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

Answer a fool according to his folly” (Proverbs 26:4).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Be not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding; whose mouth must be held with bit and bridle” (Psalms 32:9).

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.

Jewish Learning Is Living!

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.

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).

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.

In a world that was even more chauvinistic than our own, the Torah mandates that the Israelite people love peaceful non-Israelites living among them no less than they love themselves. The German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen rightly identifies this law as the beginning of what is known as 'ethical monotheism': 'The stranger was to be protected, although he was not a member of one's family, clan, religion, community or people, simply because he was a human being. In the stranger, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.

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.

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.

I am a father. I have a daughter and I love her dearly. I would like my daughter to obey the commandments of the Torah; I would like her to revere me as her father. And so I ask myself the question over and over again: What is there about me that deserves the reverence of my daughter? You see, unless I live a life that is worthy of her reverence, I make it almost impossible for her to live a Jewish life. So many young people abandon Judaism because the Jewish models that they see in their parents are not worthy of reverence. My message to parents is: Every day ask yourselves the question: “What is there about me that deserves the reverence of my child?” RABBI ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL, 1907–1972

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 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.

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.

What evokes persecution is precisely that which challenges a worldview, that which up-ends a symbolic universe. It is somewhat threatening to other first-century Jews to regard your community as the true Temple, and perhaps it is just as well to keep such ideas within the walls of an enclosed community in the desert; but since the belief, as held in Qumran, involves an intensification of Torah, the vicarious purification of the Land, the fierce defence of the race, and the dream of an eventually rebuilt and purified physical Temple in Jerusalem itself, one can imagine Pharisees debating it vigorously but not seeking authority from the chief priests to exterminate it. It embodied, after all, too many of the central worldview-features. The equivalent belief as held within Christianity seems to have had no such redeeming features. No new Temple would replace Herod’s, since the real and final replacement was Jesus and his people. No intensified Torah would define this community, since its sole definition was its Jesus-belief.28 No Land claimed its allegiance, and no Holy City could function for it as Jerusalem did for mainline Jews; Land had now been transposed into World, and the Holy City was the new Jerusalem, which, as some Jewish apocalyptic writers had envisaged, would appear, like the horses and chariots of fire around Elisha, becoming true on earth as it was in heaven.29 Racial identity was irrelevant; the story of this new community was traced back to Adam, not just to Abraham, and a memory was preserved of Jesus’ forerunner declaring that Israel’s god could raise up children for Abraham from the very stones.30 Once we understand how worldviews function, we can see that the Jewish neighbours of early Christians must have regarded them, not as a lover of Monet regards a lover of Picasso, but as a lover of painting regards one who deliberately sets fire to art galleries—and who claims to do so in the service of Art.31

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.

On May 31, 1834, a sizable earthquake struck Safad, accompanied by much loss of property, and some weeks later word reached town that the Egyptian army was going to conscript Arab men. Superstitious Arabs concluded that some malign influence was working against them, and the Jews were blamed. The logical solution was to massacre them, which the Arabs started to do. For thirty-three unhampered days the Muslims were allowed to riot, destroying synagogues, killing rabbis and defacing over two hundred scrolls of the Torah, each worth more than a man’s home. The remnants of the great Jewish settlement were driven into the countryside, where for more than a month they lived on grass and slaughtered sheep, after which the government came back, caught the Arab ringleaders and hanged thirteen of them.

What about Judaism has provoked anti-Jewish hostility? There are four answers. For thousands of years 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 validity of their god(s), law(s), national allegiance, and/or national worth. By affirming what they considered to be the one and only God of all humankind, thereby implying illegitimacy to everyone else’s gods, the Jews entered history—and have often been since—at war with other people’s most cherished beliefs. The antisemites also hated the Jews because the Jews lived by their own all-encompassing set of laws. And because the Jews also asserted their own national identity, Jews intensified antisemitic passions among those who viewed this identity as threatening their own nationalism. As if the above were not enough, Judaism has also held from the earliest times that the Jews were chosen by God to achieve this mission of bringing the world to God and His moral law (i.e., ethical monotheism). This doctrine of the Jews’ divine election has been a major cause of antisemitism. From its earliest days, the raison d’être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, “to repair the world under the rule of God”). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly been a source of tension. As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led higher-quality lives than their non-Jewish neighbors in almost every society where they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbors aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. As a result of these factors, the quality of life of the average Jew, no matter how poor, was higher than that of a comparable non-Jew in the same society (see Chapter 4). This higher quality of life among Jews, which, as we shall show, directly results from Judaism, has, as one would expect, provoked profound envy and hostility among many non-Jews.

