Tag Archives: Yom Kippur

The High Holy Days for the Rest of Us

September 21, 2014 James Pyles 27 Comments

Some years ago, a prominent Protestant clergyman offered the suggestion that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur could very well be adopted as religious occasions for people of all faiths. He was intrigued by the predominance of the theme of universalism in the Days of Awe. Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot convey their respective messages of human freedom, of man’s duty as a moral being, and of the thanksgiving man owes to God, in the context of the historic vicissitudes and experiences of the ancient Israelites. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, however, are not related to any particular event in Israel’s past. They are, as Yehezkel Kaufmann characterizes them, “cosmic holidays” linked with the hopes and the destiny of mankind. The liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yon Kippur is indeed suffused with the spirit of universalism.

-Max Arzt
“The Liturgy: An Introduction,” p. 13
Justice and Mercy: Commentary on the Liturgy of the New Year and the Day of Atonement

I suppose I’m crazy to post this, since most Christians wouldn’t even begin to “resonate” with the High Holy Days that are rapidly approaching. And yet, as Arzt notes, an anonymous Protestant clergyman of some prominence in a past era undeniably saw a more universal application to God’s judgment and mercy.

Isn’t that because God will indeed judge all the earth? Aren’t we all under His authority. Does He not have the right to elevate or to condemn? Did He not love Jacob, heir to the covenant promises, but hate Esau who was a descendent of Abraham and Isaac but not in line to receive favor as a Patriarch?

And yet at the end of days, God will judge the descendants of Jacob and Esau both.

The persecution to which R. Yehudai Gaon alluded is the injunction issued by Justinian in 553 C.E. against teaching the deuterosis, the oral interpretation of the Torah. Scholars had therefore assumed that when Judaism “went underground,” certain piyyutim replaced the prescribed liturgy and that other piyyutim of a more legalistic content served as a means of circumventing Justinian’s prohibition against teaching the Oral Law.

-ibid, p. 19

burning talmud — Burning volumes of Talmud

While many Christians today boast a love of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, we still bristle at the thought of the Oral Law, since it has long been a tradition in our own religious stream to love the Bible (and our own traditions) but disdain the traditions of other faiths, particularly Judaism. We may not physically burn volumes of Talmud anymore, but we continue to do so in our minds and hearts.

In America, Jews are free to practice their religious faith which includes Talmud study and worshiping according to the customs, but historically Judaism has survived, in part, by periodically going “underground” or at least maintaining a low profile. Some of the other Judaisms object to the behavior of the Chabad because they can be so “in your face” about being Jewish, and are very definitely “above ground”.

We like to remind people that America is a Christian nation (actually, it isn’t and never has been) but imagine how insecure that could make a Jew feel? Anti-Semitism isn’t extinct in America or any place else, it’s just waiting for the right environment in which to once again flourish.

It is generally agreed among scholars that the synagogue arose during the Babylonian exile and that it co-existed with the Temple in Jerusalem during the period of the Second Temple…

…Thus the Synagogue was well prepared to assume its post-exilic role as the center of Jewish education, worship, and communal welfare. That the people recovered so quickly from the traumatic effects of the destruction of the Temple was due to the fact that for some centuries before 70 C.E., the Synagogue had been a functioning institution with a reasonably well-established liturgy. The Rabbis tell us that God prepares the healing before the hurt (Song of Songs Rabbah, 4:5).

-ibid, “The New Year (Rosh Hashanah),” p. 43

I’ve maintained over the years that it was indeed the synagogue, the liturgy, and the Talmud that preserved the Jewish people in the centuries after the destruction of the Temple and the initiation of the longest exile they would ever endure, particularly after two failed rebellions against the Romans and the non-Jewish disciples of Yeshua (Jesus) betrayal of their Jewish counterparts. Apparently a Gentile sub-population could not be sustained within a Judaism in exile and under siege by the powerful nations around her scattered people.

I recently discovered that a medieval French philosopher and theologian named Peter Abelard was considered the “only pre-Holocaust Christian who related to Jews as to fellow humans.”

That’s quite a statement and an indictment against collective Christianity, but it might not be entirely unearned. While I’m not the student of history I wish I were, I do know that as much as modern Christianity depends on the work of the men of the Reformation, its chief architect, Martin Luther, toward the end of his life, was no friend to the Jews.

According to Jewish Virtual Library, an excerpt from Luther’s work “The Jews and Their Lies” states:

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly and I myself was unaware of it will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.

If I had lived in those days and had been a devotee of Luther, how could I have possibly imagined that God loved the Jewish people, had plans to restore them to their Land, and was continuing to uphold His covenant relationship with them? How could I even believe the words of Jesus when he said “Salvation comes from the Jews” (John 4:22)?

Rabbi Nachum Braverman writes, “On Rosh Hashana we make an accounting of our year and we pray repeatedly for life. How do we justify another year of life? What did we do with the last year? Has it been a time of growth, of insight and of caring for others? Did we make use of our time, or did we squander it? Has it truly been a year of life, or merely one of mindless activity? This is the time for evaluation and rededication. The Jewish process is called “teshuva,” coming home — recognizing our mistakes between ourselves and God as well as between ourselves and our fellow man and then correcting them.”

-Rabbi Kalman Packouz
from his commentary on Nitzavim (Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20)
Aish.com

This leads us back to the “universalism” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Contrary to popular belief, Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement is not an exceptionally depressing for fearful day for most religious Jews. My wife explained to me one year that it’s actually an opportunity to hit the reset button of our lives, to repair faults and faulty relationships, and to take advantage of an opportunity laid at our feet to become better people and build a better future.

