Jewish Torah Quotes

if Moses had seen the way my friend’s face blushes when he’s drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man

The sages advise us to study Torah lishma-"for its own sake" rather than to impress others with our scholarship. A paradox of parenting is that if we love our children for their own sake rather than for their achievements, it's more likely that they will reach their true potential.

Getting my shit kicked in by a clan of Jewish boarding school kids for referring to the Torah as "The Elder Scroll".

The easiest way for Americans to make sense of Chinese history is to compare everything to Jewish history. There's an analogue for everything. Torah: Analects. Curly sideburns: long ponytails. Mantou: bagels.

No ancient Jew was ever promised, or expected, a heavenly life. That was a wild and outrageous teaching of Jesus. Holy text never offers a heavenly hope--before Jesus. Think about it: No matter how faithful Adam would have been, he could never graduate to heaven. Going to heaven was a 'Jesus teaching.' It simply does not exist in Torah. pg xxvii

The Jews understand that the blessing of wealth was dependant upon obedience to the law and covenant. The laws in the Torah, if followed, would bring blessings.5 The Tanakh says, “How joyful are those who fear the Lord and delight in obeying his commands…they themselves will be wealthy.” (NLT, Psalm 112:1, 3) "If they listen and obey God, they will be blessed with prosperity throughout their lives.” (NLT, Job 36:11)

Grandpa Sereno: "There is nothing as dangerous as fear, fear of people who are different than you. Fear is the REAL danger and we must start to put all our efforts into fighting THAT instead of each other. Fight fear not people!!! Let there be light!

The ruach blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but cannot tell from where it comes or where it goes. God is He, He is Ruach (Spirit) and Ruach is speaking to our ruach (spirit) revealing great mysteries, knowledge, wisdom, understanding and joy.

In Jewish sacred literature, midrash is the primary rabbinic term for exegesis.

Messianic Judaism is not Christianity.

The system that God has given us is a holistic system. This is why the Torah is concerned with how we treat others, what we eat, how we behave, and how we produce, keep and share our wealth. The word shalom reminds us that we cannot live in peace until we completely take care of all other aspects of our lives.

Paul suggests that gentiles can practice a law written in their hearts, which will be seen as not only equal to but also above the written Torah…It should be remembered that in Paul’s day the only religious law for Paul was that of the Jewish Bible, in Hebrew… Though Torah and the New Testament, including Paul’s letters, will eventually shape church law, the New Testament’s books are not in themselves composed as law. They are not a self-consciously composed constitution. They contain no Ten Commandments in form or statement.

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence. "And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him.

Shimmel: “NEVER TRUST THE GOYIM. They are just like these other weird dangerous people, Messianic Jews! How dare Jews become “Christian-like”, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!

To me God’s voice and inspiration is stronger, of greater importance and authority than that of any fairy or any other spirit like creature from above or below earth. My Spirit Tales are stories based on truth and inspired by His writings. Stories about YHWH and His great wonderful acts are definitely not fairytales but Spirit Tales.

The kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, a piece of real estate for the single saved soul; it is a communal vision of what could be and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debts are forgiven, when we stop judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve, but also hold them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our strength. It is the good news that the Torah can be discussed and debated, when the Sabbath is truly honored and kept holy, when love of enemies replaces the tendency toward striking back. The vision is Jewish, and it is worth keeping as frontlets before our eyes and teaching to our children.

So it is no surprise that Jewish teaching includes frequent reminders of the importance of a broken-open heart, as in this Hasidic tale: A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”38

Had Moses seen how my friend’s face blushes when he is drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man.

If God doesn’t exist, no value is absolute. Life is just one big crapshoot.

In Pirkei Avot4 we learn that “the world stands on three things: on the Torah, on the service of God, and upon acts of loving-kindness.

Sarucha (age 8): "Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!" she exclaimed.

Light has a voice?” Sarucha inquired, amazed.

Jewish Learning Is Living!

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Rabbi Elyakim Krumbein puts it, “To fulfill the Torah means to grow as a person, and to grow truly as a person is tantamount to the fulfillment of Torah.

Judaism teaches us the sentence, “The Lord is One,” is not exclusive to Adonai, but rather inclusive of everything, everything, everything! Did you get that? Everything is One. This means far more than the teaching we are all connected. That teaching could be speaking biologically, or even atomically. I am talking about more than even the microscopic connection we all share. More than our DNA.

Life to me is a beautiful gift from from AdoShem that should not be wasted but shared with others. Including amazing revelations that are meant to be seen and meant to be told for such a time as this!

Reuven, I did not want my Daniel to become like my brother, may he rest in peace. Better I should have had no son at all than to have a brilliant son who had no soul. I looked at my Daniel when he was four years old, and I said to myself, How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person's suffering? How will I do this and not lose my son, my precious son whom I love as I love the Master of the Universe Himself? How will I do this and not cause my son, God forbid, to abandon the Master of the Universe and His Commandments? How could I teach my son the way I was taught by my father and not drive him away from Torah? Because this is America, Reuven. This is not Europe. It is an open world here. Here there are libraries and books and schools. Here there are great universities that do not concern themselves with how many Jewish students they have. I did not want to drive my son away from God, but I did not want him to grow up a mind without a soul. I knew already when he was a boy that I could not prevent his mind from going to the world for knowledge. I knew in my heart that it might prevent him from taking my place. But I had to prevent it from driving him away completely from the Master of the Universe. And I had to make certain his soul would the soul of a tzaddik no matter what he did with his life.