JUDAISM CONSISTS OF FOUR COMPONENTS: God, Torah (laws and teachings), Israel ( Jewish nationhood), and Chosenness. Throughout Jewish history, the Jews’ affirmation of one or more of these components has challenged, even threatened, the gods, laws, and cultures of non-Jews among whom the Jews have lived.

To non-Jews and even to many Jews, the peoplehood of the Jews is usually the most perplexing aspect of Judaism. This confusion is understandable. For one thing, one normally associates a national group with a land and a state, yet for nearly two thousand years the Jews lived without their state and most Jews lived outside their land. A second source of confusion is that the Jews constitute the only group in the modern Western world that is both an ethnic group and a religion. For both these reasons, Jews are unique, a uniqueness that often renders the Jews suspect in the eyes of others. But as perplexing, unique, and even discomfiting as it may be, the Jew is a member of both the Jewish people and the Jewish religion, and this has been so since the beginning of Jewish history. To deny that nationhood is a component of Judaism is as untenable as to deny that God or Torah are components of Judaism. This is particularly evident today, since Jewish nationhood is the one component of Judaism with which both religious and committed secular Jews identify.

Among the most ardent enemies of Judaism today is the Left. Marxists, for example, are theoretically opposed to all religions. But from Marxism’s earliest days, its adherents tended to be particularly anti-Jewish. Among other reasons: Judaism, unlike other religions, incorporates nationhood, while Marxist theory advocates the tearing down of national as well as religious allegiances. In practice, however, Marxist parties have been intensely nationalistic wherever they attained power, and the combination of chauvinistic nationalism with Marxist theory produced a particularly virulent strain of antisemitism. Neither could tolerate the Jews. Thus, for example, Soviet Jews who were committed to the God and Torah components of Judaism provoked antisemitism for Marxist reasons (quite aside from traditional Russian Orthodox antisemitism), while those who affirmed the national component of Judaism provoked Jew-hatred for Soviet nationalist (Russian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, etc.) as well as Marxist reasons. Thus, Soviet antisemitism was a reaction to every component of Judaism.

1 For some readers, the traditional Christian designation to describe the first half of the canon, the Old Testament, is problematic. The defining adjective, “old,” can denote something irrelevant or inferior or in need of completion—all meanings that work to diminish the collection’s role and importance on its own terms. As a result, some prefer the Jewish designation the “Hebrew Bible” or the “Tanak” (an acronym based on the beginning letters of the three sections of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim). Others, perhaps attempting to retain a Christian interpretive identity, have proposed the First Testament or the Older Testament as a necessary corrective. Words and intentions matter, so I have a great deal of respect for those wishing to avoid any hint of Christian supersessionism through an adapted use of terminology. In this work, I will use the Hebrew Bible. 2

A Jewish-Christian lawyer once wrote to me that, as he considered the serious meaning of the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, “I knew then that no moral law was written on a blade of grass, in a drop of water, or even in the stars. I realized the necessity of the Divine Immutable Law as set forth in the Sacred Torah, consisting of definite commandments, statutes, ordinances and judgments.

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.

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).

But she wanted the Jewish state to be just and democratic, citing the Torah’s injunction against ill-treating the ger, or the stranger, because the Israelites were “strangers in Egypt.” She felt less affinity with what Israel had become. After more than five decades of “temporary” occupation and settlement building since 1967, she said, “I believe what we are doing now is not Jewish.

three volumes Rubenstein examines Torah as the primary value of the Talmudic academy and discusses the means by which one gains stature in the academy: by engaging in argumentation, through one’s lineage, or as a result of the breadth of one’s knowledge.

Philadelphos did everything with extravagance – what the Greeks called tryphe[*4] – making his father’s library the greatest collection in the world and inviting all peoples to settle in Alexandria, which was soon home to a million people, Greek, Egyptian and Jewish. When he commissioned Greek-speaking Jews to translate their Torah into Greek, he made the Bible available to non-Jews, a move which later had world-changing consequences.

Commentators query why, according to the midrash, Yosef was punished for conveying accurate – albeit negative – information for the limited purpose of helping correct his brothers’ wrongful ways.19 Although a number of answers have been offered,20 on both a human level and a p’shat level21 Yosef’s error is obvious. As Sforno and Maharal observe, in telling his father about his brothers’ misconduct, Yosef acted like a na’ar, a young child who, because of his inexperience, is unable to anticipate the ramifications of his actions.22 Surely, Yosef should have realized that telling on his brothers would only antagonize them further, exacerbate his alienation from them,23 and possibly even result in danger to himself. Indeed, the brothers’ hatred toward Yosef continues to grow until they ultimately throw him in a pit and sell him.24 In this context, the midrash understandably correlates Yosef’s accusations about his brothers with the violence they would later perpetrate against him.

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.

