-45 (NASB)

But while Jews and Gentiles can equally receive the Holy Spirit of God, can we apply Rashi’s comments and the Torah in the same way? Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks states:

According to Maharsha, there are 600,000 interpretations of Torah. Each individual is theoretically capable of a unique insight into its meaning. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas commented:

The Revelation has a particular way of producing meaning, which lies in its calling upon the unique within me. It is as if a multiplicity of persons … were the condition for the plenitude of “absolute truth”, as if each person, by virtue of his own uniqueness, were able to guarantee the revelation of one unique aspect of the truth, so that some of its facets would never have been revealed if certain people had been absent from mankind.

Judaism, in short, emphasizes the other side of the maxim E pluribus unum (“Out of the many, one”). It says: “Out of the One, many”.

The miracle of creation is that unity in Heaven produces diversity on earth. Torah is the rain that feeds this diversity, allowing each of us to become what only we can be.

Of course, that explanation may not be entirely satisfying to non-Jewish people in traditional Christianity, Hebrew Roots, Messianic Judaism, and all their variant streams. There’s a tendency, especially here in America, to strive to make everyone exactly the same. Equality means homogenization and cookie cutter duplication, with no variations allowed. It’s hard to contrast this with a society that says it also values diversity.

The Master said that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45), but he didn’t say that the rain always means the same thing to each person upon whom it falls. We are all grafted into the same root and fed by the same sap, but that doesn’t mean the branches from the wild tree (Gentiles) transmutate into branches identical to the civilized tree (Jews). Children from different nations, races, and ethnicities could be fed by the milk of a single mother, but that doesn’t mean all of the children would become identical in national, racial, and ethnic origin to the mother.

What it does mean is that God all loves us with impartiality, even the unjust, for he feeds and waters them as well. If God did not love them, then there would be no hope for any of us, as no person ever came to God clean and unsullied by sin. In this season of repentance and renewal, we should not complain because we are different, but rejoice because we are all equally loved by our Father Who is in Heaven.

Only love,
Can make it rain,
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love,
Can make it rain,
Like the sweat of lovers laying in the fields.

Love, Reign o’er me.
Love, Reign o’er me, Rain on me.

-Peter Townshend
“Love Reign O’er Me” (1973)
from The Who’s “Quadrophenia” album

When Messiah returns, he will be able to treat us all with love and to respect us as Jews and Gentiles, and as human beings all created in God’s image, and yet with no two of those “images” being exactly alike.

One of the fundamental requirements of a leader in Judaism is that he or she is able to respect the differences between human beings.

Wishing you a good and sweet new year.

19 Days.

Uncategorized

The Candles of Rosh Hashanah

September 5, 2013 James Pyles 6 Comments

When I got home last night after my meeting with my Pastor, the Shabbos candles were lit. I was pleasantly surprised. For the past week or so, my wife has been at the Chabad helping the Rebbitzen prepare for Rosh Hashanah. My wife didn’t stay for services, which somewhat disappointed me, but the fact that she lit the candles when she got home was heartwarming (and hearth warming).

Unfortunately, there’s a limit to what I can say to her about it without crossing barriers, so I have to keep my feelings to myself (don’t worry, I’m pretty sure she never reads my blog).

As I said, I visited my Pastor last night, basically to discuss Chapter Eight of D. Thomas Lancaster’s book, The Holy Epistle to the Galatians: Sermons on a Messianic Jewish Approach. We actually started on topic but managed to drift into the definition and purpose of “the Church,” the collective body of Jewish and Gentile disciples of Jesus, the Messiah. Pastor’s opinion is that the New Covenant creates an entirely new entity, the church, and that Jews who become part of that New Covenant join a new entity and leave the older covenant, Sinai, behind.

But if newer covenants cancel older ones, then what about Abraham?

What I am saying is this: the Law, which came four hundred and thirty years later, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise; but God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise.

–Galatians 3:17-18 (NASB)

Nope. Newer covenants do not invalidate older ones.