Discipleship to Jesus was not like discipleship to a Jewish rabbi. The rabbis bound their disciples not to themselves but to the Torah; Jesus bound his disciples to himself. The rabbis offered something outside of themselves; Jesus offered himself alone.

I did not go to the rabbi to learn interpretations of the Torah from him but to note his way of tying his shoelaces and taking off his shoes…. In his actions, in his speech, in his bearing, and his faithfulness to the Lord, man must make the Torah manifest. — Aryeh Leib Sarahs

I will use the conventional Christian term “Old Testament” when talking about the sacred writings of the ancient Israelites—a. k.a. the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, an acronym for the three sections of the Jewish Bible, Torah (five books of Moses), Nevi’im (prophets), and Kethuvim (writings).

R. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1167) takes this to a daunting extreme: One who witnesses oppression and says nothing, he insists, will meet the same fate as the oppressor himself (shorter commentary to Exod. 22:20–22). According to Jewish ethics, then, “in a society where some are oppressed, all are implicated. There are no innocent bystanders.

The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who 'reduced to absurdity' 'the wisdom of this world' (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah–that is essentially Jewish.

Simchat Torah (rejoicing of the Torah) marks the day we complete the Torah and start it all over again. The last verses of the last book (Deuteronomy) are read, followed by the first verses of the first book (Genesis). It’s a clear snapshot of how we hold both the ending and the beginning in the same moment, not to mention that the ending never ends.

But by raising him to the highest place in Heaven, God had vindicated Jesus, cleared him of all guilt, and in the process declared Roman law null and void and the Torah’s categories of purity and impurity no longer valid. As a result, gentiles, hitherto ritually unclean, could also inherit the blessings promised to Abraham without becoming subject to Jewish law.

I am interested in the literature and religion of ancient Israel. I focus on biblical law in its ancient Near Eastern context and on the way that biblical law was later reinterpreted in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature. I have also explored the relation of the Bible to later western intellectual history. In my latest book, A More Perfect Torah: At the Intersection of Philology and Hermeneutics in Deuteronomy and the Temple Scroll, I explore the relationship between biblical composition history and its reception history at Qumran and in rabbinic literature. At the University of Minnesota, I have department affiliations with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Program in Religious Studies and am also an affiliated faculty member of the Law School.

The church needs to be revitalized by a new "Jesusism" based upon the old Judaism. Jesus did not seek to destroy the Torah and the Prophets; rather, he came to place these sacred writings on firmer footing by a more precise interpretation. This new focus on Jesus does not mean that Gentile Christians need to convert to Judaism or pretend to be Jews. This would compromise seriously Jewish and Christian identities. Christians masquerading as Jews does note reflect an appropriate response to the reality of the wild olive branch engrafted into the tree. Let Jews live as Jews and let Christians follow Jesus' teachings! A new vision of Jesus does mean that Christians must learn to love the Jewish people and esteem the root which supports the branch. A new vision of Jesus requires a decision to study his teachings and to live the life of a disciple.

In the United States, thirteen-year-old Jewish boys often mark the transition to adulthood with a bar mitzvah, involving a rather elaborate ceremony that includes singing a passage from the ancient Torah, followed by a celebration of dancing to hip-hop music and gorging on dessert. Sambian boys in Papua New Guinea mark the same transition by participating in the Flute Ceremony, which includes playing ritual flutes and performing fellatio on older boys and elders of their tribe. Imagine if the Sambian and American Jewish boy suddenly changed places. We’d witness how a momentous source of pride to members of one culture could be a totally meaningless or humiliating experience to members of another, because the behaviors and achievements that confer self-esteem do so only to the extent that we embrace a cultural worldview that deems them worthy.

In describing the creation of man, the Torah says, “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the earth and blew into him the breath of life.” It’s interesting to note that the Hebrew word for formed, which is vayiezer, was misspelled in the Bible, having used the Hebrew letter iud twice. The word vayiezer can also mean inclinations, and from what we understand, when man was formed, he had inside of him two completely different inclinations.

Years ago, a Muslim woman called my radio show and asked me why I was not a Muslim. She asked this question with complete sincerity, and I answered her with equal sincerity. The name of her religion, I told her, is Islam, which in Arabic means submission (to God). The name of the Jewish people is Israel, which in Hebrew means struggle with God. I’d rather struggle with God, I said, than only submit to God. She thanked me and hung up. The answer apparently satisfied her. Arguing/struggling with God is not only Jewishly permitted, it is central to the Torah and later Judaism. In this regard, as in others, the Torah is unique. In no other foundational religious text of which I am aware is arguing with God a religious expectation. The very first Jew, Abraham, argues with God, as does the greatest Jew, Moses. (It is worth noting that though Muslims consider Abraham their father as well, arguing with God has no place in the Quran or in normative Islam.) It is difficult to overstate the importance of this Jewish concept. For one thing, it enabled Jews to believe in the importance of reason — God Himself could be challenged on the basis of reason and morality; one does not have to suspend reason to be a believing Jew. Indeed, it assured Jews that belief in God was itself the apotheosis of reason. For another, it had profound psychological benefits to Jews. We do not have to squelch our questioning of, or even our anger at, God. One can be both religious and real.

