A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 2

Continued from last week...

Before answering your questions, I would like to take a look at the Greco-Judeo-Roman world which produced Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, Akiva ben Joseph and the Rabban Gamaliel. We, Jew and Gentile alike, look at that world through the smoke of two thousand years of mutual distrust. I suspect however, that the distrust didn’t really begin to accelerate until at least a hundred years after the death and (we Christians maintain) resurrection of Jesus. I have already said that I suspect the word “Jew” was not used in exactly the same way at the time of the Second Temple as it is now.

Today, “Jewish” denotes both a religion and an ethnicity. One can be a Jew and be devout or completely without religion. Hitler tried to eliminate a people, an ethnicity, from the face of the earth. It didn’t matter to him that a person called a Jew might be completely irreligious. His warped racial theories killed untold numbers of people who thought of themselves as Germans or French or Russians or Poles.  They might have been complete materialists, but Hitler and many Europeans at the time said, a Jew is a Jew, no matter what he believes or does not believe.

One could and can stop being a Christian. One could not then, and for the most part cannot now, stop being a Jew. The Jew is somehow “other” than the particular nation of people among whom he lives. This otherness in relation to Christian Europe took centuries to develop. That distinction is rooted at least a thousand years before the time of Jesus and Gamaliel, and probably a good deal earlier than that. It finds its roots in the desert of Sinai, in a covenant that both Christians and Jews believe God made on the Holy Mountain with a group of escaped slaves from Egypt, most of whomwere descendants of a man named Jacob.

I needn’t tell you Rabbi the story of your own heritage, but allow me to explain this story - at least from my perspective - to those who might not understand. Jews and Christians alike believe 4,000 years ago, more or less, the Creator of all things spoke to a man, Abram, telling him to leave his home and journey west where he would receive a land and become a great nation and the father of many nations. Abram obeyed the Almighty and his name was changed to Abraham. In the land of Canaan, he became the father of Isaac, who in turn became the father of Jacob.

Abraham and Isaac had other sons, but the inheritor of the promise was Jacob. After a night of wrestling with an angel, this Jacob was renamed Israel, a name which means “a man who contends with God.” Through him new nation was born. He was the father of twelve sons, among whom were Joseph and Judah and Levi. From Judah descended the tribe of Judah and the two great kings of Israel, David and Solomon. Moses and Aaron descended from Levi, the tribe of priests and Levites, who are still counted among the Jews of our times. This family went down into Egypt perhaps 3,800 years ago to escape famine. There they became a great nation, a people called the Hebrews, a nation called Israel.

God delivered them from slavery through a series of miracles and led them out of slavery and into the desert of Sinai where at His holy mountain He established His covenant with them. He would be their God and they would be His people, holy and unique among the nations. They would be consecrated to Him by their way of life, laid out in the Torah. It is called the Nomos, in Greek and is called the Law in other languages.

The Torah brought together instructions from the previous covenants, such as basic natural law given in the covenant with Noah and the sign of the covenant, the circumcision of males, which had been part of the covenant with Abraham; butthis was the definitive covenant with the sons of Jacob/Israel, that is with those who were to be called Israelites. Notice that the covenant of Sinai is made with Israel, God’s firstborn. Beyond that there is no covenant specifically and uniquely withJudah, unless one counts the promise made to Judah made through Jacob/Israel that the scepter of government would never depart from him.

Judah was one of twelve with whom the covenant was made. Judah was part of Israel. It is from the name Judah that the word Jew derives. Most people would say that God made a covenant with the Jews. This is imprecise. Of course God made a covenant with Jews, insofar as they are part of Israel, but if we are to use the language of the Hebrew Scriptures, the tribe of Judah, the Jews, are but a part of Israel.

When the Israelites entered the land that God had promised their father Abraham, each tribe was assigned its proper place. In the south were the tribes of Judah, Simeon and Benjamin. It seems that Simeon was quickly absorbed into the tribe of Judah. It lost its distinct identity as a punishment for its founder’s misdeeds. The tribe of Benjamin maintained its identity well into the time of the Roman domination. Saul (Paul) of Tarsus identified himself as a Benjaminite. The separate identity of the tribe seems to have been lost by the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 AD. The tribe of Levi was scattered through the whole land, both north and south. The tribes of Levi persist to this day.

