Thinking about God: Jewish Views, by Rabbi Kari H Tuling: a review

 

This is an invaluable book, and what you get out of it will depend on two things: who are you, and what are you seeking?

If you're a reader (Jewish or not) who's unfamiliar with this tradition, you may become bemused by the sheer variety of Jewish views about God, and how different they are, and how all of them are valid parts of the Jewish tradition. It may change your sense of what thinking about God can be like. Along the way, you will also quietly learn a lot about Jewish texts and traditional ways to read them and about ways that our understanding of God can shape our daily lives. In fact, Rabbi Tuling insists, "Theology defines what is possible in our lives." Read it, and see if you agree!

If you're a Jewish reader who's well-versed in bible and midrash, like me, you will recognize some of the passages with which Rabbi Tuling begins each chapter and nod along with her line-by-line explication. Some of the medieval thinkers were unfamiliar to me, and some of the modern ones too. But as a person who usually approaches God as a partner in the project of tikkun olam, the repair and gradual perfection of creation, and not as a "God of the philosophers," I found it useful to read over the contrasting views and see how much I agreed with some, and less with others. It made me put into words some of what I believe about God rather than just relate to God as someone who's always already been there.

And if you're a person who's inclined toward theology but not familiar with Jewish approaches, you may be taken up short by how much Jewish views of God can contrast with the assumptions soaked into Christianity (to say nothing of Islam, Buddhism, or other traditions!) You may also learn the connection between daring exegesis and theology in Judaism--much more common than a purely deductive approach--and you will have to decide whether you agree with the author when she says, "Any theology that can confidently explain why children get cancer is a monstrosity."

All of us readers, I think, will get suggestions on what to read next!

Common Errors Made about Early Judaism

If you are either Christian or Jewish (or have been influenced by people who are), then you should read The Jewish Annotated New Testament. If you can't spare the time to read the whole book, then read the essays at the end. 

And if you can't read all the essays, for God's sake read "Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism," by co-editor Amy-Jill Levine.

Levine is an Orthodox Jewish woman who has devoted her scholarly career to studying Jesus and Christianity. Her earlier book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus is a classic in the field. In other words, she knows whereof she speaks!

Here are ten misconceptions that Levine thinks both Jews and especially Christians have about Judaism circa the time of Jesus. They are not just trivial errors: they make it impossible to understand either Christianity or Judaism in context.

1. The contrast between Jewish "law" and Christian "grace" (and the belief that the "law" is impossible to fulfill). "In actuality," Levine points out, "Jews, then and now, did not find Torah observance any more burdensome than citizens in most countries find their country's law today."

2. The mistaken view of Judaism as religion of "works righteousness." Some Christians believe "Jews follow Torah in order to earn God's love or a place in heaven." But God's love is a given, a place in heaven is not a major Jewish concern, and that is not why Jews use Torah to guide their lives.

3. The erroneous idea that ritual purity laws were burdensome (see #1) and unjust. To Levine, this assumption makes a lot of Christian readings of the Good Samaritan and of Jesus healing a woman from hemorrhages go completely astray. By misunderstanding ritual purity and impurity, they miss the point of their own stories.

4. Related to #3, the idea that Jewish society at the time was uniquely misognynistic. Levine is a feminist, and she says that's nonsense. "Jewish women owned their own homes...served as patrons...appeared in the Temple... and in synagogues, had use of their own property...had freedom of travel...appear in public; and so on."

5. The counterfactual idea that Judaism permitted easy divorce, at the expense of women, when the marriage contract (ketubah) guarantees her right in the case of divorce, and guarantees them in advance.

6. Viewing sinners and tax collectors as "marginal" and "cast out" instead of as what they were: "people who violate the welfare of the community and who have deliberately removed themselves from the common good."

7. Ignoring Jesus' militant statements and Judaism's varied views of the messiah, from warrior-king to shepherd, in order to pretend Jesus was a pacifist and Jews rejected him for that reason.

8. The idea that Jews worshiped a distant, impersonal and completely transcendent God. Where, she implicitly asks, do you think Jesus got the idea that God is abba, Father?

9. The idea that the Temple hierarchy dominated and oppressed the population--when the Temple had more and more become the center of Jewish life in the Holy Land, and Jews loved going there.

10. The false dichotomy of exclusivism vs. universalism. Again, go back to the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, if you want to find the roots of universalism as a messianic ideal--and study what the texts actually say about interactions between Jews and Gentiles if you want to know what was going on at the time. When anyone states, as in Acts 10, that association between the two is against some law, they are blatantly misstating the historical truth.