While there’s been a great deal of improvement in the relationship between Jews and Christians since the Holocaust, there is still a lot of underlying tension. There’s still a lot of “unexamined baggage” both Jews and Christians are carrying around about each other. To be fair and given recent events, there’s also a lot of baggage I’m carrying around about other Christians that needs to be examined and cleaned up one way or another. I suppose the fact that Rosh Hashanah begins This coming Wednesday the 24th at sundown with Yom Kippur following at sundown on Friday, October 3rd could provide all of us the opportunity to do better and be better than we have been so far.

I know I need something like this. Sure, we can repent and draw nearer to God and to other people any time of year, but when do we have an engraved invitation from God to do so?

I’ve heard D. Thomas Lancaster call Yom Kippur a “dressed rehearsal” for the final judgment. Even if, as a Christian, you feel assured of your salvation, that doesn’t mean you are perfect. I know it doesn’t mean I’m perfect, not even close. Rehearsals are opportunities to practice an important event to make sure you get it right before the real thing happens. That’s a pretty good reason for all faiths, and truth be told, all human beings to observe the universalism of the Days of Awe, for indeed awesome days are coming and when they arrive, if we are not prepared, we never will be.

Christianity still has much to repent for about how we think, feel, and sometimes treat the Jewish people, particularly religious Jews. What have you done that you need to repent of?

May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.

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Elul, All, Nothing, or Something

August 29, 2014 James Pyles 8 Comments

Question: I have been testing the waters, trying to get involved in Judaism. But I feel like I’m swimming in a vast ocean of unfamiliar concepts: Hebrew texts, legal nuances, culture, etc. I’m not sure any of this is for me!

The Aish Rabbi Replies: There is a misconception that many people have about Judaism, what I call “the all or nothing” syndrome. With 613 mitzvot in the Torah, things can seem a bit overwhelming. People take a look at traditional Judaism with all these different commandments and say to themselves, there’s no way that I can be successful at living that type of lifestyle, so what’s the point of looking into it or getting involved? Where to start? What to focus on? How to make sense of it all?!

That’s not the Jewish way!

“Judaism: All Or Nothing?”
-from the “Ask the Rabbi” column
Aish.com

Really? Not the Jewish way? Most Christians would disagree based on this:

If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all. For He who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not commit murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

–James 2:8-13 (NASB)

I suspect we’ve traditionally misunderstood what James is trying to say to his readers, since he doesn’t seem to be saying that you have to keep the Torah perfectly. He seems to be saying that if you expect your observance to justify you before God, only then would you have to keep the Torah perfectly. However, if you observe the “royal law”, that is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18, Mark 12:30-31), and do not show partiality, you are not sinning and not counted among transgressors if you are not perfectly observant. Even if you are not perfect but you show mercy, then God will show mercy to you (see Matthew 5:21-22, Matthew 6:12).

So it would seem the Aish Rabbi is correct in that being an observant Jew doesn’t mean being a perfectly observant Jew:

Imagine you bump into an old friend and he tells you how miserable he is. You ask him, what’s the matter? He says, I’m in the precious metals industry. My company just found a vein of gold in Brazil that’s going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

You say, that’s fantastic. Your financial problems are solved. What’s the problem?

He says, you just don’t get it. Do you realize that this is just one vein of gold? It represents such a tiny fraction of all of the unmined gold in the world. What do I really have, compared with what’s out there?

You say, are you nuts? Who the heck cares about what you haven’t found yet? What you’ve got now is a gold mine!

That’s the Jewish approach. Any aspect that you learn about, or can incorporate into your life, is a gold mine. What does it matter what aspect of Judaism you’re not ready to take on? In Judaism, every mitzvah is of infinite value. Every mitzvah is more than any gold mine. Don’t worry about what you can’t do. Even if you never take on another mitzvah, you’ve still struck eternal gold.

The best advice: Relax.

What if when you first became a Christian (if you are a Christian), you believed you had to live a perfect Christian life (however you define such a life)? What if you believed you had to go to church every Sunday, had to attend every Sunday school class, had to be at church every Wednesday for whatever class or event was being offered? What if you thought you had to instantly understand terms like “justification” or “propitiation” or “agape” and if you didn’t know and do all you believed was expected of you, it would be the same for you as a Jewish person who didn’t literally observe the 613 commandments of the Torah?

Sounds pretty horrible, huh? Instant perfection or instant failure.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But we’re under grace, not the Law. We Christians don’t have to be perfect.” Ironically, that’s pretty much what the Aish Rabbi is saying, too. Except in Judaism God’s grace and His behavioral expectations for Covenant members aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s all part of the same package. It’s all God’s providence and love.

The love between God and Israel is unconditional. Even when Israel behaves in a manner that results in estrangement, that love is not diminished. Israel does not have to restore God’s love, because it is eternal, and His longing for Israel to return to Him is so intense that at the first sign that Israel is ready to abandon its errant ways that led to the estrangement, God will promptly embrace it.

-Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski
“Growing Each Day, Elul 1”
Aish.com

In Judaism (as I understand it and I realize I’m making an overly generalized statement), God loves not because a Jew is perfect but simply because God loves and because He chose the Jewish people and the nation of Israel to be His own.

One of the things the Aish Rabbi says is:

The misconception that Judaism is all-or-nothing includes the false idea that a person is either “observant,” or “non-observant.” But that’s not true. In fact, here’s a secret:

Nobody is observing all the mitzvot.