Just as the Gospel of Luke promotes a particular Christology (view of Jesus), which is distinct from that found in Matthew, Mark, and John, so Acts promotes a particular view of Paul. This characterization of Paul can be seen as distinct from his self-presentation in his letters. In particular, given that Paul had developed a reputation for speaking against Torah (See “Paul in Jewish Thought,” p. 741), Acts “rehabilitates” Paul by presenting him as a loyal Jew who promotes circumcision and participates in rituals in the Jerusalem Temple

Celler pressed him on theological details that were only vaguely addressed in the amendment: “Would a Protestant child be taught papal infallibility? Would a Catholic boy or girl be required to listen to divine instruction from the Torah? Might Mohammedan parents insist their child be taught the scriptures of the Koran?” In an unusual statement for an evangelical leader, Cook dismissed those concerns, claiming that there was really “not that much difference” among the texts used in the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.

Paul was horrified; yet again, the issue that had erupted so painfully in Antioch threatened his entire mission. He had always maintained that it was unnecessary for gentiles who committed themselves to the Messiah to observe the Torah, since they had received the Spirit without its help. The Torah was valuable to Jews, but it could only be a distraction to the Galatians; forcing them to adopt a wholly Jewish way of life would be as absurd as demanding that Jews take on the ancient Galatian traditions and start feasting like Aryan warriors, singing their drinking choruses, and venerating their warrior heroes.

From antiquity onward, Torah scrolls were treated as objects of veneration, and imagined to have (for example) health-giving properties. This Jewish idea that the book embodied the divinity of its sacred subject matter shaped the formation of the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. From antiquity onward, the idea of a material book as the ultimate source of truth has persisted. The Roman emperor Justinian passed a law in AD 530 requiring the presence of “holy scriptures” in court throughout proceedings; in the United Kingdom, as recently as 2013 the Magistrates’ Association reaffirmed the need for witnesses to swear on sacred texts.

There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to 'go back eighteen rows,' and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit. Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: 'It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.' Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can't resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, 'Silence, it's my will.

INSIGHT FOR BUSINESS: Make sure you understand the business environment in which you are working, from the lowliest job to the most complex one. You don’t need to be able to do every task, but you must understand everything that happens inside the organization. While it is important to delegate responsibilities, never abdicate supervision. It is important that you keep tabs on the entire process from top to bottom and from bottom to top. INSIGHT FOR LIFE: Keep all aspects of your life in balance. Extremes in any direction lead to setbacks in another. Make sure to be involved in your own life by not allowing decisions to be made for you by others—but at the same time, take the opinions of friends and family seriously.

Paul’s opponents in Galatia believed that Jesus’s heroic death and resurrection had inspired a spiritual renewal movement within Israel; they advocated continuity with the past. But Paul believed that with the cross something entirely new had come into the world.7 By raising Jesus, a criminal condemned by Roman law, God had taken the shocking step of embracing what the Torah deemed defiled. Jewish law decreed: “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a gibbet”; by accepting this shameful death, Jesus had made himself legally profane, voluntarily becoming an abomination. But by raising him to the highest place in Heaven, God had vindicated Jesus, cleared him of all guilt, and in the process declared Roman law null and void and the Torah’s categories of purity and impurity no longer valid. As a result, gentiles, hitherto ritually unclean, could also inherit the blessings promised to Abraham without becoming subject to Jewish law.

When it comes to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith - the law of Moses - Jesus was adamant that his mission was not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). That law made a clear distinction between relations among Jews and relations between Jews and foreigners. The oft-repeated commandment "love your neighbor as yourself" was originally given strictly in the context of internal relations within Israel. The verse in question reads: "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people , but shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). To the Israelites, as well to Jesus's community in first-century Palestine,"neighbor" meant one's fellow Jews. With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors and occupiers, however, the Torah could not be clearer: "You shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not live in your land" (Exodus 23:31-33)

So what was the hidden divine purpose in this seemingly strange story? As we saw, from Romans 5:12 on Paul has referred to “Sin” in the singular, “Sin” as a force or power that is let loose in the world and that ultimately rules the world (“Sin reigned in death,” 5:21). “Sin” here seems to be the accumulation not just of human wrongdoings, but of the powers unleashed by idolatry and wickedness—the powers that humans were supposed to have, but that, through idolatry, they had handed over to nongods. Paul then uses the word “Sin” as a personification for all this. Sometimes it seems as though, in 7:7–12 at least, Paul says “Sin” where he might have said “the satan,” or at least the serpent in Genesis 3. In any case, in Romans 7 Paul is telling two stories, the story of Adam and the story of Israel, weaving them together to show—as in much Jewish tradition—just how closely that they resonated with one another. His main point is that, through the Torah, Israel recapitulated the sin of Adam.

The purpose of eating separate dairy and meat meals is symbolic; at Mount Sinai the Jews agreed to keep the laws of the Torah, even ones that entailed significant sacrifices, one of which was the commandment to separate milk and meat. “We will do and we will hear,” said the Jews at Mount Sinai, instead of the other way around, demonstrating a blind faith that Zeidy says we still have to be proud of. All of us were at Mount Sinai, says Zeidy after the meal is over and everyone is patting their bloated stomachs. The Midrash says that every Jewish soul was present when the Torah was handed down to the chosen people, and that means that even if we don’t remember it, we were there, and we chose to accept the responsibility of being a chosen one. Therefore, Zeidy lectures further, for any of us to reject any one of the laws would mean we were hypocrites, as we were present at the time the commitment was made. There is no immunity for a Jewish soul. I wonder how old my soul has to be to have been present at Mount Sinai. Did I say yes because I wanted to fit in? Because that sounds like me, afraid to think differently out loud.