Read Levine's essay for yourself and follow her references back to the sources to learn more.

From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple & Rabbinic Judaism (Lawrence Schiffman)

According to Jewish legend, the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BCE and the Second Temple in 70 CE, on the same day of the Jewish calendar. 

We Jews mark that day, Tisha B'av, every year, in memory of the two destructions, as if nothing happened in between. 

That elision is certainly consistent with how I learned Jewish history. In my education, there was a big blank between the return from the Babylonian Exile and the conquest of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus. 

Only the Maccabean revolt was stuck in the middle (the way Chanukah is stuck in the middle between the fall holidays and Pesach in the spring).

For someone like me, then, From Text to Tradition : A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism does a great service.

I picked up this book while I was taking part in a 929 daily discussion of the Tanach. We had reached the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and I was confused. Who were these people, and how did they relate to some of the figures I'd read about earlier in Zechariah (Zerubabel and Joshua ben Jehozadak)? Who were the Jews who never went into Babylonia? What were people from other countries doing in Judea now? And who were the Samaritans, and why was there (what seemed like) sibling rivalry between them and the Jewish leaders?

Schiffman clarifies many of these points and makes me want to learn even more about them. He goes on to talk about Jewish life during the age of Alexander the Great and his successors, especially the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria, not only in the holy land but all around the Middle East. In Judea itself, he briefly addresses the conflicts between high priests and Hasmonean monarchs (descendants of the Maccabees)--and among the members of the royal family themselves. 

An aside: Why, I wonder, have there not been as many novels about the Hasmoneans as about the Tudors, or the Medici? The rivalry in the court of Salome Alexandra is certainly as dramatic as the politics under Elizabeth I. There is fertile ground here for fiction writers!

Schiffman purports to be writing a history of Judaism, not Jews, during this period. Repeatedly, however, he makes the point that you cannot understand how Jewish thought and practice evolved without paying attention to the social and political pressures that shaped it. 

This seems especially true for the period just before the destruction of the Second Temple. Knowing what was going on between different "political parties" in Judea and their relations to Hellenism, to Roman rule, and to nations fighting against Rome (like the Parthians) is vital to understanding Jewish sects like the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, the people at Qumran, and the Jesus-followers who eventually became a separate religion.

There are some texts that were written by Jews that have played a more important part in Christianity and in historiography than in Judaism. These include the Septuagint, the apocrypha, the pseudepigrapha, the philosophy of Philo Judaeus, and the history written by Josephus. Schiffman explains that the Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora might at one time have been familiar with these, but they increasingly were absorbed either into the Greek-speaking Christian world or into the Hebrew-speaking, Palestine-centered Jewish sphere. 

Then he goes on to explain the texts that did become central to rabbinic Judaism (which with very few exceptions is Judaism as we know it today): the Mishnah, the baraita, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, the books of midrash.

Whew! I see I cannot discuss this book without doing a lot of name-dropping. If you are not at all familiar with this history, perhaps Schiffman is not the best one to introduce you to it. 

If you're in a similar place as I am however--very familiar with some of these people, places, and things and only vaguely familiar with others--then he may be a good teacher to put them together into a more complete picture.

I note, however, that this book was published thirty years ago, and the author was already hoping that recent discoveries and studies would fill out the picture more. If you know of a more up-to-date book that compares to this, would you please suggest it to me?

Inheriting Abraham, by Jon D. Levenson

Someone once said that the U.S. and the U.K. are two nations divided by a common language. We both speak English, but oh, the different ways we speak it!

This brilliant little book by Levenson, the Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard, makes the same claim about Jewish, Christian, and Muslim conceptions of Abraham. Abraham is central to all of us, but in very different ways.

Abraham in Judaism

For Jews, broadly speaking, Abraham is the the first father of our people. In the Torah, God singled him out and commanded his allegiance, and Abraham proved worthy of God's trust through his actions. He circumcised himself and his sons Ishmael and Isaac, as God instructed. He didn't withhold his son Isaac when God told him to sacrifice Isaac (in the Akedah story). Abraham also argued with God about what justice required, so well that if only a few more righteous people lived in Sodom and Gomorrah, both cities would have been saved.

Some commentators go so far as to imagine that Abraham lived by the 613 commandments of the Torah even before they were given to Moses. The continuity between Abraham and the Jewish people is complete.