Pretty shocking, huh? But that’s not all.

That’s because certain mitzvot only women usually do – like lighting Shabbat candles or going to the mikveh. Other mitzvot only men can fulfill – like Brit Milah. Others only apply to first-born children, such as the “fast of the first born” on the day before Passover. And only a Kohen can fulfill the mitzvah of reciting the Priestly Blessing.

So when we talk about the totality of mitzvot, we’ll never do them all anyway! So rather than get overwhelmed with the vastness of it all, better to be realistic about what we can do, and move forward in a positive way.

But that just means some people don’t do all of the mitzvot because not all of the mitzvot are intended for everyone, like the laws for the Kohen or the laws pertaining only to women (and as you probably already know, there are laws that apply only to Jews and not to Gentiles, Christian or not).

But that could still mean a Jew is supposed to be perfect in all the laws that do apply to him or her.

Let’s say, for example, that a person wants to try the mitzvah of prayer. We may go to synagogue and see someone immersed in intensive prayer for one hour. We cannot conceive of how we could possibly get to that point ourselves. That’s understandable, especially for one who is not fluent in Hebrew. So it’s a matter of knowing which prayer gets top priority – for example, the Amidah prayer.

The Amidah has 19 blessings, and it’s very difficult to concentrate for that entire time without being distracted, or one’s mind wandering to other things like shopping and checking your email. So the key is to take on a small goal: “I am committing that for the first prayer of the 19, I will not rush nor allow anything to interfere between me and these few words.” That goal is realistic and attainable, and one can begin to approach a high degree of intensity and concentration on that one prayer.

What this does is give a taste of the higher goal. All that’s needed is to extrapolate to all 19. This is much more effective than starting off by saying, “Today I’m going to pray the entire 19 with great concentration!” – and then after three words, you’re thinking about what’s for breakfast.

If it’s too lofty a goal, then at least taste it once. Break down a huge goal into bite-size steps that are realistic to achieve, and will give a taste of the full goal.

That’s a lot of text to say something simple. Start with just one, small mitzvah and work up from there.

But what does this have to do with Christians?

One point of relevancy, and I alluded to this above, is that we Christians need to have a better understanding of how Torah observance relates to Jewish life, since we tend to give observant Jews a hard time for not being perfectly observant. We also tend to view “grace” and “the Law” as polar opposites (like “Christianity” and “Judaism”) which, as I also mentioned, is not true.

But if, as most Christians believe, the Law has nothing to do with us, why do we care beyond those straightforward statements?

If you’ve been reading my blog posts for the past couple of weeks, you know there is an ongoing debate about whether or not God requires all Jesus-believers, both Jewish and Gentile, to observe the same Torah commandments in the same way.

If you listened to the rather uncomfortable debate between Dr. Michael Brown and Tim Hegg on this topic, you discovered that Mr. Hegg believes the answer is an unequivocal “yes” for everyone, while Dr. Brown thinks that no believer, Jewish or Gentile, has to observe any of the commandments (grace replaced the Law).

Frankly, I disagree with them both, but then the question is, what should Gentile Christians do?

Now that I have addressed the notion of “Torah on the heart” as a covenantal anticipation and partial fulfillment as promised to Jews, how may we envision it having an impact also on non-Jews who attach themselves to the Jewish Messiah? They do not become members of Israel or participants in the covenant per se, and they are not legally obligated by the Torah covenant. Therefore, something must become available to them because of their increasingly close proximity to the knowledge of Torah and its impact on those who actually are members of the covenant. In one other recent post, I invoked the analogy of gentiles entering the Temple’s “court of the gentiles” in order to offer sacrifices in accordance with Torah stipulations for gentiles doing so. I compared the symbolic sacrifice of Rav Yeshua to such sacrifices, but offered in the heavenly sanctuary by Rav Yeshua as a mediating Melchitzedekian priest. Such symbolism reflects the ratification of continual repentance, after which the forgiven offerer learns to walk in newness of life in accordance with HaShem’s guidance (e.g., the aspects of Torah that apply to him or her). In another recent post I addressed the notion of a gentile ‘Hasid and the appropriate reflections of Torah that may be applicable — in which a gentile might become thoroughly immersed in order to experience the same sort of spiritual intimacy with HaShem, and enter into the perceptive environment of the kingdom of heaven in its metaphorical sense in anticipation of its future physical realization. Thus non-Jews would experience spirituality from outside and alongside the covenant in the same manner as intended for Jews inside the covenant.

In such an environment the Shema may take on additional meaning, as a gentile reply and response to its pronouncement by Jews. As Jews say: “Shm’a Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad” (“Hear, O Israel, HaShem is our G-d, solely the One-and-Only HaShem”), followed by “Baruch shem k’vod, malchuto l’olam va’ed” (“Blessed is His glorious purpose — an eternal kingdom”), then gentile disciples of Rav Yeshua may reply: “Hear, O Israel, HaShem your G-d has become our G-d also, the One-and-Only HaShem” (“Shm’a Israel, v’hayah Adonai Eloheichem gam Hu ‘aleinu, Adonai Echad”), perhaps followed by Zech.14:9 “V-hayah Adonai l-melech ‘al col ha-aretz — ba-yom ha-hu, yihiyei Adonai Echad u’shmo echad” (HaShem shall be King over all the earth — in that day HaShem shall be [recognized as] One, and His purpose [as] unified).

