Christmas: A Jewish Perspective

It’s Christmastime, a celebration of the birth of Jesus.  Amidst all the hoopla, we rarely hear anything about the Jewishness of Jesus.  I know some people know this, but I think it’s worth repeating.  Jesus was not a Christian.  Jesus was and is Jewish.  His mother Mary was Jewish.  Joseph, his father was Jewish.  The Gospel writers were Jewish.  Jesus’ disciples were Jewish.  The Apostle Paul was Jewish.  Most of Jesus’ early followers were Jewish.  Jesus attended and taught in the synagogue.  His scriptures were the Jewish scriptures.  He died with a Jewish question on his lips taken from Psalm 22.

There is an old joke that Christianity is a Jewish sect which has had good numerical growth.  I think Jesus was out to make non-Jews as Jewish as possible.  There is an ongoing continuity and discontinuity between Jewish and Christian believers.  The closer your relation to someone the deeper the disagreements can be.   The response to Jesus, the Christian “yes” and the Jewish “no”, are both holy, honest and valid. 

 I wish all Christians a holy season to contemplate the mysterious and vital relationship between Christians and Jews.  Let’s not forget how close and how far we are from and to each other.

Prophets, Rabbis and Pastors

After many years of sitting through first synagogue then Church and back to synagogue services, here are a few observations about Prophets, Rabbis and Pastors.

Rabbis and Pastors are translators of their respective traditions. Their job is to communicate and facilitate the truth of their traditions.   They have not been trained to teach people to think but rather to  believe.  Most are employed or called by congregations to perform certain functions.  They are administrators of an organization whose members voluntarily attend worship.  They usually avail themselves of various tax breaks, have 401 K’s, get regular salaried checks and vacations and are part of a larger denominational religious structure.  Many live comfortable middle-class lives.  Many have learned how to be politically tactful and manage their congregants with diplomacy.  Many are very nice and friendly.  If you are in the hospital, as part of their routines, they will come visit and pray over you.  Some Rabbis and Pastors are much too certain about what they proclaim.  Many have learned how to give their respective sermons without aggravating their followers too much.  Finally, most Pastors, Priests and Rabbis are not interested in taking risks for the sake of their messages.  

A prophet, on the other hand, is someone who speaks the truth.  You might reasonably assume that is also what Pastors and Rabbis do.  But there is a difference between being a prophet and being a religious functionary.

The only prophets we know are the Biblical prophets.  In their day, Prophets were not part of the religious establishment.  They usually had other vocations and were called by God to leave their day jobs and go to a certain place to deliver a message.  Their message was intended to get people to repent, to be changed radically at the core.  Prophets charged people to care for the poor, widows and orphans.  Prophets were not tactful.  They were not nice.  They got in people’s faces in order to wake them up.  They were critical of any religion that did not result in concern and action for justice.  Prophets used shocking sexual language to awaken people from their spiritual slumber.  Most prophets did not want to be prophets and protested to God over what they were compelled to proclaim.  Finally, most prophets were killed for what they were saying.

Prophets can be criticized for not being tactful enough while Rabbis and Pastors can be criticized for being full of tact.  The fact is they are each performing a different function.

Many years ago, a fine Lutheran pastor spoke these wise words to me, “Murray, my friend, the people in the pews, you are their servant, but they are not your master.”  A few Pastors and Rabbis know this to be true.  These special clergy have integrity and have gained the trust of their worshippers.  That trust allows them to periodically step up and speak truthfully and prophetically without fear of retribution. 

It doesn’t make them prophets, but it means they have the courage to speak against too much religious certainty and arrogance.  And they also find themselves proclaiming how faith and concern for justice are inextricable.  They are not frightened of their members.

When you meet such a Pastor or Rabbi, you are witnessing the potential integrity and strength of religious faith. And that’s something!

Surviving Order and Chaos

Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty: “It tells us that there is a fuzziness in nature, a fundamental limit to what we can know about the behavior of quantum particles and, therefore, the smallest scales of nature.”  It seems craziness and uncertainty are built into the nature of nature and the nature of human nature.

We ought not be surprised to read this since we experience it in our lives all the time.  People are well; people get sick.  We get into our cars uncertain whether we will have an accident; we may feel well this morning but we wonder how long that will last; we make decisions every day but are not sure they are right; the stock market goes up and it goes down without any certainty as to what it will do tomorrow; Mr. Trump remains Mr. Trump, unpredictable, alarming, obnoxious, and we are uncertain what he will do next, we have faith in God or we do not and we wonder if we could be wrong.  Of what can we be certain?  Is anyone or anything in control? “Is anyone driving the bus?”

Let’s just admit:  Life is a convoluted uncertain mixture of order and chaos.  And for good or for bad, we are compelled to live in this vortex.  Our religious faith does not exempt us from walking through the good and the bad.  Our faith teaches us how to persevere and survive both the order and the chaos of life.  Stay sane out there.

What You Might not Know about Hanukkah

You probably know this week many Jews are lighting candles for 8 nights and exchanging gifts.

 You might not know, Hanukkah is about a Jewish civil war over assimilation versus loyalty to Jewish monotheism.  In 165 B.C.E. the land we know today as Israel was controlled by the Greek forces of Alexander the Great.  Being Greek, with its emphasis on worshipping nature and the body was in vogue.  Worshipping one God was superstitious nonsense.  Many Jews at the time had adapted and assimilated into Greek culture.  They jettisoned their Jewish commitments.  They allowed the holy temple to be abused and despoiled. 

There were other Jews who were loyal to their tradition who decided to attack their fellow Jews and the Greeks to reclaim the temple, more importantly, to reassert monotheism. 

This civil war and the success of Judah Maccabee and his compatriots set the tone for the survival of monotheism and the eventual creation of Christianity and Islam, all of whom stubbornly continue to proclaim the one God.

The word Hanukkah means rededication.  The temple in Jerusalem was rededicated to the one God Jews believed was at work in this world.  The oil to light the menorah, supposed to last one day, lasted 8 days.

 As a skeptical religious romantic, I light the candles this week to remember and proclaim again our hope against hope in the one God.