“. . . every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old.” Matthew 13:52
My beloved is like a gazelle (Song of Songs 2:9). Rabbi Isaac said, “The community of Israel said before the Holy one, blessed be He: ‘Sovereign of the Universe, you say to us, My love, my love—You give us the greeting of love first. Just as a gazelle leaps from mountain to mountain and valley to valley, from tree to tree and fence to fence, so the Holy One, blessed by He, leapt from Egypt to the Red Sea and from the Red Sea to Sinai, and from Sinai he leaps to future redemption.” (Song of Songs Rabbah 2.9.1)
On its face, the Song of Songs is just a love song. There is no mention of God or worship. But the sages of Israel saw it as an expression of the mutual love between God and Israel. So, according to the sages, how does the Song function as a part of Scripture?
One answer comes in a beautiful collection of thoughts about the Song assembled in the seventh century C.E. This collection is called the Song of Songs Rabbah. For centuries, numerous stories and biblical interpretations based on the Song of Songs had been passed down. But Song of Songs Rabbah was the first to bring a large number of them together in one collection This anthology is arranged as a verse-by-verse commentary on the Song.
Hanukkah is here! This Festival of Lights is so bright, it is sure to make the cooler winter nights warm and full of joy. Throughout Israel, giant hanukkiyot (plural for hanukkiyah, the 9 branched candelabrum that we light during the festival) are in all the city squares, on the corners of streets, in the center of Army bases, and on the roof of the Knesset (parliament).
One of my favorite places to go to see the lighting is the Western Wall—Kotel. There, at the foot of the Wall, is a large hanukkiyah. Jews from all walks of life gather for the lighting, including many Jews who do not look outwardly observant. This festival has an appeal and an ease with which seemingly non-observant Jews can connect with Jewish life without the requirements and restrictions that we find in the Torah-mandated festivals.
Luke’s besorah (gospel) is sometimes called the “gospel of hospitality.” This is in part because it describes the coming of the Messiah as a “visitation from God” (Luke 19:44)1 and focuses on the question of how people responded to “the Messiah, the Son of God” (Matt 16:16; 26:63). Consider two scenes in Luke’s besorah.
In Luke 2:1–20, we are told that Yeshua the son of David was born in the city of David.2 However, the residents of this prophesied city (Mic 5:1[2])3 did not recognize the time of their visitation or go out of their way to be hospitable to Yeshua and his family. Luke notes that because there was no room for Miryam and Yosef in the living-quarters, they had to find shelter in a barn. After Yeshua was born, Miryam laid the Messiah in a feeding trough or box for animals. Shepherds soon arrive, marveling over the child and praising God. Finally, a proper welcome!
“…your old men shall dream dreams (chalomot), and your young men shall see visions.” Joel 2:28
Recently, I received an unexpected monetary gift and, for about ten days, pondered getting a new toy: an iPod Touch, whereby I would have access to the 75,000 or so applications available through Apple.
I researched online, but, unlike my remote ancestor, I did not see that the iPod was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that it was desirable to make one wise. Even though I visited not one, but two Apple stores, I did not take from the Apple and eat.
Of course, there was a sense of loss. Like most people, I like toys. However, conscious of all the demands upon me, and with a recent significant birthday reminding me of the limits of my time, I decided I would be better off without this portal to countless diversions.
Popular fascination with Jewish mysticism has been with us now for more than a decade. Among scholars it began much earlier. Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) paved the way for a new generation of historians of religion who perceived the central role mysticism has played in Jewish theology, practice, and religious experience. These scholars have transformed our understanding of the early Yeshua-movement. It is no longer viewed as a departure from Judaism under the influence of pagan mystery religions and Greek philosophy. The ascribing of divine attributes to the risen Messiah by Paul, John, and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews—all Jews—now makes sense as an appropriation of terms and concepts at home in the world of Jewish mysticism. Common to this world were wide-ranging speculations concerning the enthroned divine image described by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and concerning the mysterious biblical figure known as the Angel of Hashem.
The Jewish mystical tradition remained a potent force in Jewish religious life throughout the centuries that followed the destruction of the Second Temple. In the Middle Ages, one particular form eventually became dominant. Known as Kabbalah (“tradition”), this system of thought saw the One God of Israel not as an undifferentiated singularity but as a dynamic and unfolding interplay of divine powers(the ten Sefirot).
The weeks between Purim and Pesach are ones of preparation for the Festival of Redemption that we experience during Pesach. The sages presented for us four weeks of special readings on Shabbat in which we take out an additional Torah Scroll for the final reading from the Torah—the Maftir section. The last of these is Shabbat Hachodesh—the Shabbat before the beginning of Nissan— emembering this commandment given to he whole people of Israel, to remember the new month, this being the foundation for keeping the sacrificial calendar.