But maybe I’m already looking a little too far ahead ….

-comment made by ProclaimLiberty
on one of my blog posts

That’s probably a lot to absorb and it’s likely not all of you will relate let alone agree.

Coming at the question from another direction, a friend of mine pointed me to an article by John C. Wright called Christians in the Pantheon called Life.

A reader with the name Metzengerstein, which sounds like it might actually be a real name for once, writes and comments:

“It is an interesting fix we Christians find ourselves in. On the one hand we should like to argue that Capitalism is a better system than any other by virtue of its results and its preference towards voluntary action and organization over government coercion for arranging society.

“On the other hand, we are anti-materialists who would like to proclaim there are more important things in life than money, and that wealth can lead you astray. Even technological improvement and scientific advancement can lead us into a mindset of creating a heaven on Earth, rather than passing through a transitory phase in a strange land.”

I confess I do not see the paradox.

Click the link I provided above to read the rest, which outlines why there isn’t a contradiction between the Biblical expectations for Christian behavior and living in the world.

Learning what God expects of us is simple enough to grasp in a few moments and yet complex enough to take an entire lifetime to comprehend.

He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?

–Micah 6:8 (NASB)

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

–Matthew 22:36-40 (NASB)

Seems pretty straightforward but within those simple statements is a world of meaning and learning.

In Christianity, we tend to expect that we are to understand everything in the Bible perfectly and live it out unerringly (which sounds very “legalistic,” the way most Christians see Jewish people). There are no mysteries or contradictions and that with the right interpretation (and solid doctrine), the meaning of God’s Word just unfolds right in front of you with little or not effort at all.

Except that’s not how most Christians experience the Bible if they’re at all honest in admitting it.

The reason I study the Bible through a somewhat Jewish lens is not to learn how to practice Judaism, but to learn to live with a certain amount of dynamic tension involving those little things that don’t seem to add up or that even contradict each other in the Bible.

I recently heard (read) a joke about Jewish people (I think it was in one of ProclaimLiberty’s comments) about “him being right, and the other guy being right, and you’re right, too.” From a Christian point of view, that all seems impossible. How can three different people hold three different opinions and yet all of them are right?

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

-attributed to Yogi Berra

Rav Yosef Cologne, the Maharik, wrote against a group of Rabbis who imposed their authority on their students and claimed that once someone studied under the authority of a rebbi he must behave submissively to that rebbi forever and may not disagree with his ruling. Maharik responded that even if one wants to claim that the former student remains submissive to his rebbi forever, that would only apply to halachos related to honoring a rebbi, e.g., to stand when the rebbi enters the room or to tear kriah if the rebbi passed away. If, however, the former rebbi is making a mistake in halacha the former students must raise the issue rather than silently accept the rebbi’s position.

-from Halachah Highlights
“Disagreeing with one’s Rebbi”
Commentary on Moed Katan 16
Daf Yomi Digest for Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Most Christians and even some Jews tend to see observant Judaism and particularly Orthodox Judaism as a straight jacket made out of lead. Once you’re in, you can never escape and there’s no such thing as “wiggle room”. Here we see (again) that Christian presumptions about Judaism don’t always hold water.

The lived experience of a Christian is actually more complicated and nuanced than one would imagine. Just reading John Wright’s brief essay reveals details that aren’t obvious to either the secular or Christian Gentile. The same can be said for observant Jewish life. Neither lifestyle exists as a single package that one acquires immediately like a birthday present, but rather represents a lifetime of experience, painstakingly gained bit by bit with each passing day.

We’ve just entered the month of Elul in the Jewish religious calendar, which is the month immediately preceding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Derek Leman made some suggestions that could apply to both the Gentile and Jewish believer, but while there seems to be some overlap here for those of us to consider ourselves “Messianic,” it’s critical for us to grasp that we also have very individual duties and responsibilities to God that we are constantly seeking to master.

Frankly, my plate is full just in keeping up with all I need to learn on my journey of spiritual growth. I don’t have a lot of time to worry about what other Christians or what Jews are or aren’t doing.

If I’m to borrow anything useful from Elul, let me adopt a discipline of repentance, increased prayer, introspection, and seeking to draw nearer to God.

For more on the month of Elul, read Elul: The Secret to Change.

“May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.”

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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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How Forgiving is Our Teacher?

September 15, 2013 James Pyles 16 Comments

My late teacher Rabbi Louis Finklestein used to say, “When I pray, I speak to God; when I study, God speaks to me.” In the words of our liturgy:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, Sovereign of the universe…who commanded us to study the words of Torah. May the words of Torah…be sweet in our mouths and in the mouths of all Your people so that we, our children, and all the children of the House of Israel may come to love You and to study Your Torah…Blessed are You, Lord, who teaches Torah to the House of Israel.

Note the tense of the verb: God “teaches,” not “has taught,” Torah to Israel. God, then, is a teacher not only at Sinai, in antiquity, but today as well, and not only today but also in the world to come. The souls of the righteous who have perished are described as having gone to “the yeshiva on high,” where God will be their teacher and will elucidate all the puzzles of the Torah that were never clarified while they lived on earth.

-Rabbi Neil Gilman
“Chapter 4: God is Nice (Sometimes),” pp 62-3
The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians

I’ve mentioned before that I think of God as a teacher, at least sometimes, a bringer of enlightenment and truth. There are also some in religious Judaism who believe that when Messiah comes (or comes back), he will teach Torah perfectly. I suppose this means he’ll teach the Gentiles as well as the Jews how Torah is to be correctly applied to our lives and all of the messy confusion we experience now will finally go away…as long as we choose to accept his teaching and incorporate them into our daily practice.