Pastor kept trying to make his point about the New Covenant from Ephesians 2, but we were missing what it says in Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36, which is the only way to understand the Biblical “core” of the New Covenant:

“Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

–Jeremiah 31:31-34 (NASB)

“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you went. I will vindicate the holiness of My great name which has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned in their midst. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord,” declares the Lord God, “when I prove Myself holy among you in their sight. For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land.”

–Ezekiel 36:22-24 (NASB)

I wrote a multi-part series starting here that charted the massively complicated course of the New Covenant in terms of what it does and doesn’t say about Jews and Gentiles. This is a very good example of not being able to adequately “prove” the particulars of the New Covenant using only the Apostolic Scriptures (New Testament, which by the way, does not mean the same thing as “New Covenant”).

First of all, look at the object of the New Covenant. Jeremiah 31:31 says it’s “the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” so basically, the Jewish people. But what is the New Covenant and how does it differ from the old, according to Jeremiah? Verse 33 says “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God and they shall be My people.”

I have no reason to believe that when God says “My law” that He means anything other than Torah. The difference is that instead of the Torah being externally recorded, it will be part of the internal Jewish motivation. Verse 34 says that they (the Jewish people) “will not teach again, each man and his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all will know Me…”

Today, Jewish people, and in fact all of us, “know God” because of the Bible, an external document that gives us the details of God’s holy standards for the Jews and the Gentiles who are called by His Name. True, the Holy Spirit was given to all believers, but we still have our internal, human nature that struggles against both the Spirit and against conforming our lives to Biblical standards. “After those days,” the Messianic Era, those who are part of the New Covenant, Israel and Judah, the Jewish people, and those of us who are grafted into the root through our faith in Messiah, will have that law, as it applies to each of us, written on our hearts, so that it will be “natural” for us to be obedient to God.

What I don’t see is that the content of the law or the differing roles of believing Jews and Gentiles will change in the slightest. It doesn’t say that in the text.

To support this, Ezekiel 36 says that because of God’s great name, which has been profaned among the nations (verse 23), God will renew Israel, so that the nations (the rest of the world) will know that God is God. Verse 24 continues saying God will take the Jewish people from the nations and return them to Israel. This too is part of the New Covenant, the redemption of national Israel.

So what do we know about the New Covenant. God will write His Torah, not on a scroll or on stone tablet, but on the hearts of the Jewish people, so that they will more perfectly obey His Torah. He will also redeem the Jewish people from their long exile and return them to their Land, to Israel. This is the New Covenant.

Quite a shift from what Pastor was talking about.

I’ve already written about how Gentiles become part of the New Covenant through Abraham, so don’t worry…we’re there, too. I tried to pull it all together in a final (or almost final) blog post called Building My Model which I think you’ll find is a pretty good summary of how the whole New Covenant develops.

Ephesians 3 is part of that description, but because my Pastor mentioned Ephesians 2, I’ll include links to my own interpretation of that chapter as well as an illuminating online conversation on Ephesians 2 and why it does not describe the swan song of the Torah. In fact, I recently said that it is impossible for the Jewish people to repent and to be redeemed by God without turning back to God and obedience of His Holy will through Torah observance.

But what does this have to do with Rosh Hashanah?

During the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, religious Jews take the opportunity to hit the reset button on their lives, to take stock of the previous year and to repair any damage they may have done in their relationship with other people and with God. In the long history of enmity between Christianity and Judaism, we in the church have demanded that Jews distance themselves from the Torah (and thus from God) by burning Torah scrolls, volumes of Talmud, numerous synagogues, and sometimes Jewish people.

If the New Covenant includes and intensifies the older covenants rather than replacing them, then we Christians have some “making up” to do with the Jewish people. In our mistaken attempt to reconcile them with Christ by destroying Jewish observance, Jewish lifestyle, and Jewish people, we’ve been opposing rather than obeying God. If we Christians are serious about being part of the New Covenant, then we cannot inhibit the Jewish people from also being included. In fact, if they aren’t included, then we have no direct linkage, since Abraham is the father of all.