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 less intelligible the divine Name, the higher its order. The less reason and intellectual control at play, the greater the spiritual force. Literal study of the Torah, for Abulafia, served only to sharpen the intellect; the real “work” took place only in mystic trance.

This was the birthplace of the well-known Greek version of the Jewish Torah known as the Septuagint.

In 1952, a year after becoming Chabad’s leader, the Rebbe undertook to send a newly married couple to serve as shluchim in Brazil. Unlike the Lipskers, in this case the bride and her parents, all three Lubavitchers, were very unhappy with the Rebbe’s request. The father, who held a key position for the movement in Israel, couldn’t comprehend the idea of his daughter and son-in-law moving to a country with little Jewish infrastructure in place, and he wrote to the Rebbe to express his unhappiness. We possess no copy of the father’s letter, but the basic content of what he said is clear from the Rebbe’s response (when the letter was published, the Rebbe, as was his custom, omitted all names). The father, clearly pleased about the marriage, wrote that the family’s “happy event was [now] disturbed” by the news that the couple were to be sent abroad. It seems apparent from the Rebbe’s response that the father made no effort to disguise his displeasure at what the Rebbe had done. The Rebbe was in no way apologetic. He wrote in his capacity as a leader, in a sense as a military general who understood the need to deploy his troops where they were most needed, to “a place where your son-in-law and your daughter can fully utilize their potential.” The Rebbe acknowledged that moving to a foreign and largely nonobservant Jewish community requires a certain measure of self-sacrifice (mesirut nefesh), but he then posed a rhetorical question intended to overwhelm any further opposition. To paraphrase: “If one can’t expect such self-sacrifice from a graduate of our yeshiva, one who is a child as well of such a graduate and who is married to the daughter of such a graduate, if even from such people one can’t ask for a measure of self-sacrifice, then upon whom can one rely?” The Rebbe proceeded to offer both a carrot and a stick. Thus, he assured the father—knowing that the letter would be read by his daughter as well—that the couple would flourish in every meaningful manner by undertaking such a mission: “The vastness of the good fortune that will result if they accept this offer, including good fortune in a physical sense, is obvious to me.” On the other hand—and the Rebbe stated this as a fact, not a threat—refusing such a mission would cut the couple off from the work of the Previous Rebbe (who had died just two years earlier), and, by implication, from the Rebbe himself. Although he expressed “shock” that an offer to spread “the light of Torah and Chasidus” to unknowledgeable Jews could lead to the parents feeling that their happiness had been “disturbed,” he also set down, near the letter’s end, his trademark conclusion: “As stated above, I am not giving an order, Heaven forbid. This is only a suggestion.

There is no doubt that for the Islamists the "Zionist entity" (al-kiyān alṣ-ahyūnī) — the name "Israel" is used only exceptionally to describe the Jewish state — was founded as a religious state. Religious beliefs based on the Torah shape Zionist thought and determine life in Israel until today. The Islamists find proof of this "fundamental truth" in the slightest detail.

The example of the Jewish state gives detailed indications of how an Islamic Palestinian state should be organised. Israel has no written constitution, but the Ministry of Religious Affairs controls every law issued by the Knesset to ensure its accordance with the Torah. If the state is sometimes too slow or unwilling to implement religious laws and to supervise their observance, truly religious people (al-qubba ‘āt al-sūd or black hats) themselves go into the street and control their fellow citizens. Nusse, Andrea. Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas (p. 49). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Becoming a people, then, is as much about self-determination as it is about distinguishing a group from its neighbors. Indeed, this is a core feature of Jewish identity: we are constantly striving toward who we might yet be.

The problem was that Zionism had come to redefine the Jewish people in a way that no longer required allegiance to God and the Torah. Even the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” posed problems, she said, noting that the Jewish people came into being when they received the Torah from God at Mount Sinai, in the desert peninsula that was now part of Egypt, and that “a Jew is a person who goes in the path of the Torah and its commandments.” Most crucially, she added, “We cannot possibly identify with a Jewish state whose laws are contrary to the Torah of Israel.

Light has a voice?” Sarucha inquired, amazed.

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

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!

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

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).

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.

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.

In our case, as for countless other Jews, the price of integration was the loss of millennia of Jewish tradition. The Torah’s instruction gave way to the moral void of modernity, a hectic dance over absence. Many

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.

Kabbalah (in Hebrew, literally “receiving”) refers to the mystical traditions that encompass the secrets of the Torah, the esoteric truths that reveal the most profound understanding of the world, of humankind, and of the Almighty himself. Philo was a Jewish mystic in Alexandria, Egypt, who wrote dissertations on the Kabbalah in the first century of the Christian era. He is commonly considered the central link between Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christian mysticism. His triangles point either up or down to show the flow of energy between action and reception, male and female, God and humanity, and the upper and lower worlds. In fact, the Latin name for this kind of mosaic decor is opus alexandrinum (Alexandrian work) because it is filled with Kabbalistic symbolism originally taught by Philo of Alexandria.