It seems amazing that we might not, but as I read the Bible, even after the second advent, there will be plenty of people who won’t recognize him as King, even as he sits on the Throne of David in Holy Jerusalem.

But then again, even when we acknowledge God, sometimes we can still be opposed to Him; we can still be angry with Him. But that may not be as strange as it seems:

Yet even then, their anger at God’s behavior was always expressed from within their long-standing relationship with God. They never allowed their sense of being mistreated by God to drive them out of the religious community and its belief structure.

-Rabbi Neil Gillman
“Chapter 5: God is Not Nice (Sometimes),” pg 65

I know the idea of being angry at God usually elicits a certain amount of “pushback” from some readers, but I maintain that it’s a common human response to God…we just don’t talk about it. But what is God’s response to us when we are angry at Him?

Job’s “comforters” arrive and evoke the classical Torah interpretation of suffering: Job must have sinned. But Job retorts that he has not sinned, or that he has not sinned nearly enough to justify this punishment. At the end of the book, God addresses Job in the speeches “out of the whirlwind.” These are a paean to God’s power and to the complexity of God’s creation. Their message is “Job, don’t try to understand Me. Don’t try to fit Me into your neat moral categories. I am God; you are a human being.” Surprisingly, Job acknowledges the difference:

I know You can do everything,
That nothing You propose is impossible for You…
I had heard You with my ears,
But now I see You with my eyes;
Therefore, I recant and relent,
Being but dust and ashes.

-Job 42:2, 5-6

This implies that Job has now achieved a clearer understanding of God’s ways and a measure of closure.

-Gillman, pg 69

This seems not unlike the article Jay Litvin wrote about his own need to attain closure or at least regain closeness with God, in Mr. Litvin’s case, by “forgiving” God for Litvin’s terminal illness. But Job’s and Litvin’s approaches are quite different. Whereas Job acknowledges God’s statement that he cannot understand the ways of God and thus should abandon any attempt to put God in a theological or doctrinal box, Litvin sets all this aside and treats God, not as understandable, but nevertheless, forgivable.

I suppose you could argue that having the temerity to “forgive” God might require that we would then need to be forgiven by God, that too is the act of a loving Father rather than a harsh and punitive Judge:

He will not always strive with us,
Nor will He keep His anger forever.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins,
Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
So great is His lovingkindness toward those who fear Him.
As far as the east is from the west,
So far has He removed our transgressions from us.
Just as a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.
For He Himself knows our frame;
He is mindful that we are but dust.

–Psalm 103:9-14 (NASB)

Then comes the theological underpinnings for the power of repentance: “For He knows how we are formed; He is mindful that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). God grants us the power of repentance because God knows how we were created: from the dust (Genesis 2:7).

-Gillman, “Chapter 6: God Can Change,” pg 91

In Rabbi Gilman describing the Jewish relationship to God for Christians, he says that God gives human beings the ability to repent because God knows how weak and frail we are (dust and ashes). Out of that knowledge, God desires to forgive us, which, of course, requires that we first repent.

Jonah chapter 3 tells the simple but powerful tale of Jonah prophesying to the great city of Nineveh that unless they repent of their sins, they will be destroyed by God. Amazingly, this Gentile and corrupt city, from the King to the lowest commoner, repent, and because of this, God relents and forgives.

There’s a certain irony, at least to me, in Rabbi Gillman final commentary in this chapter:

The poem then concluded with a theological justification for God’s compassion:

You are slow to anger and ready to forgive. You do not desire the death of the wicked but that we return from our evil ways and live. Even until our dying day, You wait for us, perhaps we will repent, and You will immediately receive us. Our origin is dust and we return to the dust. We earn our bread at the peril of our life. We are like a fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as a fleeting shadow, as a passing cloud, as the wind that blows, as the fleeting dust, and as a dream that vanishes. But You are ever our living God and sovereign.

The echo of Psalm 103:14…is unmistakable here. God must forgive because God above all knows what it means to be a human being and to live a human life (not because of Jesus, according to Jewish thought, but because God is the creator of all).

-ibid, pg 96

As a Reform Jewish Rabbi, Rabbi Gillman isn’t about to acknowledge the Christian view of Jesus, but comparisons between his closure to Chapter 6 and the following are unavoidable:

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)

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

–Hebrews 4:14-16 (NASB)

It’s not that God couldn’t feel compassion and empathy for human beings without experiencing a human life. What creator is unable to understand his creation? And yet, Jesus as both divine and human is uniquely positioned to understand human frailty and to act as intercessor between a fallen mankind and an ultimately Holy, Ein Sof God. Peter also echos Psalm 103 and “foreshadows” the Yom Kippur service in his words.

I sometimes wonder why we have a Christianity that is completely separate from Judaism. If modern religious Judaism is correct and the Gentiles are to come to God through Israel but without the Jesus of the Bible, then why isn’t modern Israel, the Jewish people, a light to the world, opening that door for the rest of humanity? I know the only “Jewish” requirement for Gentiles is our obedience to the Seven Noahide Laws, but without Jewish mentors and a Jewish understanding of this framework, non-Jewish humanity is without comprehension, let alone community (as far as I know, there are no exclusively Gentile Noahide “synagogues” or “churches”). Does modern Judaism truly believe that God left each generation of Gentiles without a means of redemption? It would seem so, since Judaism, for the most part, does not encourage “Noahidism” among the Gentiles.

