Another early blog on the subject of my relationship to Judaism, this came years after the previous one and then nothing followed until now. But it still feels very much on target, despite my having advanced considerably in my Jewish observance. (May 30, 2023)
I was raised on Jesus. I went to Sunday school until I was in eighth grade when I was confirmed. I wore one of those fish pins on my lapel whenever I dressed up in my best suit, a brown-pinstriped, three-piece. You can see it on my graduation photo from high school. I learned to sing "Jesus Loves Me This I Know," and "Away in the Manger." I played a shepherd in the church Christmas pageant. My favorite musical was, is, and always has been Jesus Christ Superstar, though lately I've been listening a lot to Godspell, which I watched the other night on Netflix with my wife.
When I first considered reverting to Judaism one of my chief objectives was that I would have to give up Jesus. "You don't know what you're asking," I told the host of the Shabbat dinner I was attending. "You don't know who you're sitting with," he responded and introduced me to the young rabbi across the table, who, it turned out, was born and raised Irish Catholic. "But Jesus Christ Superstar is my favorite musical," I protested. "I liked it too, when I was a teenager," said the host's wife.
Was Jesus something I could put away, along with other childish things?
I never really related to the whole Messiah thing. What I loved about Jesus was the story, and for me the least important part of the story was his coming back to life. That's why, for example, I was so disappointed the last time I saw Jesus Christ Superstar performed, and they raised an aging Ted Nealy from the cross and had him float across stage like a geriatric Peter Pan. What was beautiful to me about the story was that here was a man who knew he was going to die for teaching love and kindness, but he went on teaching it anyway, and here was a woman (Mary Magdalene in JCS) who loved a man who was perfect but who could not love her back because of that perfection, and here was another man, Judas Iscariot, who was Jesus' closest friend, his "right hand man," who also loved him but now had come to see Jesus as a threat to a nation, who betrayed Jesus for ideals nearly as high as love and then who saw that he had done so in vain. And there were the disciples, blessed to be groupies to the greatest superstar that ever lived but never really understanding what he was about. And here were his people, the Jews, some who embraced him, some who rejected him, because who, really, is able to discern a prophet in his own time, much less his own country? This is all, of course, the gospel as preached by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, but it is largely the one to which I subscribed, and we can see these same dynamics played out in Godspell, where Judas/John the Baptist, in his Sgt. Pepper Coat, is so compelling a figure. I still love this story. It still haunts me, though I have no desire to go inside a church, and, indeed, I was recently in one and was not impressed with the ministry. I suppose if Christians were like those happy-go-luck hippy-clowns in Godspell or even the angst-ridden hippies of JSC, I would find it harder to resist. The Twelve Tribes comes closest to that, I suppose, and I sometimes have fantasies of running off with them the way one runs off wit the circus.
But I don't think I could give up my Judaism anymore. It's become too ingrained in me, or rather I've discovered that it was ingrained all along ,and I can't forget that. So, what? Become a "Jew for Jesus," a Messianic Jew? I don't think so because I just don't believe Jesus was the Messiah, though I do believe he was a great rabbi, and a great man, perhaps the greatest teacher the world has ever known. But not the Son of God. At least not any more than you or I, who are all the sons and daughters of God--assuming there is one.
Recently, I've been listening to the Gospels on audio books, ostensibly to prepare for a course in Western Humanities. I intend to include the Gospel of Luke because I think it's essential to understanding the development of the hero from a character such as Odysseus, Sacker of Cities, to our modern, (relatively) selfless heroes ranging from Gawain and Lancelot to Superman. As I've been listening, as a post-Christian Jew, I see these gospels with new eyes. I understand things I didn't understand before, such as what it means when the Pharisees criticize Jesus because his disciples don't wash their hands before eating bread. In the old days, I thought they were just accusing the disciples of being sloppy. I didn't understand that washing your hands before eating bread is a standard (Orthodox) Jewish practice. An (Orthodox) Jew would not put a crumb of bread in his mouth before rinsing his hands two or three times each with a two-handled pitcher, saying the blessing for washing, and the blessing for eating bread. In Jesus' time, however, there must have been Jews who omitted this custom just as there are today (i.e. reform, conservative , and secular Jews). And Jesus, in insisting this custom was less important than how one speaks--"it is not what goes in the mouth but what comes out of it that corrupts a man"--was making an important point about priorities, one that might still have relevance for Jews today.