Last night, while I was out of the house, my wife lit the candles to commemorate the start of Rosh Hashanah. As a “good Christian husband,” what is my duty to my Jewish wife, given all I’ve just said? Part of my duty is to be delighted that the warmth and glow of the Shabbos candles once again grace the interior of our home.

L’Shana Tova Tikatevu. May you all be inscribed in the Book of Life and enjoy a wonderful new year.

Uncategorized

Paul’s Hagar and Sarah Midrash

September 1, 2013 James Pyles 7 Comments

Tell me, you who want to be under law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise. This is allegorically speaking, for these women are two covenants: one proceeding from Mount Sinai bearing children who are to be slaves; she is Hagar. Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother. For it is written,

“Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear;
Break forth and shout, you who are not in labor;
For more numerous are the children of the desolate
Than of the one who has a husband.”

And you brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also. But what does the Scripture say?

“Cast out the bondwoman and her son,
For the son of the bondwoman shall not be an heir with the son of the free woman.”

So then, brethren, we are not children of a bondwoman, but of the free woman.

–Galatians 4:21-31 (NASB)

This set of verses from Paul’s letter to the Galatian churches has been one of the most devastating commentaries used against the Torah of Moses and the Jewish people over the last two-thousand years. Torah and Judaism are slavery. Christ and his grace are freedom. The message to any Jewish person who struggles to come to faith in Jesus as Messiah is that they must give up being Jewish, Judaism, and any connection to the Torah because it is all slavery, and pursue the Christian Jesus because only the Goyim have freedom…

…or be cast out as the bondwoman and her son…her Jewish son.

But given the larger dynamics of Paul’s life, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that he would have meant to say that in this message.

And when they heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law; and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs. What, then, is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. Therefore do this that we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow; take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law. But concerning the Gentiles who have believed, we wrote, having decided that they should abstain from meat sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication.” Then Paul took the men, and the next day, purifying himself along with them, went into the temple giving notice of the completion of the days of purification, until the sacrifice was offered for each one of them.

–Acts 21:20-26 (NASB)

After Paul arrived, the Jews who had come down from Jerusalem stood around him, bringing many and serious charges against him which they could not prove, while Paul said in his own defense, “I have committed no offense either against the Law of the Jews or against the temple or against Caesar.”

–Acts 25:7-8 (NASB)

Throughout Paul’s entire ordeal, in trial after trial, before one judge to the next, Paul continually denied that he had committed any crime against the Jewish people. He denied that he told Jewish believers not to circumcise their sons. He denied that he told Jewish believers not to walk in the customs of their fathers. He denied that he took a Gentile into the Temple or committed any crime against such a Holy place. He denied that he told the Jewish believers to forsake Moses.

So how can we interpret the statements Paul made in Galatians 4:21-31 to mean that Paul did tell the Jewish believers to forsake the Torah and that faith in Messiah was totally inconsistent with Jewish people living as Jews?

In his article A Torah-Positive Summary of Sha’ul’s Letter to the Galatians, Ariel Berkowitz defends Paul’s statement from a Jewish perspective, something most Christian Bible readers lack (please forgive the length of the following quote):

In chapter four, Sha’ul, having been thoroughly trained in the best rabbinic methods of Bible interpretation of his day, makes a midrash. A midrash is the Jewish way of saying that an allegorical or sermonic interpretation of the Scripture is about to take place.

This midrash is in 4:21–31. It is difficult to understand, as all midrashim (plural of midrash) are. Its difficulty has thrown many an earnest Bible interpreter aside. We will not analyze all of the midrash. We will only summarize the main point, because that is the point that is most pertinent to our present study of Galatians.

Sha’ul uses this midrash to illustrate the point he made in chapter three with his comparison of the two important covenants, the Abrahamic and Mosaic. Just as Abraham was putting Hagar before Sarah in order to fulfill God’s promises of descendants, so are those who are attempting a works justification putting Sinai before Abraham. Let us explain.

