Rosaries, Icons and Teffilin
8 November 2007 - 28 חשון 5768 by Huw
Interesting link made over at Trial & Error, answering a question I’ve had for quite sometime.
One sort of standard Jewish Blessing begins:
Blessed are you, O L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us by your commandments (B’mitzvatav) and has commanded us (V’etzivanu) to… (something).
Those commandments - Mitzvot - are things like Sabbath and Hanukkah candles, the morning use of phylacteries and the prayer shawl, washing of hands, Sabbath Challah, Passover seders, study of the Torah, etc.
When I was first exploring Jewish Piety, 5 years or so ago, I couldn’t quite wrap my brains around this one. I’m so very used to Paul’s arguments about the “works of the flesh” so why would “commandments” make us “Sanctified”? To my Christian brain, it read like making points. If I get enough points, I’m saved. It’s just “works-based righteousness” which any Protestant will tell you isn’t real at all.
Some “Messianic Gentiles” say the blessings rather differently: Blessed are you, O L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us by your Messiah and taught us to…”
That’s a rather different sort of blessing, no? And while it may sound more “Christian”, in fact, it sounds rather more like that common branch of soteriology where the Father has to sacrifice his son to himself for the rest of us. In this view - monergism - an Omnipotent and Scary Deity acts alone and we do nothing. While supportable from a twisting of certain texts, it’s not what the Early Church taught. That was “Synergism”the idea that we are saved in our co-operation with our Loving Creator.
While I have a whole HOST of problems with many of the doctrines of Palamism, the one that gets me is that Grace is the active presence of the HOly One himself in our lives. We co-operate with Grace - with the Holy One moving through us - to draw ourselves closer to wholeness. Icons, rosaries, holy communion all become vehicles of Grace, of divinity reaching out to us to draw us back. And when we reach out to take hold of those vehicles that Grace flows into our lives making it easier to do more.
Daniel today made a connexion that ties that Synergism back to our Jewish sources.
One of the chief creative leaders of an educational organization we fund and work with has written a lot of material on the notion that the word “mitzvah” can also mean “connection” as well as command.
It turns out that she’s right. According to Jastrow’s lexicon, the Qal form of the root צןה does in fact have as as base meaning “to join” or “connect.”
“AH!” I gasp, finally getting a handle on something I’d missed all those times.
The Mitzvah is not a “thing you do to score points”. A Mitzvah is a connexion, a link forged in a chain between us and the Holy One. As Daniel put it,
…the commandments are not the laws that a commanding God issues to a chosen people but the actions that the people that chooses God feels commanded to take in order to create in the world of human thought and society a vision of the unity that underlies all things. The mitzvot are paths toward holiness, not laws to be obeyed under fear of punishment. Where the body goes, the mind and spirit will follow so by mandating ritual action, the mitzvot should in theory lead the mind to conscious appreciation of the unity and sacredness of life.
A connexion, a joining. A linking. A synergy. We do some blessed thing not to make points, but because in so doing we co-operate, connect, make contact with the thing we want to become.
Maybe the proper understanding is not “By your commandments” but, taking the suffix, “b’” literally as “in” what we mean is “made us holy in your mitzvahs“. Maybe the proper understanding of icons and rosaries isn’t “sacramentals” but “mitzvahs” - connexions. (We’ll leave to the ultra-Protestant their mistake of “Works-based righteousness” - which they will see in both Icons and Teffilin.)
My point here is not to Christianise Judaism or to “return to the Jewish Roots” of Christianity but rather to show the parallel: how, at least here, the common divisions are based on misunderstanding rather than actually difference.
Of course, there is also the more mystical thought that as we behave and love like Christ, that mystical connection gives us a greater union with Christ. That is, our goal is indeed mystical union with Christ. The more we behave and love like him, the more we are deified.
I lean more towards the side of living and loving like Christ rather than emphasizing a meditative mystical knowledge (a la hesychasts). In this I admire the Mother Theresas who found union with Christ, and true holyness in service and practical love.
100% agreement! But that’s supposed to be the point of all the other things, ya? I mean we pray a thousand Jesus prayers, do hundreds of prostrations, use holy oil and icons, (ie do mitzvot)… in order to be more loving, right? Which is the greatest commandment (Mitzvot = connexion to Grace).
Or so I thought.
The Mitzvah is not a “thing you do to score points”. A Mitzvah is a connexion, a link forged in a chain between us and the Holy One.
Bingo!!!!!!
Or maybe as Rabbi David Hartman would say “brining G-D consciousness to every aspect and moment of our lives”.
If this is a subject of Interest you might ( if you have not already done so) read Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology by Rabbi Arthur Green. It has a Chapter that does a nice job of exploring this vary subject.
Be Well