But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescribed a hand not for a hand but for the theft of a loaf of bread or for the striking of one’s better and which gave much favor to the rights of the nobility and virtually none to the lower classes. The casual cruelty of other ancient law codes—the cutting off of nose, ears, tongue, lower lip (for kissing another man’s wife), breasts, and testicles—is seldom matched in the Torah. Rather, in the prescriptions of Jewish law we cannot but note a presumption that all people, even slaves, are human and that all human lives are sacred. The constant bias is in favor not of the powerful and their possessions but of the powerless and their poverty; and there is even a frequent enjoinder to sympathy:     “A sojourner you are not to oppress:     you yourselves know (well) the feelings of the sojourner,     for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.” This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE LEMBA       One of the most outstanding cases of  Black diaspora Jewry is the case of the Lemba of southern Africa. The Lemba have long claimed that they are Jews or Israelites who migrated to Yemen and from there to Africa as traders. Amazingly, DNA evidence has backed the Lemba claim of Jewish ancestry.   Today, the Lemba can be found in southern Africa countries like Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many of their customs are similar to Jews such as the wearing of  yarmulke-like skull cups and observing kosher laws such as the requirement not to eat pork. Interestingly they also avoid eating rabbits, scaleless fish, hares and carrion. In short, the Lemba follow the requirements in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament.     The Lemba claim that about 2500 years ago, their ancestors left Judea for Yemen. Only males are said to have sailed to Africa by boat. The migrants took local wives for themselves. They built a city in Yemen called Sena. From Sena they traveled to Africa where they dispersed. Some remained in East Africa and others traveled to southern Africa. Lemba women do not have 'Semitic' admixture, and this is in line with their oral history.     Professor Tudor Vernon Parfitt, a professor of Jewish Studies then at the University of London, spent several months among the Lemba. He later travelled to Yemen and to his

Too often scholars have thought and even suggested that what happened during and after Constantine was that the church sought to replace the pagan temples, priests, and sacrifices with their own. This is at best a half truth. If this had been primarily what was going on, we would have expected to find priestesses showing up in the mainstream church in and after the time of Constantine, since there were certainly priestesses in the pagan temples. But this we do not find in the historical record. This is because the church of that period was not merely trying to supplant pagan religion with Christian religion, though some of that was going on. More to the point, there was a rising tide of anti-Judaism, and one of its manifestations was this Old Testament hermeneutic. The Torah had been claimed as the church’s book, Jews were being ostracized and then later ghettoized, and a hermeneutic of ministry was being adopted which co-opted the Old Testament for church use when it came to priests, temples, and sacrifices, and indeed sacraments in general. Thus ironically enough while the structure of the ecclesial church was becoming more Old Testamental, the church hierarchy was not only becoming less tolerant of Jews, it was forgetting altogether the Jewish character of Jesus’ ministry and his modifications of the Passover that led to the Lord’s Supper celebration of the early church in the first place.

In a remarkable midrash (commentary) on Proverbs, we read the following: “All of the festivals will be abolished in the future [the Messianic Age], but Purim will never be abolished.” The miracle of Purim is very different from the miracles mentioned in the Torah. While the latter were overt miracles, such as the ten plagues in Egypt and the splitting of the Red Sea, the miracle of Purim was covert. No law of nature was violated in the Purim story and the Jews were saved by seemingly normal historical occurrences. Had we lived in those days, we would have noticed nothing unusual. Only retroactively are we astonished that seemingly unrelated and insignificant human acts led to the redemption of the Jews. The discovery that these events concealed a miracle could only be made after the fact. Covert miracles will never cease to exist explains the Torah Temimah. In fact, they take place every day. The midrash on Proverbs is not suggesting that the actual festivals mentioned in the Torah will be nullified in future days. Rather we should read the midrash as follows: Overt miracles, which we celebrate on festivals mentioned in the Torah, no longer occur. But covert miracles such as those celebrated on Purim will never end; they continue to occur every day of the year. Purim, probably rooted in a historical event of many years ago, functions as a constant reminder that the Purim story never ended. We are still living it. The Megillah is open-ended; it was not and will never be completed!

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

The artillery and mortars had been silent for at least the past few hours. After awhile the rabbi stopped initiating new songs. He took a few more sips of wine and sat for a time, almost shining in obvious pleasure, and yet reflective and silent. All watched him, and after a few minutes he spoke again in his odd Moroccan/Brooklyn accent. "The weapons of a Jew are prayer and mitzvot. Tonight we are arming ourselves with mitzvot like the finest suit of armor ever made. Better than a ceramica," he said, referring to the bullet-proof flak vests worn by many Israeli soldiers by their street name. "By the mere act of sitting and eating and drinking, because we are doing so in a sukkah at the time that our Creator told us to do so, we acquire for ourselves a heavenly shield more powerful than any missile or tank." He let those words settle in as he beamed at all present at the table and standing in the sukkah. "A mitzvah—carrying out HaShem's commandment or doing a good deed, such as an act of kindness towards your fellow human being—creates a heavenly smell, a wonderful odor that is both spiritual and physical. When the Creator of the whole universe commanded the Jewish people to bring sacrifices upon His holy altar, and they did so exactly as he had instructed them, the Torah says that it created a Re-ach Tov, a good and wonderful scent, that pleased the Ribbono Shel-Olam. And in those moments when the Jewish people acted on the instructions of their Creator, there was a kesher and a devekus, a tie and a drawing closer, between the Jewish people and their Creator.