Christianity was born of Judaism but we have been separated. Jewish people say the separation occurred when Paul developed an anti-Law religion for the Gentiles, effectively making Paul a Jewish traitor and perverter of Jewish teachings into a new Gentile religion. Christians say that Paul understood that the Law had been replaced by the grace of Christ and Torah entered into a period of obsolescence, making Paul the Jewish vanguard out of Judaism and into Christianity. Even my Pastor, who believes there will be a Third Temple and that there will be sacrifices again, tells me that the Torah was always intended to be temporary, and Paul was the instrument of closure for that part of Jewish existence.

I don’t accept either viewpoint. I can’t. One of the comments made on a recent blog post said in part:

In the case of the biblical literature, re-interpretation is a necessary part of such developments because many adherents to a given system are not native to the languages of the source literatures.

It may have become necessary for the form and structure of religious thought and practice to also have been reinterpreted because of the innate differences between Jewish and Gentile disciples of Messiah. Not only are the covenant structures different (or at least overlapping), but based on the much longer and unique Jewish history with God at the point of the apostolic period, how discipleship was transmitted by the Jewish apostles and received by the various Gentile populations in the then-civilized world, may have well required a sort of cultural “morphing,” even when Gentile Christianity and Jewish “Messianism” were still on speaking terms in the late Second Temple and early post-Temple time frame.

God is God of all and God desires to forgive all so that none should perish, but it seems apparent, given the wide variety of Jewish and Gentile approaches to God we’ve seen over the past two-thousand years, that God’s people have yet to come to any sort of consensus as to how that approach should look. Maybe this too is part of God’s gracious forgiveness, not locking human beings into a too tightly structured “approach pattern.”

I know that Jesus said that we only enter through the narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14), but some Christians believe that gate is as narrow as a single denomination. Some Christians believe you are only “saved” is you are baptized in running water vs. a wading pool. As for observant Jews, how many believe other Jews who do not observe Shabbos will not merit a place in the world to come? How many Jews believe that only their branch of Judaism or only their Rebbe has the true teachings of Torah?

But if God is our teacher and perhaps ultimately, our only teacher, where can we go to learn from Him without having to endure endless layers of human filters? Ourselves and delving into the Bible by the power of the Holy Spirit you say? Many claim to possess the true Spirit and thus out of that (or their own imagination), possess the true teachings of Christ, but I still maintain that there is a lot more chaff than wheat in human understanding of God. I can only hope and pray that God is a lot more merciful and forgiving than some people of faith say He is, so that our honest but fumbling attempts to know Him aren’t in vain.

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Yom Kippur: The Brokenhearted Offering

September 13, 2013 James Pyles 6 Comments

I hated Yom Kippur because it made me feel like a fraud. I would bang away at my chest all day, enumerating all my sins, promising I was repentant. But in my heart I knew that I would return to my mean self the moment the fast was over. I didn’t believe I could ever change, that I was really worthy of life and that I would ever be able to redeem myself. So I would go through the day anxious for it to be over, hating myself for being such a big, fat fraud.

-Eliana Cline
“Why I Hated Yom Kippur”
Aish.com

I’m writing this on Sunday, almost a full week before you’ll read it. Today, my Pastor’s sermon in church was on Yom Kippur. The timing was deliberate. Last week’s sermon, which I missed because I decided to skip church for the holiday weekend, was on Rosh Hashanah. It’s always interesting to hear a sermon in a Christian church about something that is so profoundly Jewish.

Aaron shall place lots upon the two he-goats: one lot “for Hashem” and one lot “for Azazel.” Aaron shall bring near the he-goat designated by lot for Hashem, and make it a sin offering. And the he-goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be stood alive before Hashem, to provide atonement through it, to send it to Azazel to the Wilderness.

–Leviticus 16:8-10 (Stone Edition Chumash)

One of the things I’ve come to learn about Jewish holidays and festivals being preached in the church is that these Jewish events can never be allowed to just stand on their own. They always have to “point to Christ.” Otherwise, I guess, they just aren’t really worthy, God-given events all by themselves (that was a little sarcasm).

Anyway, it is Pastor’s opinion that each of these two goats represent the first and second coming of Christ. I have no idea where this idea comes from, but knowing Pastor, it comes from some Christian source or authority. Although I sometimes disagree with him, Pastor does his research and he hardly ever “shoots from the hip” in a sermon.

The analogy, which is how I think of it, falls apart when you realize the Azazel goat (Pastor called it by the more common name “scapegoat”) must bear the sins of Israel and be sent out into the Wilderness, presumably to die. One commentary in my Chumash on verse ten says:

Or HaChaim notes that the goat is referred to here and in verse 21, before the confession, as alive. After Aaron pronounces confession upon it, however, it is no longer called alive, even though it would be some time before it would go to its death. The confession had the effect of placing all of the people’s sins on the goat, which would then carry them off to the desolate Azazel. The presence of such contamination on the goat rendered it spiritually “dead;” thus it was called alive only before Aaron’s confession.

Even if you don’t quite buy what Or HaChaim says, the Azazel goat seems a poor symbol for the King of the Jews returning to redeem Israel in glory and power, leading an army of angelic beings.

But Pastor said a lot of really good things about Yom Kippur and how we Christians can learn from the Day of Atonement. Yes, he said our final atonement is Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sins and who was resurrected to give us the promise of eternal life through faith in him.

