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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.