God called Abraham to a life of faith. God promised Abraham that He would give him children in his old age. God meant that the children would come through Sarah. Time went by and no children came.

Apparently, Abraham thought he would attempt to secure God’s promises by his own effort instead of relying on God to perform it. Thus, he had a child through Hagar. Although this was perfectly in keeping with the established customs of his day, it was not perfectly in keeping with trusting God! Abraham should have trusted God and waited for Sarah to have a child. Ishmael, therefore, was a child of works, but Isaac was the child of faith.

Sha’ul says that anyone who tries to secure God’s gracious promises of salvation and justification by obeying the Torah (going to Sinai) is like Abraham trying to secure God’s gracious promises through his own effort with Hagar. In the Galatian congregation, they were putting “Sinai” before “Abraham,” when they should have put “Abraham” before “Sinai.”

If you read my commentary on last week’s Torah portion, you’ll recognize a familiar theme from the Berkowitz article, that of justification coming through faith, not the mechanics of performing the mitzvot. Berkowitz’s interpretation of Paul’s midrash is no different.

Just as Abraham thought he could fulfill God’s promise of a son through his own efforts with Hagar, so too did some of the Jewish people (or Gentiles who thought they must convert to Judaism) believe they could secure justification before God by perfectly observing the Torah mitzvot. However, those Jewish and Gentile believers who understood that justification comes through faith and not the observance of Torah, are like Abraham when he trusted God’s promise of a son through Sarah, though it seemed completely impossible, because Sarah was so old.

This is not nullifying the Jewish responsibility of observing the Torah but rather putting faith and obedience in perspective. Obedience must follow faith, otherwise it is not in response to faith. Obedience, that is, following “the rules” for their own sake, does not provide justification before God. This is to be compared to Hagar and her son in Paul’s midrash. Only by faith in God does justification before God become achieved, not through our own performance of the mitzvot, then and only then, does Jewish obedience to the Torah of God have full meaning. This is to be compared to Sarah and her son in Paul’s midrash.

Lest I depend too much on Berkowitz for my defense of Paul, the Torah, and the Jewish people, I want to examine another, related source:

Paul develops a parable (midrash) based upon the story of Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, to point out the difference between God-Fearers and proselytes.

-D Thomas Lancaster
“Sermon Twenty-Two: Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Ishmael” pg 219
The Holy Epistle to the Galatians

That’s Lancaster’s brief summary as he’s introducing this chapter and the topic of Galatians 4:21-31. He seems to be taking a somewhat different approach to Paul’s midrash, making a comparison, not between “legalistic” Torah observance for justification vs. justification by faith, but between Gentile God-fearers and those who desired to convert to Judaism for the purpose of justification.

Lancaster takes his cue from Galatians 4:22, “For it is written that Abraham had two sons.”

In the synagogue world, a “ben Avraham” is a convert. Paul used the story of Isaac and Ishmael to illustrate two different types “benei Avraham,” in other words, two different types of Gentile proselytes. He was not contrasting Jews against Christians, nor was he contracting Jews against Gentiles. He was not talking about Jews at all. Instead, he used the Isaac and Ishmael analogy to contrast two different types of Gentiles: “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by a free woman” (Galatians 4:22).

-Lancaster, pg 221

Lancaster says that Paul makes a big deal out of “flesh versus the promise” as in:

Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as referring to many, but rather to one, “And to your seed,” that is, Christ.

–Galatians 3:16 (NASB)

Lancaster makes specific in his chapter that “All nations will be blessed in Abraham’s seed, the Messiah.” Abraham and Sarah conceived their son Isaac according to the promise, Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6). Isaac was born by faith but Ishmael was born by Abraham taking matters into his own hands, so to speak, and attempting to fulfill the promise of God, the promise that leads to Messiah, by his own efforts and not faith.

