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

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

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.

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!

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Messianic Judaism is not Christianity.

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.

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.

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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For many Jews during Talmudic times, conversion to Christianity prob- ably did not appear as a major change: Christianity looked like a slightly di erent version of the Jewish religion, with the same core belief in one God and the Torah but with fewer demanding requirements. For many Jewish households that earned their living from farming—and especially the poorer ones that struggled to support their families and, as illiterate, were made to feel like outcasts (ammei ha-aretz) by the local rabbis and lit- erate Jews—Christianity probably seemed a welcome change: it enabled them to believe in the same God without having to obey several costly norms, including the one that required fathers to educate their sons.

At every significant point in the four centuries since English settlers laid the foundations for the nation we know—at every significant point—American leaders and the great majority of the American people have explicitly said or acted as though they understood history in terms of this public religion. As King George III’s British troops moved toward New York City in the summer of 1776, Gershom Seixas, leader of the first Jewish synagogue in America, Shearith Israel, led his people into what they called their “exile.” Armed with the Torah scrolls, the congregation linked the ancient story of its forbears with the young country’s, referring to the Revolution as “the sacred cause of America.” Once victory was won, the congregation prayed in thanksgiving: “We cried unto the Lord from our straits and from our troubles He brought us forth.” The Lord delivered Israel; now he had delivered the United States.

Torah study was a remarkable feature in Jewish life at the time of the Second Temple and during the period following it. It was not restricted to the formal setting of schools and synagogue, nor to sages only, but became an integral part of ordinary Jewish life. The Torah was studied at all possible times, even if only a little at a time . . . The sound of Torah learning issuing from houses at night was a common phenomenon. When people assembled for a joyous occasion such as a circumcision or a wedding, a group might withdraw to engage in study of the Law. 3

The mission of a rabbi was to become a living example of what it means to apply God’s Word to one’s life. A disciple apprenticed himself to a rabbi because the rabbi had saturated his life with Scripture and had become a true follower of God. The disciple sought to study the text, not only of Scripture but of the rabbi’s life, for it was there that he would learn how to live out the Torah. Even more than acquiring his master’s knowledge, he wanted to acquire his master’s character, his internal grasp of God’s law.

I cling to this notion now because it is what allows me to feel a connection to a vast body of knowledge of which I am not master, much as I am able to live in a society bursting with information that I will never wholly comprehend. I take comfort from a lesson that seems implicit in the Talmud itself, which is that not knowing Torah is part of the lesson of Torah.

The curse of the law” is not the curse of having to live within the framework of Torah for the Torah itself is good. Nor is it the curse of being required to obey the Torah but lacking the power to do so

Paul’s point is that that curse falls on people who are actually trying to obey the Torah if their efforts are grounded in legalism

The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’89 This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.

was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple – and it was on this that his enemies concentrated.90 False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the ‘rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’. Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin – or whatever court it was – he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion – Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.91 The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels.92 But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.

The basic problem with the desire of Jewish Christians to maintain Torah observance was, according to Paul, not that it engendered “works righteousness” but rather that it fractured the unity of the community in Christ.

There is, however, an important concept to keep in mind when talking about humility. There is a big difference between being humble and being a doormat. The latter is only harmful to any enterprise. We should not allow others to tread on us. We are all obligated to stand up for our rights.

Building a business is somewhat like creating the universe: it involves both an inner and an outer will. You cannot go wrong if you follow God’s example, for God is the ultimate entrepreneur and His enterprise is the universe.

you only need the Torah and ten Jewish males to have a synagogue. The rest can be cobbled together. My father says it’s because Jews, as a people, have had little chance to settle. We are always on the move. The exodus never ends. We have been unable to make roots. So our roots are in our traditions, our families. Our children.” Angelo could see Eva suddenly struggling with her

How can we draw nearer to HaShem’s throne without a living parietal lobe to navigate space? How can we see his glorious light without the rods and cones that color our visual cortex? How can we learn and appreciate Torah with sages past without an all-too-human neocortex to effect higher thinking and comprehend language? How can we even register any reward at all without the dopamine receptors spiraling across our nervous system?8 We can’t, and we should not disrespect these serious teachings by taking them to mean something so scientifically backwards and absurd. Dare I say, we don’t have the time. As the Rambam implied and Rabbi Sacks stated, 'If a Biblical narrative is incompatible with established scientific fact, it is not to be read literally.

