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.

“. . . 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

Tradition! Just saying the word makes me think of Tevye and Fiddler on the Roof. The movie is set in the mythical Russian town of Anatevka, where life is a poor, hard grind, the Russians can’t be trusted not to kill you one day, and—however hard he tries to stop it—Tevye is watching his tradition disintegrate day by day. At the end of the movie, the whole village packs up and leaves for America.

My grandparents did not live very far from the villages that inspired Sholom Aleichem, author of the Tevye stories. And they came to the United States in the same tide of immigration that Tevye would have, intent on finding a new life.

When I was growing up, I was often exhorted by my grandmother, with a twinkle in her eye: “Boychick—you’re a link in the chain,” she would say with her heavy Yiddish accent. “Just make sure you don’t break the chain!” The message was clear and my generation heard it often, especially from the lips of relatives from the “old country.” The message was, If you don’t keep Jewish customs, our tradition will die—and it will be your fault! Even when said with a smile in her voice, the message was somber. Here I was, little Carl Kinbar, a link in a great and mighty chain stretching from the past and—if I did the right thing—into the future as well. No pressure there!

In recent times, Messianic Jews are increasingly choosing to live in accord with Jewish tradition. Some onlookers, conditioned to imagine that all tradition is dead tradition, disapprove of this trend. Others, from more tradition-honoring societies, such as Asian Christians, have no problem understanding that it is appropriate that Jews live in the time-honored ways handed down from their ancestors, hence, tradition.

Without a doubt, MJTI is a “tradition-friendly” institution. A moment’s thought reveals that God has used the Jewish traditional way of life as a means to preserve Jewish community continuity despite two millennia of dispersion interlaced with persecution and with pressures to assimilate, both overt and covert.

Each generation deals with tradition differently. In every Jewish family, and in every generation, there are those who carry the ball of tradition, those who pass it on to the next generation, those who drop the ball, and those who pick it up.