INSIGHT FOR BUSINESS: Competition is not your real enemy—fear is. Choosing to follow the path of safety will cost you opportunities that will often be far greater than the potential losses you might incur by a riskier path. INSIGHT FOR LIFE: The payoff for avoiding mistakes is often smaller than what you may gain from taking risks. Allow yourself to take risks. Remember, it’s better to be an imperfect achiever than to avoid the journey altogether.

INSIGHT FOR BUSINESS: Focus on the primary task, which is to make money. Remember, however, to set aside at least 10 percent of the money to make the world a better and more divine place. This approach is good for business because it attracts additional divine energy that brings more success in its stead. INSIGHT FOR LIFE: Try to build your merit. This involves praying, giving to charity, and helping others. The more merit you are able to garner, the more Divine energy you attract and the more successful you will be in every area of life.

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

The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-biblical, aware only of some of the legal codes of the Torah and some of the elements of the founding epic, but had not yet taken in Deuteronomy, the book written two centuries earlier, ostensibly the 120-year-old dying Moses’ spoken legacy to the Israelites, which codified more rigorously the much looser and often contradictory injunctions of Leviticus. Or the Elephantine Jews did have the Mosaic strictures of Deuteronomy, and perhaps even knew all about the reforms of kings Hezekiah and his great-grandson Josiah making the Jerusalem Temple the sole place of sacrificial ritual and pilgrimage, but had no intention of surrendering to its monopoly. The Elephantine Yahudim were Yahwists who were not going to be held to the letter of observance laid down by Jerusalemites any more than, say, the vast majority of Jews now who believe themselves to be, in their way, observant, will accept instruction on what it means to be Jewish (or worse, who is and who isn’t a Jew) from the ultra-Orthodox.

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.

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

because Judaism required the reading of the Torah and promoted literacy in Talmudic academies, the Jewish community’s human capital increased

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.

Remember that it is not right to take a passage out of its context and to draw inferences from it. It is imperative to take into consideration the preceding and following statements in order to fathom the writer’s meaning and purpose before making any deductions.

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 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.

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.

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.

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,

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

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.)

A free society is a moral achievement. That is the central insight of the Torah. It depends on the existence of a shared moral code, a code we are taught by our parents, a code we internalise in the course of growing up, a code for whose maintenance we are collectively responsible. Today, throughout much of the West, morality has been largely outsourced to governments and regulatory bodies. The

Becoming a doormat is not a sign of humility; it is a sign of weakness.

four different forms of self-representation have been discussed: the gas ruach (person of coarse spirit), the ba’al ga’ava (the arrogant person), the humble person, and the doormat. Begin

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

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.

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

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.

To be part of the Jewish tradition is to “argue for justice and plead for mercy.

Among Bible scholars one of the most common interpretations is that being created in the image of God means being given the special role of “representing . . . God’s rule in the world.”8 The Torah’s view is that people are God’s “vice-regents” and “earthly delegates,”9 appointed by God to rule over the world. One traditional Jewish commentator, R. Saadia Gaon (882–942), anticipated this understanding of Genesis, arguing that being created in the image of God means being assigned to rule over creation (Saadia Gaon, commentary to Gen. 1:26).

This is one of only two instances in the whole Torah in which the words lo tov, “not good,” appear. The other is in Genesis (2:18), where God says, “It is not good [lo tov] for man to be alone.” We cannot lead alone. We cannot live alone. To be alone is not good.

From the perspective of Jewish ethics, there are few (if any) graver crimes than violating the dignity of another human being. “In hurting another person I am not just running afoul of the will of God—though I am also surely doing that. At some level, I am also assaulting God, who, Jewish theology insists, is profoundly invested in the dignity of God’s creatures.”19 Conversely, as R. Abraham Paley (twentieth century) teaches, “being careful with and attentive to the honor of your fellow is the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven.”20

What is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, all the rest is commentary. Now, go and study.

The early church was Jewish, Jewish to the bone, and did not consider the large number of gentiles added to it over the years to be an obstacle to unity. It also saw no need for non-Jews to assume the obligations stipulated in the Torah, and the matter was settled. Revisiting this issue shows enormous disrespect for the saving work of the Messiah, apostolic authority, and God himself. The solution was never based on Judaizing the gentiles or gentilizing the Jews but on maintaining distinctions.

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.