But he also deconstructed the mechanism of teshuvah (though he didn’t call it that) as the observant Jewish world sees it, and said point-blank that simply answering an altar call or raising your hand at Christian camp professing belief in Jesus doesn’t automatically grant you the aforementioned eternal life. Seeking atonement of your sins requires much, much more, and we aren’t fully disciples of the Master and Children of God until we do. After that, we still need to have a life of continual repentance, since we sin every day.

Rabbi J. Immanuel Schochet wrote a rather lengthy article called The Dynamics of Teshuvah, which I won’t quote from here. I think it could be called “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Teshuvah But Were Afraid To Ask.” If you want to know more, Rabbi Schochet’s article is a good source.

But the heart of teshuvah and atonement is contained in the more modest missive written by Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zelvin called The Master Key:

One year, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov said to Rabbi Ze’ev Kitzes, one of his senior disciples: “You will blow the shofar for us this Rosh Hashanah. I want you to study all the kavanot (Kabbalistic meditations) that pertain to the shofar, so that you should meditate upon them when you do the blowing.”

Rabbi Ze’ev applied himself to the task with joy and trepidation: joy over the great privilege that had been accorded him, and trepidation over the immensity of the responsibility. He studied the Kabbalistic writings that discuss the multifaceted significance of the shofar and what its sounds achieve on the various levels of reality and in the various chambers of the soul. He also prepared a sheet of paper on which he noted the main points of each kavanah, so that he could refer to them when he blew the shofar.

Finally, the great moment arrived. It was the morning of Rosh Hashanah, and Rabbi Ze’ev stood on the reading platform in the center of the Baal Shem Tov’s synagogue amidst the Torah scrolls, surrounded by a sea of tallit-draped bodies. At his table in the southeast corner of the room stood his master, the Baal Shem Tov, his face aflame. An awed silence filled the room in anticipation of the climax of the day—the piercing blasts and sobs of the shofar.

Rabbi Ze’ev reached into his pocket, and his heart froze: the paper had disappeared! He distinctly remembered placing it there that morning, but now it was gone. Furiously, he searched his memory for what he had learned, but his distress over the lost notes seemed to have incapacitated his brain: his mind was a total blank. Tears of frustration filled his eyes. He had disappointed his master, who had entrusted him with this most sacred task. Now he must blow the shofar like a simple horn, without any kavanot. With a despairing heart, Rabbi Ze’ev blew the litany of sounds required by law and, avoiding his master’s eye, resumed his place.

At the conclusion of the day’s prayers, the Baal Shem Tov made his way to the corner where Rabbi Ze’ev sat sobbing under his tallit. “Gut Yom Tov, Reb Ze’ev!” he called. “That was a most extraordinary shofar-blowing we heard today!”

“But Rebbe . . . I . . .”

“In the king’s palace,” said the Baal Shem Tov, “there are many gates and doors, leading to many halls and chambers. The palace-keepers have great rings holding many keys, each of which opens a different door. But there is one key that fits all the locks, a master key that opens all the doors.

“The kavanot are keys, each unlocking another door in our souls, each accessing another chamber in the supernal worlds. But there is one key that unlocks all doors, that opens up for us the innermost chambers of the divine palace. That master key is a broken heart.”

Eliana Cline’s article captured what it is for a Jewish person on Yom Kippur in a more modern setting:

This Yom Kippur, I can feel the pain of not being in a state of connection and own the consequences of my choices. I can say to God, “This is not me,” and mean it. I feel repentant, not from fear – but from a genuine desire for connection, love and transcendence. Getting in touch with my higher self that yearns to be good has enabled me to sense the sadness of my past choices.

The Talmud teaches that on Yom Kippur we are compared to angels. I never really got the comparison. Until now. On Yom Kippur all the daily responsibilities and tasks are removed; it’s a day we transcend the physical and live with total purpose. It’s a day with one sole mission, like an angel, to pray, to think and to connect – to God and to our inner soul.

We can choose whether or not to truly repent of our sins and approach God. Most of us most of the time (am I being too cynical?) repent by saying “Sorry” to God, knowing full well, or at least suspecting it in the back of our minds, that we will be revisiting our same old sins again by the by. Repentance for the moment, sin for a lifetime. No wonder Cline felt like a fraud. Most of us should feel the same way.

But Christianity doesn’t have an event on its religious calendar that’s anything like Yom Kippur. Easter probably comes the closest, but that’s a holiday of victory over sin and death, not taking responsibility for sin and repairing relationships with people and with God.

Yom Kippur can seem incredibly depressing if you don’t come at it from the right direction. If you see it as having to wallow in your sins, feeling like a fraud, feeling like an abject failure, then yes, it’s really depressing. You afflict yourself, usually by a complete food and liquid fast for twenty-four hours and a bit more, and hope that’s enough to appease an angry God. But only pagan gods need to be appeased. You can’t “buy off” the One Living God with a sacrifice unless that sacrifice is you!

For You do not desire a sacrifice, else I would give it; a burnt-offering You do not want. The sacrifices God desires are a broken spirit; a heart broken and humbled, O God, You will not despise.

–Psalm 51:18-19 (Stone Edition Tanakh)

And by “you,” I mean your broken, humble, and contrite heart.

Take words with you and return to Hashem; say to Him, ‘May you forgive all iniquity and accept good, and let our lips substitute for bulls.’

–Hosea 14:3 (Stone Edition Tanakh, verse 2 in Christian Bibles)

Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.