Jews are descendants of Abraham in a lineal way, but there are other biological descendants: the children of Ishmael. In the Torah, they are blessed with the promise of becoming great nations. Jews are blessed in the same way too, but we claim an additional legacy from Abraham. As a community, we inherit his commitment to God, and God to him. That is why converts to Judaism typically call themselves "son or daughter of Abraham" (and Sarah, in more liberal circles).

Converting to Judaism

Within the Jewish tradition, there are ways of recognizing Abraham's importance for people who are not descended from him in any way. This begins in the Torah: "All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you" (Genesis 12:3) and continues in midrash that states that throughout their travels, Abraham and Sarah brought many people to an understanding of God. Judaism is not an either/or religion, however. Abraham can be a light unto the nations (as we are commanded to be, as a people) and still be specifically Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father.

Abraham in Christianity

Christianity, of course, originally sprang from Judaism. Beginning with Paul, however, Christians interpreted the figure of Abraham both as a foreshadowing of Jesus and as a proof that they--and not the Jews--were the proper descendants of Abraham.

This interpretation rested on two readings of Genesis that the Jewish tradition would not accept.

1. Reading Genesis 12:3 not as "All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you" but through you, instead. The Jewish reading had people saying, "May you be like Abraham!" The Christian reading had them saying "We are like Abraham, and the message that he brought flows through us."
2. Making much of the fact that God chooses Abraham first and only later commands him to circumcise himself and his male children. In Paul's hands, this becomes proof that circumcision (and by extension, all the mitzvot, or commandments, of the Torah) are unnecessary. The nations of the world can become Christians without becoming Jews first.

For Christians, according to Levenson, Abraham's distinguishing feature was his faith in God. Since to many Christians, Jesus is God, their belief in Jesus makes them descendants of Abraham. 

From this perspective, people who do not put faith first, and people who do not believe in Jesus, are missing the point of Abraham and (in the case of Jews) spurning their inheritance. They are putting their salvation in peril. That is an unimaginable thing for a Christian to do, but not an issue that takes up much space in Judaism. Christians generally don't realize that Jews by and large leave questions of what happens after death up to God, and that Jews believe "The righteous of all nations have a place in the world to come" (Pirkei Avot 1:1). So, what is the point to Christians is beside the point to Jews.

For Christians, the meaning of Abraham is that Jews should give up rabbinic teachings and "go back to Abraham"--meaning to the Abraham imagined by Christians, who cares only for God and his own soul, not the one in Genesis who is clearly exercised over which of his biological sons will inherit from him. So, for Jews and Christians, being "Abrahamic religions" is a stumbling block to interfaith understanding as much as it is a spur to achieve it.

Abraham in Islam

No god but God, and Abraham was his prophet

 In Islam, Abraham is not the ancestor of the Jews nor the prototype of Christian faith. Abraham is a "muslim" in the literal sense: a person who submits to God.

For followers of Islam, what is most important about Abraham is his strict monotheism. The Qur'an stresses that Abraham was not a pagan or a polytheist, at a time when the vast majority of people were. In this way, Abraham the prophet was just like Muhammad the prophet, and the latter came to restore and amplify on the teachings of the former. Being a descendant of Abraham in any sense doesn't matter. What matters is sharing his belief.

The Torah shows Abraham meeting with and worshiping with priests who called God by other names than he did, and it does not show Abraham saying that only one God exists--simply that he, Abraham, will follow only one. Unlike Christians and Jews, however, Muslims are not bound by the stories in the Torah. If those stories conflict with Qur'an or with belief, they are free to regard them as garbled in transmission. So once again, Jews and Muslims being "Abrahamic" is a source of tension between them as much as it is an opportunity for mutual understanding.

One Abraham or Three?

Jew and Christians both claim to be Abraham's descendants and heirs. Muslims don't.

Jews and Muslims both think Abraham's monotheism means God has no body and no separate "persons." Christians think God has both.

Christians and Muslims both think everyone must eventually accept the truth of their religion to be saved from hell. Jews don't.

Levenson is drawing all these distinctions partly because he is a careful scholar, but partly because he is convinced that relations between Jews, Muslims, and Christians must be based on mutual respect. Sweeping these differences under the rug only keeps us from doing the more important work of understanding one another. I fully agree.

These Little Lights of Mine

How can a religious person be a scientist? How can a scientist be a religious person?

     In today's Torah portion, Be'haalotcha, there's a description of the menorah. Not the Chanukah menorah, with its eight branches: that came many hundreds of years after the biblical story. No, what we're talking about here is the menorah of the mishkan, the traveling sanctuary, and later of the Temple in Jerusalem. It had seven branches: three on each side, one in the middle.