Lancaster points out something Berkowitz missed. Most Christians interpret the two covenants as Old Testament vs New Testament, which is totally untrue given the context. As should be obvious, the contrast is between the Abrahamic and Sinai covenants, which both Lancaster and Berkowitz point out, and does not allow for a replacement of one over the other.

What I am saying is this: the Law, which came four hundred and thirty years later, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise; but God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise.

–Galatians 3:17-18 (NASB)

It seems rather apparent that the latter law, Sinai, does not nullify the earlier law and the promise made to Abraham by God. As Lancaster says, Hagar cannot replace Sarah. From Lancaster’s perspective, the “children of Hagar” aren’t born Jewish people but rather, Gentiles who have undergone the formal process of converting to Judaism. The “children of Sarah” are the Gentile God-fearers who have come into relationship with God through faith in the Messiah. The converts are compared to Ishmael, who was conceived and born through completely human means, while the Gentiles who have come to faith in Messiah without converting to Judaism are compared to Isaac who was conceived and given life though supernatural means.

I can see where Lancaster is going with this, but I don’t think I can agree. In this case, I think Berkowitz makes the more convincing case. Lancaster rightly is addressing the Gentiles and saying that Paul is communicating that they do not need to convert to Judaism in order to inherit the promise, but he’s leaving the Jewish believers in the Galatian churches out of the equation. There are portions of the letter that could be interpreted as being directed at both Jewish and Gentile believers.

When Paul is addressing his audience in Galatians 1:2, depending on the translation you use, he is saying “brothers and sisters,” or “brothers,” or “brethren.” There’s no indication that he was singling out a specific population, either Jewish or Gentile. If Paul meant to address only the Gentiles in order to convince them not to convert to Judaism in order to be justified before God, I would expect him to have pointed more directly at his desired audience. He seems to be talking to both Jews and Gentiles explaining a unified message: “Obedience to the Law does not justify anyone (Jew or Gentile) before God. Only faith in God, faith such as Abraham had, faith in the promise of Abraham’s seed, faith in Messiah, justifies.”

I know people will say that if Paul was addressing both Jews and Gentiles, then he was telling them both that the Torah has been invalidated by the grace of Jesus Christ, however I can’t agree with that. Based on what I wrote previously and my current analysis of Paul’s Hagar and Sarah midrash, he is saying that yes, obedience does not justify a person before God, only faith. However, that does not nullify what comes next for a Jewish person, anymore than the covenant with Abraham nullified the covenant at Sinai. Jewish believers have a continuing obligation to God to obey the Torah mitzvot because of the specific promises made to Abraham, and to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Berkowitz’s interpretation of Paul’s midrash seems the better one to illustrate this point, but it should be emphasized that it does not justify being interpreted as any obligation for the Gentile believers to obey the mitzvot in the manner of the Jews. I’ve already pointed out that the Acts 15 decision offers us a different or overlapping set of responsibilities.

Paul’s Galatians 4 midrash has been terribly misused by the church over the centuries, and we’ve forgotten what Peter has said to us about Paul:

…and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand…

–2 Peter 3:15-16 (NASB)

If Peter, a contemporary of Paul and a fellow Jewish believer, could say such a thing back then, how much more can Paul be misunderstood in the present age by non-Jewish believers laboring under nearly twenty centuries of anti-Judaic doctrine about Paul?

One of the gifts of the Messianic Jewish movement is to help return the Gospels and Epistles to their original Jewish context so that we in the church can see the actual meaning of the good news of Moshiach and the role and purpose of faith, grace, and Torah for the Jewish believers as well as the Gentiles.

Torah Portion

Nitzvaim-Vayelech: The Torah of Paul

August 30, 2013 James Pyles 21 Comments

Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.

–Deuteronomy 30:11-14 (JPS Tanakh)

On the day of Moshe’s death he assembles the whole Jewish people and creates a Covenant confirming the Jewish people as the Almighty’s Chosen People (chosen for responsibility to be a light to the nations) for all future generations. Moshe makes clear the consequences of rejecting God and His Torah as well as the possibility of repentance. He reiterates that Torah is readily available to everyone.

