Revisit: Christ-Worshippers are beginning to see the ‘light’ in the ‘OT Law’ – Really?

[First posted in 2017.—Admin1[

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We had to think about how to title this post without offending the ‘sender’. Who?

The initials “RW” would be familiar to readers of ‘Discourse’, specifically the email exchanges between him (our former Christian-turned-Messianic pastor-bible-teacher) and individual Sinaites (namely VAN, BAN, and NSB).

He titled his email: “To help you understand”. Understand what? Ah, the attached file which is posted at the end of this commentary, titled: Love and the Law – Jewish Commentary . (Click the article and it will bring you to the website that originally published it and many more articles).

The article was puzzling to us. ‘RW’ to whom we first confessed our individual and collective decision to leave Christianity —to “help him understand” —had branded us “apostates” among other denigrating labels and rightly so, he’s simply using the term applicable to the likes of us, used by the real founder of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus.

image from Pinterest

So what’s so puzzling? The very choice of the name we decided to call our movement well indicates what we had understood way back in 2010, when we veered off from the Christian path to join Torah-observant Israel on the pathway toward Spiritual Sinai, the symbolic site of the Self-revelation of the One True God Who revealed His Name as YHWH, and prescribed His Way of Life. Not coincidentally, that biblical historical event is about to be commemorated by Torah-observant Jewry on the commanded feast of Shavuot, the giving of the Law—May 30-June 1, 2017.

As we have repeatedly explained in many articles since 2010, the Torah life is what we now live, in obedience to YHWH, the God we now worship and embrace as our LORD.

In our view, Torah is all about law and grace! The Law-Giver by His Grace, did not leave humanity ignorant of what He requires from those who agree to live under His Kingship. He gave instructions, precepts, commandments, etc. to regulate human relationships in all social contexts — family, friendship, work, society, nations, etc. And when there is not one other human being to relate to, Torah contains as well, regulations relating to ‘tending the garden’, taking care of the one planet designed to nurture and sustain life in all forms, but particularly human life. With no other human around, there are instructions on how to respect, regard, and replenish nature, including what to eat, how to live hygienically, etc. The Designer of the human body left a manual for living, for the one and only creature made in His Image, endowed with the gift of free will to obey His Law which promises blessing, or disobey, the consequence of which is warned as ‘curse’.

Image from The Grace Life Blog

Please understand: Living by God’s ‘Grace’ is living according to the Law of God. Law IS Grace! He has never abrogated his Torah, at least not in the original Hebrew Scriptures. His Torah is NOT impossible to obey, even if the NT apostle Paul claims so (might have been difficult for him?); and obedience to His Torah is not legalism, even if Christianity labels it so. We have many posts explaining this but for now, this post is specifically about . . . well . . . read the title again!

‘RW’ typifies the Christian reaction to Sinai 6000, namely —

first, genuine concern for our eternal destination, damnation in hell predicted for all unbelievers or worse, apostates;
second, debate with us why we’re wrong;
third, warn others about us;
and finally, if at all possible, get us back to returning to salvation through belief in and acceptance of the Jesus Christ,
part of which means believing the Christian gospel that we are under “grace” and not “law”.

Groan.

Now, get to know ‘RW’ in the posts below; the listing is random, not chronological:

If you managed to get this far, for the article that’s supposed to ‘help’ us ‘understand’ . . . . here it is. There is a wonderful prayer at the end of our post to make your effort/patience/perseverance all worthwhile, don’t miss it!

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Love and the Law – Jewish Commentary

MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK, COMMENTARY

One evening in 1663, the London socialite Samuel Pepys decided to check out London’s latest attraction: Jews, who had just been allowed back into England. Pepys sought out a typical synagogue service in order to get a sense of what was for him a foreign faith. Unbeknownst to Pepys, the evening he had selected to visit was Simhat Torah, when Jews celebrate completing the annual reading of the Mosaic Law with raucous dancing.

Pepys was bewildered by what he saw.

“But, Lord!” he wrote in his diary, “to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.”

Pepys’s visit may have been ill-timed, but he did witness the soul of Judaism. For Jews, the law is the source of our most profound joy. And while Simchat Torah is a venerable tradition, the true celebration of the law is the holiday of Shavuot, marked by Jews this month as zeman matan torateinu, the time of the giving of the law. The Torah—a rigorous and complex code containing 613 commandments, to which the rabbis later added a myriad of further prohibitions and obligations—is for Jews an exquisite source of happiness, the ultimate embodiment of the Almighty’s love, and God’s greatest gift.

This may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Christian thinkers have been startled by the fact that law—in all its multifarious details—can be a source of delight. In his Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis admits he was confounded by the Psalmist’s description of the Torah as sweeter than honey.

“One can easily understand,” Lewis asserts, how laws may be important, even critical, but “it is very hard to find how they could be, so to speak, delicious, how they exhilarate.”

Indeed, for one who overcomes his own desires in obedience to God’s commands, the law, Lewis write,

“could be more aptly compared to the dentist’s forceps or the front line than to anything enjoyable or sweet.”

Similarly, Soren Kierkegaard, reflecting Paul’s description of the Law as a “curse,” sees in the Torah an infinitude of obligations that can never be fulfilled:

“A human being groans under the Law. Wherever he looks, he sees only requirement but never the boundary, alas, like someone who looks out over the ocean and sees wave after wave but never the boundary.”

In the past two decades, however, a stunning new genre of religious writing has appeared: Christian appreciation of the Jewish love of the law. These sensitive reflections are instructive not only to Christians but also, in certain ways, very interesting to Jews, as we can learn a great deal when we see ourselves through an outsider’s insightful eyes.