Shabbat Hachodesh reminds us of the unique role Hashem gives to mankind in the creation. He brings the change of seasons, through the gravitational orbit of the Earth around the Sun. He directs us in the Torah that the festivals need to be kept in their proper season, and he directs man to recognize and confirm the beginning of the new month. Man must make sure that the months stay in sync with the seasons, which requires a balancing of the lunar and solar calendars. One without the other will create a calendar that will soon lose it’s purpose, as the various harvest festivals will be kept at times when there is either not a harvest at all or the wrong harvest. Imagine celebrating the barley harvest in the fall at the time of the fruit festivals. He leaves to us to work the festivals into this reality. In Exodus 12:2, he gives his first command to the people of Israel: “This month shall be to you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you.” Until now he had given commands to the Avot—the Patriarchs—as individuals, and here he begins to direct the people of Israel as a collective. The whole order of the Torah was dependent on the agreement of the leaders of the people as to when this month would begin.
Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses. . .
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: . . .This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
Many of us came to faith in the Living God through personal crisis, a time when God had our full attention and we experienced some sort of divine intervention, when we said “This is my God and I will praise him—I recognize this chain of circumstances, this realization or intervention in crisis, as the work of God.”
In this conclusion to the Passover story— our people Israel have also come through a crisis and experienced the dramatic intervention of God. Now they too claim him as their own. But this is but one of three aspects of spiritual experience illustrated by our passage.
In the words “they feared the Lord and believed in his servant Moses” we see that peak experiences, those crises or times of apparent divine intervention, link us not only to God but to others whose experience shapes or resembles our own. Thus, the people not only encountered God in a new way, they also encountered Moses in a new way. We might term this second dimension of spirituality the communal dimension.
For as many as are the promises of God, they all ind their “Yes” in him. For this reason we also utter “Amen” to God . . . (2 Corinthians 1:20).
Jews all over the world eat the Passover meal during this season to commemorate our deliverance from slavery in Egypt long ago. As we enjoy this meal together, the very food on our plates reminds us of the past. We read from the Passover Haggadah, a little book that tells the story of Passover and also gives us the order of the night’s events, including the blessings and prayers.
As Jews eat the unleavened bread and portions of bitter herbs, parsley and such, we are reminded of the sufferings we experienced in Egypt as a people, and of God’s deliverance. At a certain point in the evening, we read the words of the Haggadah thanking God for delivering us, as a people, from that slavery: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, ruler of the world, who redeemed us and redeemed our ancestors from Egypt, and brought us to this night.” As with all Jewish holidays, we do not only remember the past, we also anticipate the final redemption that has been promised to us.
For Messianic Jews, Passover has a special meaning. These promises, along with all the promises of God, ind their “Yes” in Yeshua. Yeshua does not only say “Yes” to the promises of God, but that “Yes” is embodied in him. Everything about Yeshua answers “Yes” to God and to God’s promises. Yeshua is “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29) whose “Yes” to God involved giving himself completely into God’s hands.
The Scriptures seem to indicate that Messianic Jews have a covenantal responsibility to observe Passover but that Gentile Christians do not (Exod 12:43–49; Matt 26:17–19; Acts 15; 21:17–26; 1 Cor 7:17–20). This said, the Gentile wing of the ekklesia early on saw value in celebrating a Gentile form of Passover that centuries later became known as Easter. I would like to make several comments about this early Christian tradition, which for lack of a better term I will call “Gentile Passover.”
Second-century Gentile churches followed two calendar traditions concerning Gentile Passover. It appears that almost all of the churches in Asia (where Paul devoted much of his ministry [1 Cor 16:8, 19; Acts 19:10, 26]), as well as churches in Asia Minor, Cilicia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, observed Gentile Passover in accordance with the Jewish festival calendar, on the fourteenth day of the first month, the month of Nissan (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.23.1; 5:24:1; Athanasius, Syn. 2; Epiphanius, Pan. 70.9.8-9; 10.3–5; Theodoret, Haer. Fab. Comp. 3.4). Far from being a minor schismatic group, Christians who celebrated Gentile Passover on Nissan 14 stretched across a vast geographic region. Many of these Gentile Christians celebrated with Jews, and the similarity of their observance to Jewish Passover probably varied from community to community.
By contrast, the churches in the West—in Italy, Greece (including Corinth), Spain, Britain, Gaul (which included the present-day area of France, Belgium, the south Netherlands, south-west Germany)— observed Gentile Passover on the Sunday following Nissan 14 (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.23.1; Vit. Const. 3.18). These churches retained the name Pascha (Passover), but they moved away from celebrating Passover on the same day as Jews, with Jews, and in the manner of Jews.
Many Christians and Messianic Jews struggle with the traditional teaching of the Christian Church regarding the Tri-unity of God. How can God be both singular and threefold? Does this teaching not violate both commonsense and the absolute monotheism of the Torah, the Prophets, and Jewish tradition?
I do not intend to answer these questions in this short column. Instead, I would like to examine the assumption that the Torah and the Prophets teach an “absolute monotheism.”
The God spoken of in the Torah and the Prophets is ininite in knowledge, power, and presence, invisible and without form. According to Psalm 145:3, the greatness of Hashem is “unsearchable.” As Solomon consecrates the Jerusalem temple, he acknowledges that heaven itself is too small to contain the presence of the Holy One. Hashem’s only limits are those that are self-imposed or intrinsic to Hashem’s character.
Nevertheless, this same God assumes a human form and appears to Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others. The people of Israel hear this God speak in human words at Sinai. They encounter Hashem not as an ininite, hidden, and unknowable power, but as a self-revealing God who speaks, acts, and feels.