The roles of Levite and Cohen (sacrificing priest) still have their place in modern Jewish liturgy. In the north of the Land, nine tribes settled: 1. Reuben, 2. Dan, 3. Naphtali, 4. Gad, 5. Asher, 6. Issachar, 7. Zebulun, and 8. Joseph. The tribe of Joseph however was divided into two half tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh, named for the two sons of Joseph.

So in effect you have 3 tribes in the south and 10 tribes in the north and one tribe Levi, scattered throughout. The two half tribes of Joseph were by far the largest in the north and that is why the northern Israelites are called Israel but also Joseph or Ephraim or Manasseh or even Samaria for the name of their eventual capital city by the prophets.

Now it gets complicated. The northern tribes were taken into exile by the Assyrians in 720 BC and are by in large, lost to history that is until the present era of DNA testing. The southern tribes were taken into exile by the Babylonians in 586 BC, but maintained their ethnic and religious identity, and returned to the Land in 520 BC. In the messianic literature that developed over the next centuries, one of the necessary conditions for the messianic age was the ingathering of Israel, which had been scattered among the nation in a way that Judah had not been. The Talmud speaks of two messiahs, the suffering servant, the son of Joseph, and the glorious messiah son of David from the tribe of Judah.

Meïr Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser, called the Malbim, interprets Ezekiel 37 to mean that the Messiah ben Joseph will gather the ten lost northern tribes in preparation for the Messianic age. Though the Malbim is a relatively recent commentator, it seems reasonable that this is a messianic precondition.

Well, all this is gloriously obscure, but what is the point? Even in modern Judaism, though the word Israelite and Jew are used interchangeably, they do not have exactly the same meaning. Jewish and Israelite are not exactly the same thing. So, if the covenant of God is with Israel, the big question is, “Who is an Israelite in addition to who is a Jew?”

Next week: the difference between Judaism and the religion of Israel.

A rabbi asks a priest a question... part 1

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I am fascinated yet perplexed by the recent pronouncements of the church. Hope this clarifies my position.

As of the pronouncement

1.    The Jewish people are not responsible for the act of deicide, although some Jews participated in it in some fashion. (NostraAetatae). Yet - Matthew 27:24-25 states- When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “’I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said, ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, 'His blood is on us and on our children!'”

2.    The Jews have an eternal relationship with G-d through His covenant with them. How then does the Catholic Church maintain that it is Catholic Israel-replacement theology? That the Jewish covenant now belongs to the Catholic Church in any fashion.

3.    The Jewish people can find grace and salvation without belief in Jesus. What happened to Jesus' answer, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”? John 14:6. In fact, as a child I remember all too clearly the missionaries on the boardwalk in Coney Island, displaying this passage as they attempted to proselytize among the Jews.

4.    It seems the Catholic Church no longer believes that the Jews were sent out of their country because of their denial of Christ as Messiah. In Jewish tradition, the Jews were expelled from their land, primarily because of their sin of pursuing pagan religion. I do not believe there are any Jews in the world today who are pagans. In light of the above Jews of today are "saved" and enjoy a special role as G-d's chosen. Then say to Pharaoh, “This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son”, Exodus 4:22

5.    What of Romans 1:16   For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. Is not the primary message of the gospel salvation through belief in Jesus? This passage indicates that this message must be first brought to the Jews. The Catholic Church is now taken a position that the Jews do not need Jesus to find salvation.

The conclusion of all this that should be covered and I think this is what Rabbi Rosen was alluding to when he expressed his displeasure with the recent statement in that it did not include a strong statement regarding the State of Israel as a Jewish State. The church should now be in the forefront of advocating the Jews be given back their country - the land of Israel - as defined in Scripture which would obviously include the West Bank and eternal dominion over the city of Jerusalem. However, the church did the opposite. It recognized the Palestinian State, and is still advocating for the internationalization of Jerusalem.