It has to be admitted, of course, that the Jewish Torah, which naturally included the Book of Genesis, was translated into Greek in the year 250 BC, some seventeen years before Chrysippus became head of the Stoic school in 233 BC. But even the remarkable translation of Genesis into Greek did not take place until fifty-eight years after the foundation of the Stoic school by Zeno in 308 BC.

Joseph leaned over the gunnels and shouted back, “Look to yourselves now, women! We warned you, beware of Salome!” He shook his fist back at her. “She has led you astray from the law and a Jewish woman’s duty, to her home and family. Was Moses a woman? Were the prophets women? Can women study Torah? It is written that the synagogue and study house are the province of men. A woman’s voice in the Temple is like the braying of an ass. You think of a community of women and scholars, bah! Stay there until you come to your senses!

Therefore, we should also recognize that seventy had a symbolic meaning. Since it was a common Jewish tradition that there were seventy nations in the world and that the Torah was first given in seventy languages to all people, the sending of seventy emissaries is an implicit claim that Jesus’ message must be heard not only by Israel but by all people.39

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)

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

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

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.

If the Bible wasn’t corrupted in a massive and conspiratorial fashion, Islam can’t be trusted. Correcting the Torah and Gospels, setting the record straight, returning to the true religion, were central to Muhammad’s mission. If the scripture wasn’t garbled, Islam loses its justification. If the Bible wasn’t massively degraded—to the point that it would be unrecognizable—the cornerstone of Islam is a lie. To believe that Team Islam was right, and the Hebrew prophets were wrong, one has to dismiss the fact that most of the Qur’an’s stories and characters were lifted from Jewish oral traditions in the Talmud.

15:4:4 The main purpose of learning and involvement in Torah study is to make yourself into a throne for the Divine Presence. When you are dirty with all kinds of sins and transgressions then the Shechinah can’t come to rest on you because each and every sin is like a thorn that hurts Her. To remove this obstacle, confess your sins before you begin to learn Torah. (Kav ha-Yashar, chap. 53)

The Hebrew Bible is called "Tanakh," a title that amalgamates its collective parts: Torah, Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Tanakh preserves and interprets the historical, cultural, and religious heritage of Israel and Judah. In its current form, it serves as both the definitive anthology that constitutes Judaism's holy scriptures and a pillar of Jewish religious life, but these roles postdate its compilation.

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.

Although no longer gospel, the assumption that multiple sources underlie the Torah can still help clarify many of the text's contradictions. Some version of it existed in 458 BCE, when Ezra, a Jewish priest in the Persian emperor's service, read it to the Yehudites in Jerusalem, but that scroll included less than what exists today.

The Torah of Israel is not hidden in the holy Ark in the synagogue, but goes with us in all our steps in all the places we go, enlightening us with its light and sanctifying us with its sanctity....

One of Hellenistic Jewry's signature achievements was the Septuagint, the translation of Tanakh into Koine (common) Greek. Compiled between the third and first centuries BCE, it almost certainly represents the work of Alexandrian Jewry, who needed scripture in Greek because they no longer spoke or wrote Hebrew. The Septuagint makes some formal changes, reordering books and including new material. Its existence offers witness to the religious power that Jews in the last centuries BCE were according written texts, a significant moment in the process by which Jewish identity embraced Torah and Judaism became a "religion of the book." Even so, the Septuagint has arguably had a greater abiding significance for Christianity than for Judaism. The Old Testament used it, rather than Tanakh, for a basis; New Testament writers quoted it (rather than Hebrew versions). Catholic and Orthodox Christians would accept its additions as a second set of fully authoritative (deuterocanonical) books. Most Protestants would not, although some printed them in a separate section of their Bibles. The early Church forged its principal doctrines in conversation with it. The legend that seventy-two translators "harmoniously" produced identical copies has a Christian provenance: Epiphanius, a fourth-century bishop who defended the Septuagint's superiority against later Jewish revisions. As its importance for Christians rose, Jews abandoned it to assert the sole legitimacy of the Hebrew text.

Every Jewish community in every generation invents itself anew. Conservative Judaism is one such brilliant reinvention, one which now finds itself in a phase of dynamic reinvention. With roots in European Jewish Emancipation of the nineteenth century, Conservative Judaism provides an approach to Jewish thinking and practice that allows us to engage with the broader world and live our lives fully as Jews in that world. As a result, Conservative Judaism nurtures the optimistic faith that an ancient tradition can be successfully carried forward by people wholly invested in the success of an open society … if they use methods of inquiry that are intellectually honest, and also developed in the framework of a caring spiritual community. Conservative Jewish Torah thus becomes the “grid” on which the religious and spiritual framework of modern Jewish life and thought can be built by those committed to engaging with the world—intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. And so the Conservative approach has evolved. Generations of knowledgeable practicing Jews have brought the Jewish passion for justice, community, and Torah into every sphere of life. The movement has helped build and support the State of Israel; Conservative Jewish scholars and knowledgeable Jewish professionals lead institutions of all types around the world; and Conservative Jewish communities have taken root in every major city, providing opportunities for Jews throughout the world to live lives guided by the tenets of the Torah, as interpreted for modern times through the lens of Conservative Jewish ideology and belief. The essays in this book are a product of modern times, speaking to the realities of Jewish life in the twenty-first century. The wisdom and learning of the rabbis who authored them remains emblematic of Conservative

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

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

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.