–Hebrews 13:15 (NASB)

Whether you’re a Christian or a Jew, we all turn to the One God when we repent and ask for forgiveness, though we are unworthy. As Christians, we turn to God through our great intercessor Christ, and we pray that God reveals Himself and his compassion to us through him. I once heard a Jewish person tell me that no man stands between a Jew and his God. I can only ask, especially now, since as you read this, Yom Kippur is just a few hours away, that God reveals all truth, first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.

Yom Kippur is a gift. It allows us to remove the barriers that separate us from a Holy God and to once again draw near to our Father in Heaven. The gift is offered by grace. All we have to do is accept it. The only cost to us, is to be sincerely brokenhearted.

Have an easy fast and may you be inscribed in the book of life.

12 days.

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Make Teshuvah Now

September 12, 2013 James Pyles 1 Comment

We have now gone well beyond Moses’ arguments with God. God’s power is not automatic or unbridled; it is, rather, an expression of God’s will. God can choose how and when to use that power. Teshuvah is God’s gift to us, a singular opportunity to sway God from anger to compassion. This distinctively Jewish idea also teaches that, ultimately, it is human beings who have the power to determine how God will use that divine power. We invoke this theme throughout the liturgy of the High Holidays.

-Rabbi Neil Gillman
“Chapter 2: God is Power,” pg 25
The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians

I often write about what Messianic Jews have to say to Christians, hopefully in a very positive light, but Rabbi Gillman’s book is what other Jews, those who don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah, have to say to Christians. By providing the Jewish viewpoint on God, Rabbi Gillman is attempting to be a “light to the nations,” showing us who he believes God actually is (as opposed to who Christians think God is).

We don’t often think we can change God’s mind but I think Rabbi Gillman may have a point.

Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk; and he cried out and said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered himself with sackcloth and sat on the ashes. He issued a proclamation and it said, “In Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let man, beast, herd, or flock taste a thing. Do not let them eat or drink water. But both man and beast must be covered with sackcloth; and let men call on God earnestly that each may turn from his wicked way and from the violence which is in his hands. Who knows, God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish.”

When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it.

–Jonah 3:4-10 (NASB)

Gillman calls Jonah the only successful prophet in the Bible. Typically, all other prophets call for repentance (usually of Israel) and they only receive a deaf ear in return. Often these prophets are killed by the very people they’re trying to save. The prophet warns Israel. Israel ignores the prophet and does not repent. God fulfills the prophesy by doing terrible things to Israel, which usually include war, exile, and death.

…and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

–2 Chronicles 7:14 (NASB)

If the people who are called by God’s Name would humble themselves and pray and seek God’s face and turn from their wickedness, then He would hear from Heaven and forgive their sin and heal their Land. Seems pretty straightforward to me. But then, God set up the conditions. If you do this, then I will do that. If you do not do this, then I will do something else. God is prepared to respond to Israel depending on what choice Israel makes. It’s not as if God changes His mind as such.

But what about this?

The Lord said to Moses, “How long will this people spurn Me? And how long will they not believe in Me, despite all the signs which I have performed in their midst? I will smite them with pestilence and dispossess them, and I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they.”

But Moses said to the Lord, “Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for by Your strength You brought up this people from their midst, and they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that You, O Lord, are in the midst of this people, for You, O Lord, are seen eye to eye, while Your cloud stands over them; and You go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night. Now if You slay this people as one man, then the nations who have heard of Your fame will say, ‘Because the Lord could not bring this people into the land which He promised them by oath, therefore He slaughtered them in the wilderness.’ But now, I pray, let the power of the Lord be great, just as You have declared, ‘The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.’ Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of Your lovingkindness, just as You also have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.”

So the Lord said, “I have pardoned them according to your word; but indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord.

–Numbers 14:11-21 (NASB)

On the surface, it certainly seems as if God was ready to wipe out the Children of Israel, but Moses, appealing to God’s reputation, gets Him to change His mind. Or was God setting up the situation so that Moses would change his mind? Remember, it’s far easier for a human being to lose his cool than for God to do so. By deliberately putting Moses in between the Children of Israel and God’s wrath, God is forcing Moses to make a choice. Either Moses can side with God and advocate for the destruction of his people, or he can confront God as Israel’s protector…the very role for which God chose Moses.

Ultimately, if God is Sovereign and if His will and His decisions are always perfect, then He really has no need to change His mind. We, on the other hand, have to change our minds all the time, and I think God is at work trying to get us to do this. We are flawed, sinful, imperfect, self-centered creatures and God loves us anyway. It’s like being the Father to billions and billions of two-year olds. We’re all screaming “mine,” all fighting each other over our toys, all hording the goodies for ourselves, and we all don’t want to listen to God telling us to be good and to share.

Yom Kippur starts at sundown on this coming Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. Although the Day of Atonement has very little meaning to most Christians, we can still allow it to remind us that there may be some people we have hurt and we have neglected to repent of that. We may have sinned against God and have neglected to repent of that. As long as we are alive, we have the opportunity to repent, to turn back to the ways of God, and to make amends with anyone we have injured.

But who knows when one will die?

Rabbi Eliezer said: “Repent one day before your death.” His disciples asked him, “Does, then, one know on what day he will die?” “All the more reason he should repent today, lest he die tomorrow.”

–Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53a

From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

–Matthew 4:17 (NASB)

Even during the days of Mashiach, it will still be permissible for people to repent…but why wait? God is reminding us to make teshuvah now.

"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