     I was very interested to read the commentary in the Etz Hayim translation of the Torah that says:

...the six branches of the m'norah represent the several scientific and academic disciplines, whereas the center stalk represents the light of the Torah. Secular learning and faith are not rivals; each has its own concerns and addresses its own set of questions. They shed light on each other and and together they illumine our world.

     I was particularly interested that the source of this insight was given as Rabbi Isaac Luria, the founder of a major branch of Jewish mysticism (the Lurianic Kabbalah). If Luria, the mystic, could recognize the worth of secular science, it is amazing to me that any Jew could try to shut it out.


     So I was sad when I listened to the story of Shulem Deen, a former New Square Hasid, as told on the NPR podcast Reply All. He bought a computer back in the days when a free America Online disk came with the package. By going onto the internet, he learned things he never imagined--like how Reform Jews think, for a start! And he ended up being expelled by his Hasidic community, which saw him as a source of a freethinking contagion that might spread.

     To my mind, this attitude toward secularism is the flip side of the New Atheism, as expounded in the writings of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. The ultra-Orthodox forbid the study of secular science. The New Atheists do a cursory study of religious texts to find apparent absurdities without making any attempt to understand religious teachings in context. Neither can abide the other, and both treat the other as a threat.

     If only all religious people could value science as much as Isaac Luria did! (And many of us do.) If only all scientists could understand the religious imagination and the scientific spirit of investigation as both answering the human need to seek meaning in the universe. (And many do.)

     The desire for meaning is like the shamash, the extra candle on the Chanukah menorah. It kindles our curiosity and our sense of wonder. It is the source of both science and religion, which are candles of different colors that belong together.

    

The Jewish Gospels, by Daniel Boyarin: a review

Boyarin argues that when Jesus claimed to be a divine being as well as the anointed king, he was saying something other Jews would understand and find normal. From Boyarin's perspective, the difference between Jesus' followers and other Jews was not that he claimed to be the unique Son of God but that most Jews didn't think he was that guy.

I'm not a biblical scholar. I'm a Jew, immersed in the Judaism of the 21st century CE. So, the challenge for me reading this book was to try to imagine myself in the 1st century, before most of what I know as Judaism had taken firm shape.

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I had no problem with the idea that Jesus kept kosher (the title of chapter three). It even made sense to me that he might have been aghast at the new ways of keeping kosher that the P'rushim (later called Pharisees by people who couldn't read Hebrew) introduced. These forerunners of the rabbinic movement had the radical idea that all Jews could live in a state of ritual purity--not just the priests--and that ordinary activities like cooking and eating could be made holy. On Boyarin's reading, Jesus was a conservative, saying "Don't add new rules to what the Torah already prescribes." I can't verify his reasons for saying that, but it seems plausible to me, perhaps because to my mind it makes the rabbis look as revolutionary as I think they were.

The idea that there were a lot of different ways of being Jewish at the time, and that Christianity was just one of them for centuries, also makes sense with what history I know.

Given that, there may even have been Jews who think what Boyarin thinks they thought: that the Messiah, son of David, would also be a divine figure. Boyarin uses ingenious readings of Jewish texts that are minor (Daniel) or totally obscure (First Enoch, Fourth Ezra) today, to back up this point.

According to his reading of these texts, "Son of Man" (ben adam, in the Hebrew) actually means a figure shaped like a man who sits on a throne at the right of God and then descends in the clouds to earth, to rule. "Son of God" actually means the divinely chosen ruler, who is a son of God the same way a bar mitzvah is literally a son of the commandment: he's under God's authority. (That is my comparison, not Boyarin's.) At some point, the two became identified.

Boyarin argues that these texts set up the expectation of a divine Messiah, that Jesus said he was that person, and that the Jews who rejected him understood what he was saying--it wasn't an innovation to them--but denied his claim to be The One.

This is completely intriguing, but I am dubious, for several reasons.

1. Boyarin cherry-picks the verses that support his argument.

2. When he comes across verses that seem to contradict his thesis, he writes them off as an editor trying to bring an unruly original text back into line. You can do anything with a text that way!

3. That picture of an orthodox editor implies that the view that the Messiah was NOT a divine figure was always the dominant one. The Christological idea that Boyarin says is "Jewish" may always have been as strange to most Jews as "Jews for Jesus" are to most Jews today.

