Hashem

Scholars often note that Jewish tradition views the Torah much the way the Christian tradition views Christ.  When we take account of the Jewish mystical tradition, the parallel becomes even more striking.

For classic Rabbinic thought, the Torah is more than the first five books of the Bible.  It is the heavenly wisdom of God, which existed before the creation of the world and which God employed as a blueprint and instrument when fashioning all things.

Yet, according to classic Rabbinic thought, the Torah itself remains part of that created order.  It is the highest of all created realities, but it has a temporal beginning and is not divine.

One might say that the classic Rabbinic view of the Torah is analogous to the Arian view of Christ.  For the Arians, Yeshua was the incarnate Logos, who existed before the world was made; but the Logos was himself created by God, the firstborn and highest of the angels.  The Logos is neither eternal nor divine.

The medieval Jewish mystical tradition accepts the classic Rabbinic view, but claims that the created Torah derives its being from an antecedent heavenly Torah that is more closely identified with God.  With reference to this antecedent heavenly Torah, the Zohar states: “The Holy One and the Torah are one” (Zohar Shemot).  Gershom Scholem cites a mystical authority from the same period who writes: “The Torah is not something outside Him (i.e., God), and He is not outside the Torah.”1

Scholem summarizes the mystical view of the Torah as follows: “The Torah, as the Kabbalists conceived it, is consequently not separate from the divine essence, not created in the strict sense of the word; rather, it is something that represents the secret life of God . . .   In other words, the secret life of God is projected into the Torah.”2

We cannot help but hear in the words of the Zohar an echo of the Good News according to John: “I and the Father are one.”3 For the authors of the Zohar, this would be a polemical echo since they knew that Christians saw the Torah as superseded by Christ.  These Jewish authors would be saying, “Torah reveals God to us and binds us to the Holy One not your Christ.”

Yet, we hear the Zohar differently once we discard a supercessionist view of the Torah.  Daniel Boyarin understands John in such a way: “For John . . . Jesus comes to fulfill the mission of Moses, not to displace it.”4 If John understands Yeshua in this way, what prevents us from accepting both John’s affirmation and that of the Zohar?  Yeshua is one with the Father and the Torah is one with the Holy One, because John’s Logos is the antecedent heavenly Torah and Yeshua is the incarnation of that Torah.

We may thus paraphrase Yeshua as follows: “I and the Father are one, for I and the Torah are one.”

  1. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism Schocken, 1996), 44
  2. Ibid., 41.
  3. John 10:30.
  4. Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines (Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2006), 104.
Published in Issue Five / Volume Two / May 2010
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Mark Kinzer

Mark Kinzer

Mark Kinzer, Ph.D. is the President of Messianic Jewish Theological Institute, Chairman of the Board of Hashivenu, and the Rabbi of Congregation Zera Avraham in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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