One such appreciation was written by Maria Johnson, a Catholic theologian at the University of Scranton. In her 2006 book, Strangers and Neighbors, Johnson describes visiting an Orthodox Jewish home on a Shabbat afternoon. Superficially, the Jewish Sabbath presents us with Judaism at its most didactic—a collection of melakhot, forbidden forms of work that cannot be performed—and Johnson had assumed that it was, for her friends, “a 25-hour prison of petty regulation.” Then, Johnson experiences the peace that pervades the Jewish home on this day, and in a jolt of realization understands “why my friends spoke of it with such love, why they thought of the day not as a prison but as a queen.” Johnson muses that in an age of almost infinite distractions, the rigidity of the laws actually frees families to focus on what is most important:

“All the laws, the 39 acts that generations of rabbis have multiplied into hundreds of prohibitions on the most trivial everyday activities, are an adamantine edge to chisel holiness into the week in a way that cannot be ignored or evaded by distraction and must therefore be welcomed and embraced and celebrated.”

Rather than an encumbrance, the law liberates by ensuring that there is no way to do anything except, as Johnson writes,

“experience time as creatures whom God has made in his own image and blessed and chosen and called.”

Johnson here emphasizes the external impact of the law on the Jewish experience.

Another Christian intellectual has written insightfully on how a lifetime of obedience to the Torah transforms Jews internally. In an essay titled “Loving the Law,” the Catholic theologian R.R. Reno meditates on the writings of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. He reflects that while Christianity has given in all too often to the Gnostic temptation to reject this world, Jewish law insists that the soul is formed in the real world through habit-forming activity. The logic, Reno writes, is straightforward:

“When our imperatives become the intentions and actions of those whom we command, then we begin to enter into communion with them.”

Reno compares this to a child who obeys his father’s command to do his homework and ultimately comes to value education.

“Soloveichik has helped me,” Reno writes, in seeing how law is a precious gift. While Kierkegaard describes the Torah as a burdensome endless obligation, Reno argues that Jewish laws “are as countless arrows of love shot downward and into human life,” so that the more expansive and detailed the law, the more completely is one’s life “penetrated by the divine.”

Christians, then, describe how the Torah sanctifies the external and molds the internal; it makes the Jewish home holy while creating the Jewish character. Both themes are combined in another remarkable example of a Christian appreciation of the law.

In 2012, Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput visited the beit midrash, or study hall, of Yeshiva University, where he encountered hundreds of young men engaged in Talmud study. Then, in a Church homily, he delivered a paean to what he had witnessed. He was struck, Chaput told those assembled in Church that Sunday, by the passion the students had for the Torah:

“They didn’t merely study it; they consumed it. Or maybe it would be better to say that God’s Word consumed them,”

—-forming friendship between themselves, and beyond themselves, with God. Chaput then reflected how the Torah was the source of Jewish immortality:

I saw in the lives of those Jewish students the incredible durability of God’s promises and God’s Word. Despite centuries of persecution, exile, dispersion, and even apostasy, the Jewish people continue to exist because their covenant with God is alive and permanent. God’s Word is the organizing principle of their identity. It’s the foundation and glue of their relationship with one another, with their past, and with their future. And the more faithful they are to God’s Word, the more certain they can be of their survival.

With words that one once could never have imagined being uttered in a homily in a Roman Catholic Church, Chaput then adds:

“What I saw at Yeshiva should also apply to every Christian believer, but especially to those of us who are priests and bishops.”

His reflections may reveal one reason why this new genre of Christian writing, unlike any other in two millennia, has suddenly emerged.

In an age of libertinism, Christians are coming to appreciate the role rigorous adherence to law plays in Jewish character formation—and in an age when Christians are now cultural outsiders, Christians are beginning to seek the secret of Jewish survival through the centuries, and are discovering it in the Jewish love of the law.

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In keeping with celebration of Shavuot (Pentecost to Christians), we end this with a touching image of “the Jewish love of the law” : Prayer: The Rabbis’ Blessing for the Torah. Sinaites now feel the same love toward the Torah, but more so toward the Giver of the Torah: YHWH, God of Israel, God of the Nations, the God that Sinaites have chosen, embrace, love, and worship as the One and Only God!

Image from My Morning Meditations

Blessed are You

YHWH, our God,

King of the universe,

Who gives us

the Torah of Truth

so that we may study,

live, learn,

and be changed by it,

so that we may have righteous judgment

and Your spirit of love,

so that we may keep Your commandments,

do them, and live in them,

and teach them to our children

and our children’s children forever.

Amain!

In behalf of Sinai 6000

Core Community,

NSB@S6K

Source: Exodus/Shemoth 24 – "the sight of the Glory of YHVH (was) like a consuming fire" -- We gentiles living in this 21st century are able to experience that climactic moment [God appearing on Sinai] by reading and studying this portion of the TORAH. Indeed, we see YHWH not quite as dramatically as the mixed multitude did, but perhaps even better through these accounts recorded in Exodus. There is a saying that hindsight is 20/20 vision, i.e., we begin to see and understand the question marks in our past only later in our lives, as we mature and hopefully become wiser and more introspective about the meaning or seeming meaninglessness of happenings in history, whether personal, national, or universal. Søren Kierkegaard adds a twist to this: “Only 20:20 vision is hindsight. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” As we endeavor to understand each portion in the TORAH of YHWH, much of it will seem irrelevant to our current situation but if we see beyond the time-bound cultural and religious situations and begin to understand what truly has not change—human nature and the Great Revelator who designed the perfect blueprint for living in peace, happily and contentedly with family, community, country and the nations, the unquestionable conclusion is: TORAH is relevant to ALL humankind, not just to Israel, to this very day.

Love and the Law – Jewish Commentary

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