According to Luke, far from denouncing the cult, like Stephen, they worshipped together every day in the temple.22 Indeed, the revered Pharisee Gamaliel, whose views were more liberal than Paul’s, is said to have advised the Sanhedrin to leave the Jesus movement alone: If it was of human origin, it would break up of its own accord like other recent protest groups.23 But for Paul, the Hellenistic followers of Jesus were insulting everything he believed to be most sacred, and he greatly feared that their devotion to a man executed so recently by the Roman authorities would put the entire community at risk. Paul himself had never had any dealings with Jesus before his death, but he would have been horrified to learn that Jesus had desecrated the temple and argued that some of God’s laws were more important than others. For a Pharisee with extreme views, like Paul, a Jew who did not observe every single one of the commandments was endangering the Jewish people, since God could punish such infidelity as severely as he had punished the ancient Israelites in the time of Moses. But above all, Paul was scandalized by the outrageous idea of a crucified Messiah.24 How could a convicted criminal possibly restore the dignity and liberty of Israel? This was an utter travesty, a scandalon or “stumbling block.” The Torah was adamant that such a man was hopelessly polluted: “If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and you hang him on a gibbet, his body must not remain on the tree overnight; you must bury him the same day, for the one who has been hanged is accursed of God, and you must not defile the land that Yahweh your God has given you.”25 True, his followers insisted that Jesus had been buried on the day of his death, but Paul was well aware that most Roman soldiers had little respect for Jewish sensibilities and might well have left Jesus’s body hanging on his cross to be consumed by birds of prey. Even though this was no fault of his own, such a man was an abomination and had defiled the Land of Israel.26 To imagine that these desecrated remains had been raised to the right hand of God was abhorrent, unthinkable, and blasphemous. It impugned the honor of God and his people and would delay the longed-for coming of the Messiah, so it was, Paul believed, his duty to eradicate this sect.

Rabbi Zimmerman is away this Shabbat morning, so Rabbi David Stern leads Chever Torah in his place. Rabbi Stern is young, handsome, and possessed of a lightning quick wit. He wears his hair in the style made famous by J.F.K. His energy is contagious. The morning's discussion accelerates as he asks a question worthy of Rashi, then paces back and forth in front of the hall grinning with delight as we answer and respond with questions of our own. But a few minutes later the rhythm flags inexplicably and we sit silently, staring at our Torahs. Rabbi Stern fires off another question. No one answers. He offers a provocative observation - something controversial to stir the pot. Still, we are silent. Finally, in frustration, he exclaims, "Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" We laugh. But it occurs to me that Rabbi Stern has offered the most profound observation of the day, and it is a very Jewish idea. Unfortunately, most theological conversations I have had in church have been the self-reinforcing kind: a group of people sitting around telling each other what everyone already believes. If some brave soul interjects a radical new idea or questions one of the group's firmly held views, it is usually an unpleasant experience. We shift in our seats uncomfortably until someone rises to the bait. The discussion remains civil, but it seems that any challenge to the groups' theology must be corrected, so all comments are solidly aimed at that one goal: arriving at a preconceived answer. Chever Torah has no such agenda. Or perhaps I should say all discussions have the same agenda: to explore the possibilities - all the possibilities.

The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that God created man “in His image, after His likeness.” Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that God has no image. Hence the prohibition against making images of God. For God is beyond all representation, all categorization. “I will be what I will be,” He says to Moses when Moses asks Him His name. All images, forms, concepts and categories are attempts to delimit and define. God cannot be delimited or defined; the attempt to do so is a form of idolatry. “Image,” then, must refer to something quite different than the possession of a specific form. The fundamental point of Genesis 1 is that God transcends nature. Therefore, He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings “in His image,” God gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative. The unprecedented account of God in the Torah’s opening chapter leads to an equally unprecedented view of the human person and the capacity for self-transformation. [...] Everything else in creation is what it is, neither good nor evil, bound by nature and nature’s laws. The human person alone has the possibility of self-transcendence. We may be a handful of dust but we have immortal longings.

In general, it should be noted, biblical law is evolutionary, not revolutionary...

If you truly wish your children to study Torah, study it yourself in their presence. They will follow your example. Otherwise, they will not themselves study Torah but will simply instruct their children to do so. — Menahem Mendel of Kotzk

Just as water leaves a high place and flows to a low one, so too, God’s voice speaking through the Torah goes past one whose spirit is proud and remains with one whose spirit is humble. — Song of Songs Midrash Rabbah 2:8