It wasn't that he was saying, as far as I can see, that one shouldn't ritually wash hands before eating bread. He said, after all,"Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" and "Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven." What he seems to be saying is that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor, and if you're not doing both of these, it doesn't matter what rituals you fulfill. I think, this, perhaps, has been misconstrued by Christians as meaning that ritual and even law are meaningless, but, for me, least, that's a mistake. Ritual and law provide guideposts; they are tools that are helpful, in some cases, essential. But what is most important, as a Christian book my Jewish wife is reading points out, is what occurs in the heart.
I see that Jesus probably saw what I and many other Jews have seen: ostentatiously observant Jews, ones who love to sit in high places in the synagogues and flaunt their phylacteries, who, simply put, are not good people. Obvious examples today are those rabbis who were arrested last year for money laundering and even illegal trading in human organs, but one doesn't need to go that far. I saw, when I taught in Yeshiva, that scholarship and mastery of the law was valued over "midos"--kindness, good behavior. Maybe this is because it's easier to teach kids Talmud than respect for others, but really, which is more important? If learning the Talmud doesn't translated into loving your fellow man, what good is it? Now, I'm not saying learning the New Testament translates into loving your fellow man either--we have 2,000 years of history to prove otherwise. But clearly Jesus has a point.
Another thing I never understood was the Lord's Prayer. Jesus' disciples ask him how they should pray, and he advises them to use a formula of about 13 lines. What is this about? Why do they need to learn how to pray? Well, after some five years or so of practicing Judaism, I have a better understanding of the context of the disciples questions. A quick Orthodox service can last two hours. Yom Kippur services go six or more. It's interesting to me that, as Jew, I have more tolerance for these long services than I did for the 45-minute one I got in my former Lutheran church. But that having been said, these things can be exhausting, and I have often asked myself what is the point, especially when one considers all the repetition built into the Orthodox service. Let's take the Amidah, for example. This is the so-called "standing prayer" which Jews speak quietly to themselves while, yes, standing. It consists of 19 blessings, and takes someone like me, who reads Hebrew slowly, 10-15 minutes to say. In a Sabbath service this prayer is said four times, twice by the individual congregants and twice by the prayer leader who repeats the prayer both times after everyone has finished. The original purpose of the repetition was to provide an opportunity for those who couldn't read to hear the prayer spoken for them. That is no longer needed, for the most part, but the repetition is retained in the service because once a practice is adopted in Judaism it, essentially, becomes part of the law for future generations, even when the context changes to such a degree as to nullify the original intention. Kaddish, the so-called-prayer for the dead, is repeated, I think, 5 times during the Shabbat service. The "Shma" two or three times; "Adom Olam" twice. I can understand, therefore, why Jesus might have railed against "vain repetitions" and "babbling like pagans"--Orthodox Jews frequently repeat these prayers so quickly, they sound like murmuring or "babbling." The Lord's Prayer, in which there is not one jot of language that is anti-Jewish or even non-Jewish, contains all the elements of the standing prayer or for that matter the whole two-three hours service (basically acknowledgment of God's sovereignty and humble requests for our own well being, physical and spiritual) in a poem with fewer lines than a sonnet, one that can be said in less time than it takes to fry an egg. I can see the attraction of that.
But now, I see, my own post has gone on rather long, has rambled, perhaps babbled, if not engaged in vain repetition, so I think I'll call it a day.
Keep babbling friend.