If you had asked Saul of Tarsus, before the meeting on the road to Damascus, where Israel’s story and God’s story came together, the two natural answers would have been Temple (the place at the heart of the promised land where God had promised to live) and Torah (the word of God spoken into, and determinative of, Israel’s national life). The Temple indicated that Israel’s God desired to live in the midst of his people; the Torah, that he would address his people with his life-transforming word. Saul now came to see that both these answers pointed beyond themselves to Jesus and of course to the spirit. In this new world (this too became axiomatic for Paul’s mature thought and thematic for his public career) it mattered that Israel’s God was indeed the One God of the whole world. A tight-knit orthodox Jewish community in the midst of a bustling, philosophically minded pagan city must have been a fascinating place to start thinking all this through. At first glance, Israel’s scriptures might seem to demand that Israel stay separate from the nations, the goyim. The pagans, like the Moabite women sent to seduce the Israelites in the desert, would lead them astray. They should stay separate. But look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world. Saul, in Tarsus, must have reflected on what it would mean for Psalm 2 to come true, where the One God says to the true king:

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.

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,

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.

Rather Torahism is a movement occurring solely among Gentile Christians. In fact, every Torah-keeper I’ve come across has two things in common: they are Gentile (not of Jewish ethnicity) and they come from a Christian background. Torahists are Gentile Christians who believe mainstream Christianity wrongly left the Law of Moses behind when Yeshua arrived. As they see it, they are “correcting course” by returning to the keeping of the Law.

It may not be so wise, for example, to obey the golden rule and “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” As the great playwright and renowned wit George Bernard Shaw noted, the risk of mindlessly applying that rule is that “their tastes may not be the same.”24 An awareness of the power and pervasiveness of naïve realism encourages a more modest, negatively framed version, one articulated by the Jewish sage Hillel: “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor: That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It should come as no surprise that Confucius, the philosopher who is so often stereotyped as the embodiment of wisdom, similarly advised us to “never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.

Our former lives, before we were expelled from our homes, had taught us mutual support, concern for others, and acceding to another. We had a vision of the interrelationship among human beings, and the strength of community and togetherness. We grew up on the precepts of the Torah, and the concept that all Israel are as one, intertwined with each other. Some of us lost the battle to maintain this tradition. For many of the camp inmates the rules of love for others and mutual concern had disappeared as useless baggage. Here the rules were different. The Holocaust taught us that indeed, each man has his own destiny.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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).

Mat 5:3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Vs. 3 To be “poor in spirit” in Jewish thought carries the connotation of being humble or contrite enough to receive the Word of G-d.]

In this eternal moment, as illuminated by our Sages, the Torah is teaching us that a Jewish soul, no matter how brilliant or broken, is not a means to an end—it is in fact an end unto itself. This is the Torah’s last word, its crown jewel.

An Image of Disorder Consider the consequences of disorder, and you will be strengthened in choosing order in your life. The Torah gives us a direct teaching in this regard in the famous story of the Tower of Babel.16 The Hebrew word for sin, averah—like its English counterpart transgression—means “straying across a boundary.” The tower builders’ efforts to reach out to touch heaven were sinful because they transgressed the limits and constraints that are laid into the deep structure of the universe. Stretching for heaven, they failed to honor the distinction between the human and the divine. Since they flaunted order, their punishment was to suffer disorder, as represented by their inability to communicate with one another. Failure to honor the need for order brings on chaos. This cautionary tale applies to our lives, too. How much time, energy, emotion, and life is diverted into the channels that spring from disorder? Where are the Haggadot for the Seder? Where is my tallis? Who forgot to set the clock? Why didn’t you take the soup out of the freezer? Why would I buy milk if it wasn’t on the list? It’s in here somewhere. I almost got there. How many relationships are challenged or even destroyed by lack of attention to order? Without order, you are bound to be wasting something—whether time, resources, things themselves that get lost, relationships, and so on. Not wasting is a Jewish ethical principle.17 Any management consultant will tell you that you have to get organized if you want to be effective, but our concern goes far beyond that. Our concern is how living in chaos throws up impediments to being attentive to the divine will. And isn’t a life at the other end of the spectrum, which would be obsessively rigid, every bit as much an obstacle to spiritual living? Picture chaos, with stuff flying and piles of junk and cluttered thinking and a clanging ruckus: who could possibly hear the fragile voice of truth whispering in the midst of the tornado? And in contrast, but equally disabling, where order has been taken to the point of extreme inflexibility, even if you heard the divine will, would there be anything you could do to meld your own personal will to the will of God, so unbending would your ways have become?