Every single person on this planet has a relationship with God. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1267-1267 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:09:31 AM what happens when a man with an unclean spirit meets the One anointed with God’s Spirit. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1268-1268 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:09:56 AM Mark shows that Jesus teaches with unique authority, unlike and indeed surpassing that of the scribes ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1269-1269 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:10:08 AM The second part is an account of an exorcism (vv. 23-26). ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1270-1271 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:11:18 AM The combined stories demonstrate that Jesus’ word is deed. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1293-1294 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 7:16:33 AM Jewish synagogues, according to rabbinic nomenclature, were “assembly halls” or auditoriums where the Torah was read and expounded. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1329-1330 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:00:12 AM Every instance of exousia therefore reflects either directly or indirectly the authority of Jesus. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1331-1332 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:00:39 AM his authority over the highest authorities in both the temporal realm, as represented by the scribes, and the supernatural authorities, as represented by the demon in l:23ff. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1332-1334 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:04 AM The scribes derive their authority from the “tradition of the elders” (7:8-13) — the fathers of Judaism, we might say; whereas Jesus receives his authority directly from the Father in heaven (1:11). ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1334-1335 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:12 AM contingent on the authority of the Torah and hence a mediated authority; ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1335-1335 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:20 AM Jesus appeals to an immediate and superior authority resident in himself that he received at his baptism. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1337-1338 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:01:49 AM Jesus’ teaching is qualitatively different, “not as the teachers of the law.” ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1346-1346 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:03:40 AM does not recount the content of the teaching. The accent falls rather on Jesus the teacher. ========== The Gospel according to Mark (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Edwards Jr., James R.) - Your Highlight on Location 1349-1350 | Added on Friday, February 13, 2015 10:04:30 AM In the Gospel of Mark the person of Jesus is more important than the subject of his teaching. If we want to know what the gospel or teaching of Jesus consists of, we are directed to its embodiment in Jesus the teacher. ========== The Gospel

27. Jesus’ disciples interrupt the conversation by their return from Sychar, where they had gone to purchase food (v. 8). Their unvoiced surprise that he was talking with a Samaritan woman reflects the prejudices of the day. Some (though by no means all) Jewish thought held that for a rabbi to talk much with a woman, even his own wife, was at best a waste of time and at worst a diversion from the study of Torah, and therefore potentially a great evil that could lead to Gehenna, hell (Pirke Aboth 1:5). Some rabbis went so far as to suggest that to provide their daughters with a knowledge of the Torah was as inappropriate as to teach them lechery, i.e. to sell them into prostitution (Mishnah Sotah 3:4; the same passage also provides the contrary view). Add to this the fact that this woman was a Samaritan (cf. notes on v. 9), and the disciples’ surprise is understandable. Jesus himself was not hostage to the sexism of his day (cf. 7:53–8:11; 11:5; Lk. 7:36–50; 8:2–3; 10:38–42).

long tradition of seeking coded messages in the Bible, or the Torah. Even Sir Isaac Newton had believed that such a code existed, but in fact, Jewish priests and Bible scholars from the more distant past had a tradition of seeking interpretation of their world in the holy books. There were even a couple of words to describe the results; exegesis and eisegesis, meaning, respectively, insightful and false interpretations.

When the Orthodox tradition of biblical knowledge is taken as a whole, which is not easily attainable, taking years and multiple teachers, it can clearly be seen that the Torah was composed by influence of divine origin, a position that stands in opposition to the common scholarly opinion that it is the garbled mess of a multitude of redactors.

As a daughter of a Christian mother and Jewish father, she had insight into the struggle that many Jewish people had concerning the Christian Messiah. For so long, Christianity had tried to distance itself from the Hebraic context of the Scripture. She understood that part of this stemmed from the persecution of early messianic believers by the Jewish rabbinic authority, but unfortunately, early Christianity had often gone to the other extreme. They embraced many pagan practices that were abhorrent to Torah-observant Jews and condemned by the Old Testament. When a Christian came preaching a messianic message wrapped in the clothing of ancient paganism, many Jewish people turned away in disgust.

At the beginning of time and of space, or - to be more accurate - before either time or space had been defined, God conquered Jerusalem and through it He created the entire world. According to the Kabbalistic Jewish tradition, the Torah, the Sabbath, and Jerusalem were all created before the world was created. The Torah preceded it in thought, the Sabbath in time, and Jerusalem in space.

Everything was conducted in accordance with a master plan, in accordance with His directions and His code. As the Jewish sages put it: “He looked in the Torah and - using it as a blueprint - created the world.”               Once finished, He left a thin strand of the light of creation from Jerusalem on High to Jerusalem below. This thin strand was one of mercy, and was exempt from the fear of harsh judgment.

According to a Jewish tradition, everything which ever happened, is happening, or will happen in the future is to be found - in some form or another - in the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, which the Israelites received on Mount Sinai. However, the key to unlock all this data is not available to everyone.

Despite Marx’s ignorance of Judaism as such, there can be no doubt about his Jewishness. Like Heine and everyone else, his notion of progress was profoundly influenced by Hegel, but his sense of history as a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, an atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish.

went to this house of worship on Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year. It was a most moving experience. Since few Czech Jews had survived, the crowd was made up of remnants from the survivors of different Jewish communities. The books, the torahs, the cemetery - everything, at that time, was in complete disarray. It was the most moving experience that I ever had in a synagogue. I also saw and admired the square where Huss was burnt on the stake. He was the Czech reformer, who wanted to translate the Bible into the national language and was burnt to death by the prevailing Catholics, who judged him as a heretic. The old, historic town fascinated me no end. The medieval houses, with fortresslike portals, the waterwell in the courtyards, the crossover walks from one side of the street to the other, at the third or fourth floor level for escape, in case of attack; the walls around the area. It all brought the history of the city alive; it brought the Middle Ages alive.

Judaism and the Jewish remnant were preserved in the amber of the Torah. Nor was this preservation and survival an inexplicable freak of history. The Jews survived because the period of intense introspection enabled their intellectual leaders to enlarge the Torah into a system of moral theology and community law of extraordinary coherence, logical consistency and social strength. Having lost the Kingdom of Israel, the Jews turned the Torah into a fortress of the mind and spirit, in which they could dwell in safety and even in content.