The Scriptures tell us that right and wrong do exist. Our duty is to do what is right, and it is not too difficult to discern. For example, look at the issue of transgendered people and using bathrooms. Just because someone is confused, doesn’t mean we give up our common sense. Many who have had sex-change surgery want to change back. They have big regrets. They may change their looks on the outside, but their chromosomes stay the same on the inside. Figuring out which bathroom to use should be a pretty simple matter, if you think about it. God has given each of us a certain kind of plumbing. Guys go to one bathroom and ladies go to another. You see, bathrooms are supposed to be biological and not social. But, of course, there is much more to this agenda than meets the eye. This is the breakdown of the family. This is an assault on what God says is right and wrong. God says man and woman in marriage, and the world says any combination of genders in marriage is fine. The Bible says to have kids within a heterosexual family, and the world says to have kids within any kind of family structure you want. On a recent plane flight, a guy named John was sitting next to me. He loved logic. Everything had to be logical for him. When I asked him, “If you could have any job on planet Earth and money wasn’t an issue, what would you want to do?” He didn’t hesitate. He said, “Philosophy professor at a university!” I already knew this was going to be a good conversation, but his reply was icing on the cake! Then out of nowhere he asked me, “What do you think about gay marriage?” This seems to be the only question on people’s minds these days! Some people are interested in your answer; others just want to label you a bigot. Whether or not they want to categorize you doesn’t matter; our job is to tell people the truth. So I asked him, “When people get married, how many people get married?” He responded that he didn’t understand my question. So I said, “When you go to a marriage ceremony in India, China, Russia, Canada, or the United States, how many people are in that ceremony?” He replied, “Two.” I then continued, “Where did the number come from?” You should have seen the look on his face. He didn’t have a clue. I let him know it came from the oldest writing ever on the subject of marriage. It came from the Jewish Torah, and in the book of Genesis, it says: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Genesis 2:24 The interesting thing was that John knew the verse! When I said it out loud, he finished it by saying, “one flesh.” Someone had taught him that verse at some point through the years. Then I said, “Whoever gets to tell you how many people can get married can also tell you who gets to be in that number.” He loved the logic. But, of course, God is logical. That is why it is logical to believe in Him. I also read somewhere: Whoever designs marriage gets to define marriage! That is a good statement, and I have been using it as I talk with people about this subject.

In a last-ditch effort, some readers may pathetically attack the scientific method, claiming that all subjective perspective is flawed and cannot be trusted, no matter the empirical evidence or broad consensus. By this tremendously stupid standard, none of the thousands of Jews who witnessed the events of Matan Torah at Har Sinai could, in good conscience, accept their subjective experience as fact. Kal vachomer, no Jew living today should at all trust the game of broken telephone that has carried the mesorah of this experience. Take this to its logical result, and any consistent thinker will soon end up with a mind totally emptied of all axioms and convictions. Then again, not all thinkers are consistent, and too many seem oddly comfortable with such cognitive dissonance, no matter how glaring. This worldview gives rise to severe chilulei HaShem, and anyone brazen enough to offer this doublethink as legitimate belief should be ashamed of themselves. Refusal to follow the evidence is an insult to the God who put it there.

the Torah was not an onerous rulebook or a vast catalog of laws as we might think, but a gift from God that taught them how to live.

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,

Owing to the position which “the science of kalām” acquired in Islam, the status of philosophy in Islam was intermediate between its status in Christianity and in Judaism. To turn therefore to the status of philosophy within Judaism, it is obvious that while no one can be learned in the sacred doctrine of Christianity without having had considerable philosophic training, one can be a perfectly competent talmudist without having had any philosophic training. Jews of the philosophic competence of Halevi and Maimonides took it for granted that being a Jew and being a philosopher are mutually exclusive. At first glance, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed is the Jewish counterpart of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica; but the Guide never acquired within Judaism even a part of the authority which the Summa enjoyed within Christianity; not Maimonides’ Guide, but his Mishnah Torah, i.e., his codification of Jewish law, could be described as the Jewish counterpart to the Summa. Nothing is more revealing than the difference between the beginnings of the Guide and the Summa. The first article of the Summa deals with the question as to whether the sacred doctrine is required besides the philosophic disciplines: Thomas as it were justifies the sacred doctrine before the tribunal of philosophy. One cannot even imagine Maimonides opening the Guide, or any other work, with a discussion of the question as to whether the Halakha (the sacred Law) is required besides the philosophic disciplines.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

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.

And suffering exists as a consequence of the consequences of our limitations. Every single person who’s alive is going to die, and every single person who’s alive is going to deal with serious physical illness and mental distress. Insufficiency is built into the human experience and there are existential consequences to that. Now I read something a long time ago, it was a Jewish commentary on the Torah. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, what does he lack? And the answer is: limitation. That’s a riddle and an answer of unparalleled brilliance as far as I’m concerned because I think it speaks deeply to something about the central nature of existence itself. And that is that without limitation there’s no being. Now, that’s a hard thing to understand, but I think you can understand it in a number of different ways. The first thing you might want to understand is that… I play this game with my students sometimes in my class. I come up to a student or pick a poor victim at random and come up to them and say, okay, we’re going to play a game. And they say, ok. And I say you move first, and they don’t know what to do. And the reason for that is because the limiting parameters of the game have not been defined. And as a consequence of that, they’re stunned by their infinite freedom into complete immobility. And what that means, in a sense is that in the absence of serious constraint, there can be no choice, no freedom, no existence. And I believe this to be fundamentally true, just as the fact that human being is vulnerable is fundamentally true.

That focus contrasted sharply with what I had experienced growing up in the Jewish world of the late twentieth century, where everything I encountered seemed to focus on the collective, and the inner life of the discrete individual was nowhere to be found on any Jewish agenda. But I speculated that the Jewish community could not have endured for thirty-five hundred years on responsive reading alone, and I knew that I could not be the only one feeling that my

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.