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 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.

In the Jewish people, there is an aristocratic class composed of Torah scholars. This is basically the ruling class: all the appointments and honors go to them. But this class is not an exclusive club. If you want to belong to this class, you are not asked who your father was or whether you have respectable in-laws; anyone can belong to it. In this respect, the crown of Torah is truly accessible to all; whoever wishes to study is invited to do so.

Since there was little or nothing in Jesus' own reported teachings which required the repudiation of the Torah, it was possible to be a Jewish Christian, and considerable numbers in the first generations after his death were just that, both inside Palestine and beyond.

In Judaism, the Tenakh is a written history of the covenant between God and the people of Israel, almost a kind of contract. In Christianity, the New Testament is the history of one person, Jesus, who is the incarnate Word of God. In Islam, the Koran is ‘uncreated’ and has descended from the heavens in perfect form. Only in Islam is the book itself what is revealed by God. In Judaism God is revealed in the history of the Jewish people. In Christianity God is revealed as love in the person of Jesus. Judaism and Christianity are not religions of the book, but religions with a book. The third misconception is to speak of ‘the three Abrahamic religions’. Christians usually refer to Abraham as a person who binds these three religions together, and who is shared by them. In Judaism, he is the ‘founding father’. But in the Koran it is written: ‘Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian.’ (III, 67)….According to Islam, the first prophets received the same revelation as Mohammed, but the message was subsequently forgotten. Or it was tampered with, with evil intent. So according to Islam, the Torah and the Gospels are fakes.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this case the Torah is emphasising that Exodus ends as Genesis began, with a work of creation. Note the difference as well as the similarity. Genesis began with an act of divine creation. Exodus ends with an act of human creation.

concerns itself with the 40-year journey through the desert, from Egypt to the Promised Land (Israel), taken by the Children of Israel. Earlier in the Torah, God promises the Land of Israel to Abraham, and it’s Moses’s mission to lead the freed slaves — who are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — to the Promised Land. The book of Numbers provides details of many of their encounters and experiences in the desert and also includes many of the laws incumbent upon the Jewish people. Deuteronomy: The book of Deuteronomy is largely Moses’s farewell address to his people. In this book, Moses recounts many of the key experiences of the Jewish people after their liberation from Egypt. He also takes the opportunity to repeat many teachings contained in the first four books of the

The Torah teaches that God created all beings, all creatures are good in and of themselves, and that the Creator remains personally invested in creation. Scriptures also indicate that human beings were created “in the image of God” by a deity who is munificent and compassionate toward all creatures. The Creator assigned human beings the task of protecting and serving creation . . . . Jews are to be compassionate, to avoid harming anymals, and Jewish law specifically protects anymals as ends in themselves. Jewish religious traditions honor anymals as individuals, and as our kin. God created a vegan world, peaceful and without bloodshed, and the Tanakh encourages people to work to create a path back to this original Peaceable Kingdom.

But first Paul explains the strange double life that results for those who—like his own former self—are living “under the law,” delighting in it as God’s law, but finding that it accuses them: We know, you see, that the law is spiritual. I, however, am made of flesh, sold as a slave under Sin’s authority. I don’t understand what I do. I don’t do what I want, you see, but I do what I hate. So if I do what I don’t want to do, I am agreeing that the law is good. But now it is no longer I that do it; it’s Sin, living within me. I know, you see, that no good thing lives in me, that is, in my human flesh. For I can will the good, but I can’t perform it. For I don’t do the good thing I want to do, but I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do. So if I do what I don’t want to do, it’s no longer “I” doing it; it’s Sin, living inside me. (7:14–20) Doubtless, this passage has multiple resonances in the experience of anyone who has ever tried to keep any serious moral code. Doubtless too it is framed in such a way as to resonate with the non-Jewish moralistic tradition. But the main purpose of the passage does not lie in either of those areas. Paul is not attempting to describe either the normal Christian life or the normal pre-Christian life. He is not saying of any particular stage of spiritual experience, “This is what it feels like at the time,” true though that might be. He is highlighting the outworking of the divine purpose in the deeply ambiguous nature of Israel under the Torah. Israel rightly embraced the law as the divinely given covenant charter, but found that all the law could do was to show “Sin” up and actually cause it to swell to its full extent. It may at first glance seem astonishing. But Paul is affirming that this was what God had intended all along when giving the law to a people who, as Israel’s own scriptures testified repeatedly, were themselves rebellious, idolatrous, and sinful.