4. Boyarin gives no evidence that Daniel (which was eventually included in the Jewish canon, or Tanach, but has no role in the liturgy) was widely read at the time. (A stray part of me wonders if Boyarin wants "Daniel" to be important because it's his first name.) Some of the other books he cites are only extant in the literature of the Ethiopian Jews. It may be just my ignorance, but I have no way of knowing whether those books were circulating in first-century Palestine or not--and Boyarin doesn't tell me. So is he making an argument that people in that time and place would find recognizable?

Finally, let's say for the sake of argument that Boyarin is right in every respect. I can understand why that would be important to a historian. But why in the world would it be important to the rest of us?

Judaism and Christianity may have parted ways later and over different issues than we used to think--but they did part. They have been separate religions for at least 1800 years now. Since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, Jews have been persecuted in the name of Christianity. (I hasten to say that there have also been individual Christians who were great friends of Jews, even putting themselves at risk to do so.)

Harking back to a time when followers of Jesus were a recognized but minor Jewish sect does nothing to bring us closer together. Understanding where we are and how we differ today is a more productive path for Jews, Christians, and (I would add) the other children of Abraham, the Muslims, too.

Davening the Lord's Prayer

My parents used to sing us to sleep every night.  One of the songs that took a regular turn in the repertory was The Lord's Prayer, the Perry Como version, I think. And this could have been strange. We were a Jewish household, holding onto our identity in a nearly all-Christian suburb of Pittsburgh. The song is based on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Yet it seemed perfectly natural and in tune with what we believed.

Ten pages of The Misunderstood Jew, by Amy-Jill Levine, explain my childhood experience to me. Those are the pages where she shows, phrase by phrase, that the "Lord's Prayer" is made up of concepts that are entirely Jewish. In fact, she suggests that Christians would understand the prayer better if they knew more about its historical context. Follow this with me.

"Our father in heaven": Jews in the first century used the term Abba ("father") regularly, and even today Avinu (our father) is a common term in the Jewish prayerbook. Back then, it was also a political statement: a rejection of the Roman Caesar's claim to be the father of all his subjects.

"Hallowed be your name": every Jewish prayer service includes repetition of the Kaddish prayer, which begins "Magnified and sanctified be [God's] great name." And name in Hebrew is not just a word or a sound but the expression of God's active energy in our lives.

"Your kingdom come": this expresses the Jewish wish for the olam ha-ba, the "world to come," which is not an afterlife but the kingdom of God during the Messianic period. Again, this is a bold rejection of Rome's claim to be the ultimate sovereign.

"Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven": because the kingdom of God will create a world of justice and peace, here, where we live, and not exclusively in a spiritual realm.

"Give us this day our daily bread": Levine argues persuasively that this translation, in its redundancy, is missing the point. She would translate it "Give us tomorrow's bread today." Tomorrow's bread, for which we hunger, is precisely the Messianic age.

"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors":  This is a Jewish idea as well. We help those who are in economic distress, which would have been the only reason to take on debt in an agricultural economy. We believe that God will help us in our distress and keep us from paying all that we owe for our actions, whether they are sins ("trespasses") or just falling short of the mark.

Levine says, "The Greek phrase usually translate as 'Lead us not into temptation' is better rendered 'Do not bring us to the test.'" If the Roman empire would persecute you for practicing your religion and give you a good job if you would renounce your people and your traditions, that is a test that no one should have to face. Jesus knew that, and ultimately had to face that inhuman trial himself.

"But deliver us from evil": better, "the evil one." Satan in the Jewish tradition was the prosecuting angel when we were put to the test, always arguing that we had failed. For first-century Jews facing the trials of the Roman empire, it must have felt like an evil enemy pursuing them at every turn.

So, what I learn from Levine is that we could understand the "Lord's Prayer" this way:

Avinu malkeinu, our father in heaven, the way that you use your power in our lives is holy. Bring about the world to come, the Messianic age, so that what you have commanded us will be our actual everyday lives. Let us taste that world now. Don't hold our wrongdoings against us. Be merciful as you have told us to be merciful. Especially, don't let worldly powers put us in a position where we have to pay a terrible price for doing the right thing. Release us from their justice which is no justice. You are our only God and ruler.

If Jesus were alive today and prayed this prayer, as a Jew I would respond, "Amen!"

Three Rules for Interfaith Dialogue

I was blown away to find that the Christian theologian had so clearly put into words the basic ground rules for really trying to understand another person's religion.

(1) When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

(2) Don't compare your best to their worst.

(3) Leave room for “holy envy.”

By (3) Stendahl meant that you should be willing to recognize elements in another religious tradition or faith, elements you admire and wish might find greater scope in your own religious tradition or faith.

http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2010/05/krister-stendahls-three-rules-of-religious-understanding.html