-Rabbi Kalman Packouz
“Shabbat Shalom Weekly”
Commentary on Torah Portion Nitzavim–Vayelech
Aish.com

Certainly, this is difficult for most Christians to understand. After all, how can Moses say that the Law (Torah) is not too baffling, that it is not beyond reach, and that He expects the Children of Israel to obey it fully, when traditional Christian doctrine teaches that the Law (Torah) only existed to bring wrath (Romans 4:15), death (Romans 7:10), was only a guardian until Christ came (Galatians 3:24), and that if you break even one small mitzvah, you’ve broken the entire Law (James 2:10)?

That’s a tough one. It certainly seems as if the Tanakh (Old Testament) and the Apostolic Scriptures (New Testament) are not in agreement, even a little.

But Paul also wrote that the Law (Torah) “is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good,” (Romans 7:12). He additionally wrote:

Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be! Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.

–Romans 7:13 (NASB)

How can Paul say that the Law brings death and then say, virtually in the same breath, that the Law, which is good, doesn’t bring death?

I recently came across a short article written by Ariel Berkowitz called “A Torah-Positive Summary of Sha’ul’s Letter to the Galatians” at MessianicPublications.com. The fine folks at this website and I don’t always see eye to eye, but in this case, the view Berkowitz presents in his missive come very close to my own.

One of the issues that stands between my Pastor and me is the purpose of Torah for the Jewish believers, both in New Testament times and beyond, to our present age. Although we had previously agreed that the Torah has multiple purposes depending on the context, it still is a sticking point in our conversations on Galatians and D. Thomas Lancaster’s book The Holy Epistle to the Galatians.

Referring to Berkowitz, let’s see what he says the Torah isn’t according to Galatians 2:15-16:

In what way specifically was the gospel being perverted? We read in 2:15–16 that some people in that congregation were turning away from the principle that justification is by grace through faith in Yeshua alone. Sha’ul writes, “We…know that a man is not justified by observing the Torah, but by faith in Yeshua the Messiah. So we, too, have put our faith in Messiah Yeshua that we may be justified by faith in Messiah and not by observing the Torah, because by observing the Torah no one will be justified.”

This should be a no-brainer for just about everyone. The mechanical observance of the Torah mitzvot, in and of itself, does not justify anyone to God. Only faith in Messiah justifies.

No one is arguing against that. If a Christian uses that argument as an evidence that the Law (Torah) is no longer a valid means for a Jewish believer to obey God, it’s a straw man argument (although, to be fair, it’s been an argument against Torah in the church for so long, that I sincerely believe those using it are unaware of its “straw man” nature). It’s an easy argument to “win” but it means nothing. Let me repeat, obedience of the Torah mitzvot in and of itself does not justify anyone before God.

Berkowitz continues:

Some people in the congregation were teaching a gospel of works, that one might be justified by what he does. If this was not bad enough, they were using God’s Torah and making a law out of it. They were trying to use God’s revelation to His people through Moshe as a means of works salvation, hoping to gain their justification by doing the Torah.

Some people, scholars have differing opinions on who they were, tried to convince the Galatian churches that only obedience to Torah would justify one before God. This completely removes the requirement of faith. The message to the the Jewish church members was that faith in Yeshua (Jesus) was insufficient for justification. Their performance of Torah as Jews would be the primary (only) means of salvation. The message to the Gentile church members was that only by converting to Judaism (being circumcised) and full Torah observance would they be justified. Faith in Jesus wasn’t going to be enough.

I think we all know that Paul vehemently disagreed with this position, but does that mean Paul vehemently disagreed with anyone observing the mitzvot for any reason whatsoever?

We can see from the beginning, therefore, that in truth, Sha’ul had nothing against the Torah. Nor did he have anything against the Torah as a lifestyle for believers, as is evident from his own life. However, he was against anyone misusing the Torah. God never gave the Torah so that people could attempt to earn their salvation / justification from God by performing it. That philosophy is called “legalism.” Legalism is fatal! The Torah was never given by God to be a legalistic document. Some of the Galatians were attempting to do just that!