Had possession of the land remained central to the covenant during the exile, Israelite religion would have collapsed. By concluding the Torah with Deuteronomy and not Joshua, the fulfillment of the Torah is defined as obedience to the requirements of covenantal law rather than the acquisition of a finite possession.

The Torah, like other ancient law codes, assigns the death penalty to many proscribed behaviors besides murder—including adultery, rape of a betrothed woman, giving insult or injury to one’s parents, witchcraft, male homosexuality, and public profanation of the Sabbath. By the second century C.E., however, the Talmudic rabbis, whose debates and rulings constitute the main body of Halakha, had virtually nullified the death penalty. The Mishnah (the codification of law that forms the core text of the Talmud) states, “A Sanhedrin [governing council] that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death” (Makkot 7A). Even in murder cases, the Torah’s requirement of two eyewitnesses for a sentence of death was interpreted by the Talmudic rabbis to make capital punishment highly unlikely: the murderer’s own confession could not be accepted as evidence, and the two eyewitnesses were required also to have warned the criminal beforehand that he would be executed! Justice tempered by mercy thus became the Jewish ideal.

First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or “thou shalt nots” to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of “purity” and self-discipline is also “behovely,” at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents.

The rabbis are all the more emphatic in their assertions that the Torah merely intends to assist the simple-minded, and that unseemly expressions concerning Deity are due to the inadequacy of language, and must not be taken literally.

Summary of the Torah, whilst standing on one leg: What is offensive when done to you, do not do it to your neighbor. The rest is commentary, now go and study (it).

Moses received the Law [Torah] from Sinai and committed it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets committed it to the men of the Great Synagogue. They said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around the Law. Simeon the Just was of the remnants of the Great Synagogue. He used to say: By three things is the world sustained: by the Law, by the [Temple-]service, and by deeds of loving-kindness. [Aboth 1:1

Death ends a Jew’s obligations under the Torah. When Jesus rose from the dead, He began celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass instead, as He had in the Upper Room. But the Church Fathers tell us that He now celebrated it on the “eighth day” of the week, what we now call Sunday, the day He rose from death. The eighth day! In ancient Hebrew gematria seven represented God’s completion of His natural creation. And so Jewish apocalyptic writings describe the eighth day as a new day,

in the Torah, the word torah never refers to the Torah. In fact, the Torah does not explicitly suggest that it was compiled by Moses himself. (The phrase “the Torah” in passages such as Deut. 4.44, “This is the torah that Moses set before the Israelites,” never refers to the complete Torah—there the reference is to [most of] the book of Deuteronomy.)

My grandpa and grandma were broke and made a living selling mantou on the street, just like Kossar selling bialys or Schimmel selling knishes. The easiest way for Americans to make sense of Chinese history is to compare everything to Jewish history. There’s an analogue for everything. Torah: Analects. Curly sideburns: long ponytails. Mantou: bagels.

I thought of the young Saul of Tarsus in November 1995, when the then prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a student called Yigal Amir. Rabin had taken part in the Oslo Accords, working out agreements toward peace with the Palestinian leadership. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his political rival Shimon Peres and with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He also signed a peace treaty with Jordan. All this was too much for hard-line Israelis, who saw his actions as hopelessly compromising national identity and security. The news media described the assassin as a “law student,” but in Europe and America that phrase carries a meaning different from the one it has in Israel today and the one it would have had in the days of Saul of Tarsus. Amir was not studying to be an attorney in a Western-style court. He was a zealous Torah student. His action on November 4, 1995, was, so he claimed at his trial, in accordance with Jewish law. He is still serving his life sentence and has never expressed regret for his actions. The late twentieth century is obviously very different from the early first century, but “zeal” has remained a constant.

If one sees another committing a sin or going astray, it is a religious duty to inform him of the error of his way and return him to the right path. The Torah states, “Reprove your neighbor” (Lev. 19:17). One should not claim that “it’s none of my business.” When one does reprove another in matters that are between them or in ritual matters between man and God, it must be done privately and gently, with kind words. It should be made clear that the rebuke is intended only for the benefit and the good of the person. Whoever can erase the traces of improper deeds and does not do so, violates this commandment. This is so only when one has the slightest reason to believe that he will be listened to. But if one knows that his words will fall on deaf ears, then it is forbidden to reprove.

Maimonides writes, “Lest a person says: Since jealousy, lust, and desire for honor are evil ways… I will separate myself completely from them and go to the other extreme, to the point where he refuses to enjoy the pleasure of food by abstaining from eating meat and drinking wine, where he refuses to marry a wife, or to live in a pleasant house or to wear nice clothing but instead chooses to dress in rags… this too is an evil way, and it is forbidden to go that way. One who goes in such a path is called a sinner… therefore did our Sages ordain that a person must deny himself only that which the Torah has forbidden unto us, but he must not forbid upon himself things which according to the Torah are permitted… And concerning all such matters, King Solomon said, ‘Do not be overlyrighteous, and do not be too wise, lest you be led to iniquity

Consequently, I have had to look for rational explanations for seemingly irrational laws and passages and for moral explanations for seemingly immoral laws and passages. And I have almost always found them. In this case, for example, I came to understand this law was one of the great moral leaps forward in the history of mankind. In this law, the Torah brilliantly preserved parental authority while permanently depriving parents of the right to kill their child, a commonplace occurrence in the ancient world and even today (such as “honor killings” in parts of the Muslim world). The law permits only a duly established court (“the elders”)—not parents—to take the life of their child. And we have no record of a Jewish court executing a “wayward” son.