I don't understand, 

Rabbi L

Dear Rabbi,

It will take me a while to discuss these points one by one, and as always I caution you to take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I should begin with the word “Jewish.”  What does the word mean? I maintain that the word has changed meaning repeatedly over the centuries. For instance, in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Damascus scroll, we read in Chapter 6 v.7, “And on the consummation of the period of these years they shall no more join themselves to the house of Judah.” The rest of the scroll is similarly anti-Judean. I certainly don’t mean to refer to the Scrolls as authoritative or biblical, but they do provide an historical context, the authors of these documents were most certainly Jews by our standard, but not by theirs. They seem to consider themselves true Levites (refer to the beginning of the chapter). If you asked them are they Judah? They would say, “No, we are Cohen and Levi.” (Priest and Levite) This distinction persists in the modern synagogue to this day, does it not? 

The leader of prayer first calls “Cohen” then “Levi”, then “Israel.”  Judah, per se, is never called. My suspicion is that at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Yehud (Hebrew/Aramaic) and Judaios (Greek) designated an ethnicity in certain contexts, and a political/theological party in other contexts. One was clearly a Yehud/Judaios if one’s ancestry was from the tribe of Judah, as in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, but perhaps if one’s politics supported the status quo of Temple/Sanhedrin, and one was zealous for the law as Paul claims of himself. He might too be called a Judaios. Paul of Tarsus, called himself a Judaios though he was from the tribe of Benjamin. Paul, a Benjaminite calls himself a Jew “…circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.”

He calls himself a Jew (Judaios in the Greek new testament text).  “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law of our ancestors. I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today.” (Acts 22:3) For Paul, Judaios can be very positive term, “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit.” (Romans 2:28, 29)

John the Evangelist seems to use the word Jew disparagingly as does the Damascus Document. Both the Gospel of John and the Damascus Document were written by people we would identify as Jews who would never call themselves Jews. John was possibly from a Levite family as was most probably the author of the Damascus Document.

Pilate seems to use the word in a disparaging way when he says to Jesus, “I am no Jew” (John 18:35). Luke, also a gentile, seems to use the word Judaios negatively in the Acts of the Apostles. My point is this, the word Judaios, the Greek equivalent of Yehud, always translated Jew, has quite a few meanings in the historical context of the time of Roman domination of the Holy Land. It is similar to the word Yankee. If you live in New York, a Yankee is a member of a ball club. It may also mean a person form New England. If you live in Alabama, a Yankee is anyone north of the Ohio River. If you are in Cuba, the fellow in Alabama would also be a Yankee, much to his chagrin. To assume that the words Jew and Israel are interchangeable is a modern anachronism, and muddies the discussion.

If I ever get around to writing about supercessionism, the idea that the covenant with the Jews is or is not ended, this becomes important.  If Judah and Israel are not the same exact thing, then it must be understood that there is no covenant with the Jews. There is a covenant with Israel. That means the question must be asked, “Who is Israel”?

(As you can tell this is going to go on forever. I am only on the second word of your letter.)

What have you got against Jews?

N.B. TO UNDERSTAND THIS YOU MUST KNOW THAT PHARISEE IS A NOBLE WORD. PHARISEES WERE AND REMAIN DEFENDERS OF THE TRUTHS OF JUDAISM IN A DIFFICULT AND HOSTILE WORLD.

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I just located your Father Know-it-all site. What’s with you and Jews? You talk about the decrease in the Jewish population of the Roman world, attributing it to conversion to Christianity, without mention of the two great Jewish rebellions which led to the death and expulsion of a large part of the Jewish population. This, of course, was followed by Christians obtaining political power with Constantine which wasn’t so good for Jews either. As I indicated in an earlier e-mail, I sense a pattern of unfavorable comments about Jews.

Yours,

Beth K. Nesset

Dear Beth,

Well, this is a first. I am usually criticized for being too semito-philic. What’s with me and the Jews? I think the Jews are very important to the culture, so I am always trying to fine tune my understanding of the history of a rather troubled relationship. I don’t know your ethnic and religious background, but would like to tell you a story.