Here, Berkowitz and I come to a bit of a disagreement. He seems to suggest (though I may be wrong) that there is a rationale for all believers, Jewish and Gentile, to observe “Torah as a lifestyle.” This implies that both Jewish and Gentile believers would/should observe the mitzvot identically and that this was appropriate and expected as long as their obedience wasn’t for the purposes of justification/salvation. My opinion is that the specifics of obedience to God differed or overlapped, depending on whether the believer was Jewish or Gentile, based on the halakhic ruling of James and the Council of Apostles recorded by Luke in Acts 15 and affirmed in Acts 21.

Be that as it may, Berkowitz and I agree that the Torah does not justify people before God.

He did say that we have to examine the life of Paul, as depicted in the Book of Acts, to really understand the Galatians missive and his other epistles. I agree. You can’t take Galatians out of the context of the larger body of Pauline letters and certainly, you can’t dismiss Acts as the overarching narrative of the life of Paul. If elements of those different scriptures disagree and if some of those elements disagree with the Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospels, then either something is wrong with the Bible or something is wrong with our interpretation.

But Berkowitz tells us something important about the misuse of Torah. If we depend on only Torah observance to justify us before God, then the Torah really does bring death (Romans 7:10). This also seems to confirm James 2:10, since if a person depends on only Torah observance for justification, then they must observe all of the Law in order for that to work. Breaking even the least of the mitzvot would break the entire Torah and thus, the person would stand condemned before God.

But all of those negative statements against Torah observance depend on a person using Torah obedience as their sole method of justification, and we know that, based on Abraham we are only justified by faith (Genesis 15:6, Romans 4:22). However, if one depends on faith for justification before God, and in the case of the Jewish person, observance of Torah was (and is) in response to the commandments for obedience once one is justified, then what is the argument against a Jew living a lifestyle in accordance with the Law of Moses?

Applying Berkowitz’s opinion to the Jewish believers, we find:

Where does the Covenant of Torah fit in? Sha’ul says that it is an entirely different kind of covenant. While the Covenant of Abraham is, on the one hand, a covenant of promise and faith in those promises, the Covenant of Torah, on the other hand, is a covenant of obedience. In the Covenant of Torah, the ones who received God’s promises by faith would enjoy and bear fruit in those promises by their obedience. Accordingly, Sha’ul writes in Galatians 3:12, “The Torah is not based on faith…” This is Sha’ul’s way of stating what we have declared above, that the purpose of Torah was not for salvation. If the Covenant of Abraham pictures salvation, then the Covenant of Torah would picture life as a redeemed person in Yeshua.

Sha’ul says that anyone who relies on observing the Torah for his/her justification is under a curse, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Torah” (Galatians 3:10–12). The key word here is not “observing,” but “relies on.” The one who is relying on doing the Torah to earn, merit, or keep their justification/salvation is not saved or justified. Justification is only by grace through faith.

That seems rather straightforward to me as a description of Jewish believers redeemed by God through faith. Trusting in what you do, that is, performance of the mitzvot, to save you is a dead-end street. It only works if you’re perfect at it, and no one is. In that case, the Torah is a curse and it does bring death, but that’s because you’re too blockheaded to see that it’s faith that justifies. However, Paul, who did live by faith, also observed the mitzvot as a Jewish man obeying God and as such, the Torah was a blessing.

I mentioned before that I thought the Torah has multiple purposes depending on history, location, persons involved, and other contextual factors. Let’s take a look at one of those purposes which is particularly used to denigrate Jewish observance of the Law.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us — for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” — in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

But before faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.

–Galatians 3:13-14, 23-29 (NASB)

A plain reading of the text, and especially as filtered through traditional Christian doctrine, seems to indicate that the Law’s only purpose was to act like a tutor or a “child-conductor” to guide people to Christ and, once that was done, so was the Torah. Christ then frees the person under the Law from the curse of the Law and they walk away from Torah and are free in Christ.