A close reading of Leviticus reveals that the apostles were doing the exact opposite of saying that the Torah doesn’t apply to Christians. Rather, they were proclaiming that a very literal reading of the Torah will be the basis for the structure of the life of the Church community just as it was the basis for the formation of the nation of Israel. The Gentiles who come to worship Christ do not become Jewish by virtue of coming to dwell in Israel. They remain Greeks or Romans or Egyptians or Syrians. But in order to be a member of the community of God’s people and not draw the wrath of God down on the community, they must refrain from all idolatry and sexual immorality

Sure, we had mezuzahs (a kind of ornament that contains a page of the Torah) on our door frames, and once a week we lit candles and said three prayers, but who in their right mind would invite a stranger into the place that they slept? Even in shul (synagogue) no one talked about God, or if they did it was in Hebrew, which didn’t count since no one knew what it meant.

But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt. What keeps the vehicle moving isn’t the belief that it will but the heat generated from a thousand simultaneous disagreements. This might sound glib or pedantic but it’s evident in one of Judaism’s most foundational facts. Our most sacred text isn’t the Torah, the purported word of Hashem, but the Talmud, a multi-volume companion text that interprets, expands and comments. Essentially the Talmud is marginalia, a conversation. A beneath-the-line comments section. What Judaism essentially amounts to is a four-thousand-year-old argument.

Most important for Christian theologians on this matter is their understanding of Romans 10:4, which in most translations is rendered as: “Christ is the end of the law.” Consequently, for Rudolf Bultmann and others, the practical effect is that this also means that, “(Jewish) history has reached its end since Christ is the end of the law.”[9] The tragedy is that many of the theological bricks that Christianity is constructed on are undoubtedly “Jewish bricks.

Rabbi Ross superbly distills the theology of Martin Buber . . . , a consequential Jewish thinker whose focus on making human interactions meaningful influenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail.' . . . An invaluable entry point to a humanist thinker who sought to identify, build, and preserve 'holiness in our daily routines' by putting people, rather than objects, first."—Publishers Weekly

One of the most prominent of all Jewish communities lived in the Babylonian city of Baghdad. Visiting the city shortly before 1170, Benjamin of Tudela noted that it was home to ‘about one thousand Jews, who enjoy peace, comfort and much honour under the government of the great king.’ Among them were ‘very wise men and presidents of the colleges, whose occupation is the study of the Mosaic Law.’ Benjamin also mentioned the city’s two rabbinical schools and twenty–eight synagogues, the chief one richly ornamented with marble, gold and silver. He praised the Caliph for being versed in the Torah and able to speak and write in Hebrew–highlighting further

interpretations. One traditional Jewish teaching claims that there are “seventy faces to the Torah,” meaning many different ways to understand it. Another declares: “Turn it [the Torah] over and turn it over, for everything is in it.

Traditional Judaism opted for Hebrew and Aramaic texts as the source of definitive authority.[14] The textual differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic, both ancient I believe, have been the source of bitter contention between Jewish and Christian apologists. Polemical encounters between both groups, especially in the medieval period, though they persist to this day,

The claims that the OT God had now sent forth Jesus as the self-revelation that surpassed all previous ones (including specifically the Torah), that this God thereby had widened the circle of the elect to include all nations, and that a right relationship with this God and a full participation in the elect now rested upon how one responded to Jesus, these all amounted to significant differences with the Jewish religious tradition. In

Granted, this probably draws upon Jewish traditions in which personified divine Wisdom or the divine Word is referred to in a similar role (e.g., Prov 8:22-31; Wis 7:22; 8:4; 9:1-4; Ps 33:6; and numerous references to the "Logos" in Philo of Alexandria).27 In some texts this divine Wisdom is explicitly identified with the written Torah (Sir 24:1-23; Bar 3:9–4:4).

The rabbinical form of Judaism that emerged from this movement emphasized literacy and the skills to read and interpret the Torah. Even before the destruction of the temple, the Pharisee high priest Joshua ben Gamla issued a requirement in 63 or 65 AD that every Jewish father should send his sons to school at age six or seven. The goal of the Pharisees was universal male literacy so that everyone could understand and obey Jewish laws. Between 200 and 600 AD, this goal was largely attained, as Judaism became transformed into a religion based on study of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Talmud (a compendium of rabbinic commentaries). This remarkable educational reform was not accomplished without difficulty. Most Jews at the time earned their living by farming, as did everyone else. It was expensive for farmers to educate their sons and the education had no practical value. Many seem to have been unwilling to do so because the Talmud is full of imprecations against the ammei ha-aretz, which in Talmudic usage means boorish country folk who refuse to educate their children. Fathers are advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons of the ammei ha-aretz. The scorned country folk could escape this hectoring without totally abandoning Judaism. They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.

However, Sha’ul’s point throughout the passage, and indeed throughout Romans, is that for Jews and Gentiles alike there has never been more than one route to righteousness, namely, trusting God; so that the Torah is built on trusting God and from beginning to end has always required faith.

in contrast to what the Sages claim, the Sanhedrin was established only in the Second Temple Period, and not before.

Nowhere do these verses give the judges any liberty to legislate new laws; instead, they simply instruct them to rule according to the Written Law (v. 11).[233] According to this passage, the role of the judges is merely to judge by the law of the Torah and not to add countless new laws which in most cases have nothing to do with the Written Law.