I have a dear friend who is an ultra-orthodox rabbi. He likes me because I am orthodox, even if I’m not Jewish. His daughter was being married on a Sunday, and because I work Sundays, I couldn’t attend the wedding. So the rabbi invited me to Shabbos dinner to meet the in-laws. The groom’s uncle, a true Tsaddik, (righteous man) was there. He heads an anonymous charity for mothers in trouble. I was about to pour him a glass of wine, and I stopped myself because I realized that if it was yayin (wine) he couldn’t drink it if I had poured it. Were it mevushal, (cooked wine, or wine sweetened by a boiling process) it would be no problem if served by a gentile.

I said to the Tsaddik, “I don’t know if I can pour this for you. I have to see if it’s…”

He looked utterly flabbergasted and said, “I don’t know! I’ve never been in this situation before!!!”

He was astonished by the whole thing. He had never had a religious conversation with a gentile and certainly not with a galleck (Catholic Priest) and there we were, talking about the same things, righteousness, the nature of Messiah, the Scriptures and so on. He was amazed, and frankly so was I.

I realized that we were co-religionists. We did not share the same faith, but we did share the same religion. The moral and ethical concepts, the understanding we shared about much of the nature of the Almighty, even customs such as the washing of hands and the blessing of bread and wine, the prayers and psalms and chants, the hope of Messiah. We shared all these to some degree. We were playing in the same ball park, as it were.

What we did not share completely were faith and our understanding the nature of Torah (the Law). I regarded the whole Hebrew Scripture as fully inspired. He regarded Torah as preeminent, and of course he did not regard the New Testament as inspired at all, but was surprised to find that I do not consider the New Testament more inspired than Hebrew Scriptures. Talmud, along with Torah, was his whole life. Talmud is not mine though Old Testament – better called Hebrew Scriptures – most certainly is. His great trust is in Talmud and Torah. My trust is in Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew whom I believe to be the visible image of the invisible God, the Torah come to life! (c.f. St. Paul’s first letter to the Colossians, chapter one, verse 15)

Nonetheless, it was a transformative conversation for me. I realized that we were both claiming to be Israel. One cannot claim to be Israel without Moses and Mt. Sinai, but one cannot be a Jew without Talmud. I believe that my friends, the Tsaddik and the Rabbi, are doubtless Israel. They don’t believe that I am Israel, because I am not a Jew. In this, I think, they make a fundamental mistake. They claim, as I believe does Talmud, that the word “Jew” and the word Israel are interchangeable. I don’t think this claim can be made on the basis of Hebrew Scriptures. It is interesting that the word “Jew” or “Jews” (Yehud, Yehudim) really doesn’t appear in the Hebrew Scriptures very frequently. I think it is less than 100 times. The word Israel appears more than 2,000 times, 2575 times if the New Testament is included in the count. The word only refers to what we might think of as a Jew beginning with the second temple period, principally in the book of Esther, probably written in 350 BC about events that occurred in 470 BC, that is after the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. I maintain that Rabbinic Phariseeism, which is what we now call Judaism, really took hold of the religion of Israel in Babylon, the cultural center of the remnant of Israel after the devastation of the Holy land in 132 AD.  Remember, it’s the Babylonian Talmud that carries the most weight in Jewish life, not the Jerusalem Talmud. The Pharisee movement created an innovation in the religion of Israel that allowed one to practice a form of the religion of Israel when one could not go to the temple. This was an innovation.

I have a unique spin on the passage of Christian scripture in which Jesus talks about new wine skins and new patches on old garments.

“No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined, but new wine must be put into fresh wineskins, and no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. New wine must be put into fresh wineskins. No one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, 'The old wine is mellow.” (Chrestos in Greek means “mellow” in this context)” Luke 5:38 

People assuming that Jesus’ innovations are the new wine, struggle with this final statement that “…old wine is mellow, better, good et alia.” Why would Jesus say that His innovations are not as good as the customs of the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist? 