Except we’ve already seen that the “works of the Law” weren’t obeying the Law in and of itself, but it was obeying the Law specifically for the purposes of justification; obeying the Law in the absence of faith. The curse was the consequence of faithless performance of Torah in order to achieve justification.

If anything, the coming of Christ freed the Gentile of the obligation of converting to Judaism as the only means of entering into a covenant relationship with God. They did not have to convert and thus observe the mitzvot but rather, thanks to the promises made to Abraham and realized in the Messiah, the non-Jewish believers could come to God by faith and be justified before him. The Jewish believer could also access God by faith and not the false belief (which may have been a popular opinion among some Jewish groups in the late Second Temple period) that only through observing the mitzvot (before faith came) could a Jew (or anyone else) be saved. After all, God can make Sons of Abraham from stones (Matthew 3:9) so being Jewish does not automatically make one justified.

Berkowitz emphasizes this point thus:

To help make his point, Sha’ul draws upon a well-known Roman and Greek custom in his day. Well-to-do people often sent their children to a hired teacher for their education. To guide them along the way and to make sure that they arrive to their instructor, they of ten employed a protector. The Greek text refers to this “protector” as a paidagogos, (π αιδαγωγός). The paidagogos was not the teacher, but he was merely the protector and the one who guided the student to the teacher. For those who are not yet justified by God’s grace, the Torah can function in the same way. Sha’ul states in Galatians 3:24–25, “So the Torah was put in charge to lead us to Messiah, that we might be justified by faith.”

In other words, if you are laboring under the false assumption that only observance of the mitzvot can save you, one of the functions of the Law is to guide you to the one who can truly save you by faith: Messiah.

Jesus also believed that Torah functioned to point to him:

Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

–John 5:45-47 (NASB)

Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?” Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.

–Luke 24:26-27 (NASB)

Yes, the Torah pointed and still points to Jesus for the Jewish people and frankly, for any Gentile who believes that converting to Judaism or having to obey all of the Torah mitzvot in a manner identical to observant Jews, is the only way to be reconciled with the Father. In terms of justification, faith in Christ is better than observing the Law if your goal is to be saved. However, realizing that faith in Messiah is the means of justification does not invalidate in the slightest, a Jewish believer’s duty to obey God subsequent to salvation by observing the mitzvot. Thankfully, that observance doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to rest on the firm foundation of faith, otherwise, justification by the Law only is like trying to live in a paper house in the middle of a forest fire. Gentile Christians don’t obey God perfectly either (Christians, please remember that when you see a religious Jewish person being less than “Torah-perfect”), and fortunately our salvation isn’t endangered by that fact.

There’s more I could say on the Torah and Galatians based on the Berkowitz paper, but I think I’ll save that for another time. I believe we can see from the Torah as well as the Gospels and Epistles, that Jewish observance of Torah was not finished at the cross. I believe we can read Galatians, not as Paul’s “anti-law” letter, but as Paul’s correct interpretation of the relationship between Jewish Torah observance and justification. He was trying to tell his Gentile audience that they didn’t have to convert to Judaism and start keeping Torah in the Jewish manner in order to be saved. He was telling his Jewish audience that they had no reason to boast of being Jewish or Torah observance, because it was faith like Abraham’s that provided justification. Their observance of Torah was a valid consequence of being Jewish and being obedient, but their faith is the “sacrifice” of a “broken and a contrite heart,” (Psalm 51:17) that God truly desires.

But as David so eloquently wrote:

For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; you are not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.

By Your favor do good to Zion; build the walls of Jerusalem. Then You will delight in righteous sacrifices, in burnt offering and whole burnt offering; then young bulls will be offered on Your altar.

–Psalm 51:16-19 (NASB)

Faith and then obedience.

Good Shabbos.

26 days.

"When you awake in the morning, learn something to inspire you and mediate upon it, then plunge forward full of light with which to illuminate the darkness." -Rabbi Tzvi Freeman