The men sing wordless songs. There are seven Simchas Torah tunes, and they are all primitive melodies strung together by meaningless syllables. But these sounds are classic Jewish sounds, expressions of pure, animal emotion that transcend any language. On this night, words aren’t needed. Thousands of men lift their hands to the heavens and stamp their feet rhythmically on the stone floor, singing, “Oy yoy yoy yoy, yei ti ri rei ti ri rei ti ri rei oy yoy!” and “Ay yay yay yay, ay di ri ra ra ay di ri ra ra . . .” I am almost swept away myself, by the power of all those voices blending together; for a moment it seems as if these men can blur the lines between heaven and earth with their rapturous singing. I can no longer see people; instead I am surrounded by saints; all sin is temporarily wiped clean. Only I remain mortal, fallible. Perhaps I am beginning to understand the glory of this event after all; maybe the only reason I scorned it is because I am truly ignorant, overlooked by the divine light that seems to shine on everyone else. I feel as if tonight may be the night when I finally understand my role, my common destiny, and shake off the cold threads of doubt that separate me from my people.

There’s a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, ‘Why on our hearts, and not in them?’ The rabbi answered, “Only God can put scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

All scholars agree that the account is composite. (Witness the number of times Moses ascends the mountain.) The older documentary hypothesis,

Revolutionary utterances do not work their magic overnight. As Rambam (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides; 1135–1204) explained in The Guide for the Perplexed, it takes people a long time to change. The Torah functions in the medium of time. It did not abolish slavery, but it set in motion a series of developments – most notably Shabbat, when all hierarchies of power were suspended and slaves had a day a week of freedom – that were bound to lead to its abolition in the course of time. People are slow to understand the implications of ideas. Thomas Jefferson, champion of equality, was a slave owner.

What is hurtful to you, do not do to others. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.

We were an odd couple, me struggling with a body that didn't feel like mine, God existing behind all that is, was, and will be. But when it came to relating to human beings, God and I had something in common: neither of us could be seen or understood by those we dwelt among and loved.

The Jewish people who claim to be the Chosen of Yah have used Torah, and their interpretation of it, as a vehicle to exclude people from the covenant of Yah.

the House of Hillel’s insight was considered more refined because they took the time to consider and incorporate their opposition’s analysis into their own point of view. This expression of humble receptivity validated their rulings and decisions on Torah matters, because it revealed their commitment to listening to and learning from others besides themselves. This, according to Judaism, is the very definition of wisdom. In contrast, the House of Shammai was known to be combative and defensive in their argumentation.

As we learn in the Mishnah152: “R. Meir would say: Whoever studies Torah for its own sake merits many things; moreover, [the creation of] the entire world is worthwhile for him alone.

The Torah’s ultimate concern extends beyond the prescribed bounds of ritual and worship, including also, and even especially, the seemingly “mundane” aspects of human existence and experience. Everyday activities such as getting dressed, eating breakfast, or doing business all fall under the purview of the Torah’s mission to Divinize our lives.178

The Torah’s ultimate concern extends beyond the prescribed bounds of ritual and worship, including also, and even especially, the seemingly “mundane” aspects of human existence and experience. Everyday activities such as getting dressed, eating breakfast, or doing business all fall under the purview of the Torah’s mission to Divinize our lives.178 In fact, bread is used in Scripture179 and Rabbinic writings as a symbol for various forms of physical engagement, including marital relations. Every moment of life is thus a “battle”—an opportunity to open ourselves to the Divine Presence in that experience.

An interesting example of this principle is found in the case of the nazirite. A nazirite was someone who chose to consecrate themselves to G-d by living a more reclusive, ascetic, and isolated lifestyle for a period of time. Surprisingly, these fervent spiritual seekers were instructed to bring a sin offering at the conclusion of their vow! In explanation of this curious law, the Talmud teaches that this was in order to atone for their misplaced self-imposed asceticism.180 In the words of the Jerusalem Talmud181: “Is what the Torah forbade not enough that you must voluntarily forbid other things too?!

So look now at how it was that within Jewish history wisdom literature developed and out of wisdom literature Jewish mysticism grew. Following the Babylonian exile, the voices of the prophets fell silent. The law—the Torah—was codified to speak to every conceivable circumstance of both life and ritual. The law was thought of as the dictated “word of God,” and God increasingly was seen as a distant and even uninvolved deity. God is always easier to see in times of victory than of defeat, in power more than in powerlessness. There was an ache of emptiness in the Jewish soul. The development of the “wisdom tradition” was the response, the next phase in Judaism.