I maintain that He is saying the opposite. He is saying that Rabbinic Phariseeism is the innovation. As I mentioned, Rabbinic Phariseeism is a way to practice the religion of Israel without a temple. Jesus was saying that as Messiah he would fulfill the messianic expectation by rebuilding the temple at the same time transforming it into a temple made of living stones.  “You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus the Messiah.” (1Peter 2:4)  

He would fulfill the Messianic expectation of the rebuilding and purifying the temple that had been profaned by the Syrian Greeks, the Hasmoneans who extended its space for military purposes and then by Herod the Great, who used it to aggrandize himself. He would, however, do so in a way unexpected. He would create a living temple, the church.  He thus claimed to be the fulfillment of the tradition of Israel. It was the Pharisees who were the innovation.  

My dear friend Rabbi Lefkowitz, an ultra-orthodox Rabbi, would howl at this interpretation, as would most Christians, but it was he who started my thinking about this, I’m sure to his chagrin. He once said, “You Christians have got it wrong. You are more Jewish than we are. You have temples and sacrifices. We believe that the temple and the sacrifices of the law were concessions to the Jews, lest they backslide into the practices of the Canaanites. The sacrificial order is not central to Judaism. It’s the moral and ethical content of the Torah that matters.”  To which I want to respond that the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures fairly drip with sacrificial blood?  

A second insight that pushed me in this direction came from Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, with whom Rabbi Lefkowitz thoroughly disagrees on this point. Shanks holds that two forms of Judaism survived the destruction of the temple, Christianity and Rabbinic Phariseeism. The Sadducees, the Zealots, the Essenes and the followers of John lost their reason for being with the destruction of the temple. Rabbinic Phariseeism, or what we now call Judaism, is a religion of the synagogue. It survives because the temple is optional, though desirable. 

Christianity is still the religion of the temple, though a spiritualized temple. Catholicism and eastern Orthodoxy still offer sacrifice. Protestantism is thus a deviant form of Christianity, a form of Phariseeism which holds that there is no more sacrifice and no need for further sacrifice. We, in the traditional forms of Christianity, maintain, as I believe Jesus did, that we are fulfilling, not changing Torah. The only way I would disagree with Hershel Shanks is instead of using the word Judaism to stand for the totality of Israel, I would say that two forms of the religion of Israel survived the destruction of the temple, Christianity and Judaism.

The best estimates for the Jewish population of the ancient Mediterranean world are about one or two million. The estimate of the Jews living in the Diaspora, (scattered communities) in the Roman world is perhaps 4 or 5 million more. 

Dr. Rodney Stark in his book The Rise of Christianity, points out that in a few centuries the Jewish population of the Roman Empire was greatly reduced to perhaps fewer than one million. Certainly many were killed in war or died in plague, but it is doubtful, that the majority of first century “Israel” would have perished. More likely they found in Christianity a kind of “reform” Judaism which allowed them to practice the religion of Israel, praying to the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and reading the books of Moses, and the prophets, without the restrictions that made life so difficult in a diaspora, (a scattering) through the Greco Roman world, where circumcision was mocked as an obscenity and kosher meat was hard to find. 

The end of all this, is that there are two major representatives of the religion of Israel, two groups of people who reverence the books of Moses and the rest of the Tanakh, that is Hebrew scriptures, three if you count the 800 Samaritans who are still alive. The two are Christianity and Judaism, or more properly, Rabbinic Phariseeism. To say that Christianity comes from Jewish roots is very problematic. It means that Christianity must necessarily supersede Judaism; or that somehow Christianity is inferior to its parent religion, Judaism, a sort of “Judaism light.” 

I believe it is more accurate to say that both Judaism, though it precedes Christianity by about 3 or 4 centuries, and Christianity are variations of the religion of Israel. We Christians thus must concede that Jews have an authentic claim to be Israel. What I would hope for is the recognition of Jews that we too practice a form of the religion of Israel, which we believe to be its fulfillment. Thus we may find a new mutual respect and a way to collaborate despite the horrors of the past, a collaboration that is respectful and mutually beneficial, while admitting real and serious differences. 

We claim to be Israel by just a bit of genetic inheritance and a lot of adoption. We are members of the same religion, but followers of different faiths. Jesus and Moses are not enemies. Their followers should imitate them.

Rev. Know-it-all

PS you will be pleased to know that my family did not get along with Henry Ford. They refused to loan him money when he wanted to get his business going. We thought he was a bad investment and beside he gave us the shpilkes.