Throughout the Bible, the priests were the ones who were given the Torah; they were responsible for teaching the Written Law to Israel; and they were responsible to preserve it in order to pass it on to future generations;[237] therefore, they knew best how to implement the Torah and to judge according to it.

it is interesting to investigate how the mezuzah was turned onto an amulet which can guard the house against evil.[171] Historical and archeological research found that pagan nations from Mesopotamia used to mark their entries with different kinds of “mezuzahs”, which carried symbols of idols. Amulets of this kind were also found in Egypt, where this practice was made in order to keep the inhabitants of the home from all sorts of evil.[172

The tefillin were perceived as magical figurative symbols, and the use of such amulets, attached to the head or arms, were practiced in the ancient world by pagans, long before the first century.

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.

it was natural for the priests to engage in implementing judgment.[234] Thus, there is no reason to assume that it refers to the rabbis/ Pharisees, which are first mentioned towards the end of the Second Temple era.[235]

the Hebrew Scriptures have lost their relevance compared to the rabbinic “new covenant,” and they were now used only as a tool to validate the Oral Law and to strengthen the rabbis’ authority.

The close ties which the Pharisees had with the Greco-Roman world caused them to adopt many of their beliefs and customs, such as witchcraft and other superstitious rituals which were completely alien to Scripture.

Maimonides considered himself a disciple of Aristotle,[129] saw Moses as the chief philosopher, and even referred to [rabbinic] Judaism as a philosophical religion.[

The rabbis claim that the thirteen methods by which they interpreted Torah[139] were given to Moses at Sinai.[140] The problem with this claim is that these methods are found in the Hellenistic world.

Thus Moses emphasizes the need to learn, to keep, and to do the Laws of the Torah, but he never promoted studying it only for the sake of studying, as the Sages teach. Moreover, rabbinic tradition has turned the act of learning Talmud into work itself (תורתו אמנותו)—a never-ending occupation which bestows merit, both in this world and in the world to come.[147] Of course, this “work” took place in the yeshiva, which (as shown above) was a duplication of the Greek academy

A mantra is defined as an expression of syllables, words, and sentences spoken in the form of ongoing repetition, in the belief that this action releases spiritual powers. Apparently, the source of the mantras was Hinduism and was originally made in the Sanskrit language.

research on biblical prayer, compared to “rabbinic prayer,” has suggested that praying out of the Siddur (i.e., the rabbinical prayer book) is closer to chanting mantras than to prayer as found in the Tanakh.

The Siddur was composed by the Sages, beginning in the Second Century and was finalized toward the end of the first millennium.

the rabbis have decreed when to pray, how to pray, where to pray, and with whom to pray. But in complete contrast, biblical (Old Testament) prayer is individual, never repetitious, and is never restricted to one place or from anyone.

The dependence on astrology and its worship typified the customs of many pagans, such as the Babylonians in Mesopotamia and the ancient Egyptians.[159] The ties between the Sages in Israel and the Gentiles, led them to believe in astrology, witchcraft, and other superstitions that are completely alien to the Bible.[160]

Furthermore, holy writings attached to the body and portrayed as amulets were used by various pagan peoples. For example, an amulet which resembles tefillin was discovered in Mesopotamia.

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

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.12 As evidence that many Jews did indeed convert to Christianity, Botticini and Eckstein cite estimates showing that the Jewish population declined dramatically from around 5.5 million in 65 AD to a mere 1.2 million in 650 AD.

Judaism has consisted of four components: God,Torah, Israel, and Chosenness; that is, the God introduced by the Jews, Jewish laws, Jewish peoplehood, and the belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jews’ allegiance to any of these components has been a major source of antisemitism because it not only rendered the Jew an outsider, but more important, it has often been regarded by non-Jews as challenging

The first time I attended an Anglican church, the most surprising part of the service was when they lifted the physical book of the Bible into the air and carried it down the aisle. People turned and bowed their heads as it moved past them. Their reverence for Scripture captivated my imagination. I had taken for granted that I could hold the Bible in my hands at home, fall asleep reading it in bed. Growing up, some of my friends had Bibles decorated with cartoons. But there, the people of God stood for the processon of the Bible. They stood for the reading of the Word. I felt as thought I had been pulled back in time to when Ezra read the law to the returning Israelites, and they all stood to hear it. Going back to Christianity’s Jewish roots, the Torah was carried with worshipers all around it. The people stood for the procession of the sacred word. Jews kissed —and some still kiss—the sacred book when they opened it and closed it. If the scroll of the Torah became unusable, they would bury it like a loved one rather than destroy it. The word of God was central to their worship, their culture, their very identity. (p. 12)

Torah" can be construed as "law," but to prioritize this sense assumes the perspective of early Christians, who regarded Jewish devotion as fixated on obeying divine law and thus insufficient for salvation. For Jews, the broader meaning of "Torah" is "teaching" or "instruction." Its organizing narrative relates the People of Israel's fortunes from the time of their progenitor, Abraham, until they stand along the River Jordan poised to conquer Canaan; it also contains myths, cosmology, genealogies, and poetry, as well as legal codes.