Hospitality

This Sunday’s (yesterday’s) reading from the Revised Common Lectionary (for Proper 6, Year A) included the passage recounting “The Hospitality of Abraham.”

The LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.

While Christians evolved a reading of this story that has the Lord having supper with Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish reading sees a break: The Lord appeared… and while Abraham was in communion with God, these three guys showed up (angels, according to later Jewish understanding).

The point of the Hebrew text is Abraham’s hospitality to these strangers was such that even being wrapped up in communion with God would not prevent him from serving lunch to strangers on the street.

In this, the Jewish understanding is rather like the Desert Fathers who said even if one is at prayer, one should go to the door if a brother calls. They said this citing John - how can you love God whom you do not see, if you fail to love your brother whom you do not see?

But they could have cited Moses.

Important Dates

Over at the Daily Episcopalian, Derek Olsen continues his series on 7 Dates and Why They Matter for Anglican Faith. (part one is here). In the current writing he focuses on the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD.

At class on Wednesday night, Cam suggested also that 90AD was important: it’s the year of the Council of Jamnia. Now, although current scholarship has a debate about Jamnia (as recounted in the Wiki) we can agree that, sometime between 70 and 135 (the Bar Kokhba revolt) something happened, both to Judiasm as a whole and that odd sect of “fulfilled Jews” that became what we know of as the Christian Church.

What was it that happened? Don’t expect me to answer.

As I’ve blogged before, The Break - those 60 years - gives us nearly all the Christian Scriptures (even though they were not assumed to be “Scriptures” then). The give us the Jewish Canon - and the Christian form of it including the Apocrypha. That same time gives us the growing inculcation of Gentile ideas into this movement - and a growing Jewish fear of Gentile converts. At the end of the process, it’s as if two fraternal twins were adopted by warring clans and suddenly find themselves face-to-face across a battlefield.

But what the hell happened during the process?

Responding to Made-Up Stuff…

Rabbi Dennis responds to one of my favourite tricks, making something up and saying it’s “really” Jewish: in this case, a Dispensationalist trick called the “Prophetic Calendar”. The Rabbi’s research is a good way to avoid

allowing Christian exegetes to redivide the total number days into 490 artificially constructed 360-day years, allowing actual history to be forced into a Procrustean bed of Christocentric time.

Usually this trick works the best when the parties speaking (and listening) know *nothing* about Judaism.

The only problem is that most folks only find one version of Christianity out there, be that “one version” Dispensationlist, or Roman Catholic or whatever. So while I don’t want to accues Rabbi Dennis of being such…

Most (but not all) Jewish Writers on Christianity seem only to know about Post-Augustinian (but pre-Vatican II) Roman Catholicsm and a few sundry flavours of Protestant Fundamentalistm. They seem oblivious to the implications of a more liberal Christianity or one salted with Eastern (instead of Western) spices. And a few of them don’t even understand the one flavour they have. To play fair, most (but not all) Christian writers on Judaism seem only to know of a Judaism they made up in their head: basically, liberal Christianity minus Jesus (or with a hidden Jesus that, well, you know, we can see but they can’t).

Wagnerian Drama

So, a question:

Can Wagner - and his understanding of myth, especially German myth - be purged of Wagner’s antisemitism or are they linked? Is his nearly-Jungian reading of Germany Myth always going to result in the horrors of Nazism? Or is there a way to read Wagner’s spiritual music without his anti-Semitism (as we do to even Christian saints, these days)?

Good Holiday!

A warm and well-seasoned Pesach to all those who celebrate!

Sabbath = Rest?

As far as “day of worship” the Christian holy is “the first day of the week”, although some research indicates that to have been Saturday night - rather than Sunday - for some communities in parts of the Church.

Has Sunday (or Saturday night) ever been understood not only as a “Day of Worship” but as a “Day of Rest”?

I’m not referring to later legislation (or canons) which forbade work on Sunday. There’s a difference between “forbidding work” and “having a day of rest”. Clearly those legislations were placed *because* people hadn’t been taught about a day of rest. And, on top of that, the whole legalism of such canons annoys me.

To be clear: setting aside Sunday for Church/Family/Community activities isn’t the same as saying “thou shalt not make the noise of a hammer on Sabbath”.

Do Christians have a “day of rest” per se, or just a “Day of worship”?

(The context for this question: I was snow-blowing the sidewalk, and I decided to do laundry as well, so I wouldn’t have to do it on Sunday.)

Confessions of a College Food Worker

In the fall of 1983 I transferred to NYU from my tiny little Christian College in upstate NY. And I roomed at a Fraternity House. That fall I pledged the fraternity and then, in the spring - having passed through Hell Week - I became a member. My roommate that Spring Semester was the Fraternity President and (off the books, anyway) his girlfriend lived with us. Both of these folks, along with my boyfriend at the time, were managers in 3 different stores of one chain of very popular foodstuffs. The retail stores on Manhattan’s streets have long since closed but at the time they were as plentiful as Starbucks is now. And they were certified Kosher by the OU.

In all the stores where we were earning minimum wage - and all of us were college or high school students… but there is no way to eat healthy on minimum wage. What we did, however, was take these French Breads that we sold in the store and make sandwiches on them. At the end of the day, the breads got thrown away anyway, so we took the breads and made tasty treats like ham and cheese, roast beef, or my favourite: pepperoni and cheddar. We would run these on the baking trays through the oven to make hot, open-faced sandwiches. It didn’t dawn on me until later that, in this process, pretty much every item in all the stores was de-koshered - and thus all the food. But we never saw a Rabbi in any of our stores, anyway.

And, after a couple of years, one of the partners in the corporate offices had a wee kerfuffle with the owner of the company and went out and opened his own chain of retail. And these, too, were certified Kosher. In the early days of the store all the product was manufactured in the main store on the Upper East Side. I worked at that store. We had a lot of mistakes in the early days. We sold smoothies (although in those days they were called “fruit shakes”). One day I got food poisoning. Seems that if you leave cut fruit sitting out long enough in a NYC summer, it gets rancid. So we stopped selling fruit shakes. Then, one day, we introduced a new flavour of ice cream: Oreo Cookies and Cream. I think this was 1986?

Anyway… Kosher Trivia Hounds will see a problem here: Oreos were not certified Kosher until the mid1990s because they used lard.

I reported this to the owner of the store who totally freaked out. I assured him that, in fact, the ice cream machines, the ice cream tubs the scoops - and thus the rest of the ice cream - were now Unkosher. He never heard of such a thing. The odd thing was: the owner, as well as the person in charge of manufacturing were both Jewish. The response? change the ice cream recipe, use kosher cookies, tell no one and keep on serving! Again, this was in 1986, and all the retail stores have long been closed.

So one question is, if Gentiles (in the first instance) and uneducated Jews (in the second instance) can accidentally cause so much trouble - and then willingly cover it up: how much food is actually kosher?

But a bigger question: if your job doesn’t pay you enough to eat - without using day-old stale bread and pooling your resources with all of your co-workers… or if your company orders everyone to hush up about ethical violations, does it matter if meat and dairy never touch?

Two Kaplan Quotes

Both of these quotes were written as critiques of Jewish Orthodoxy, but I think they speak to Christian Orthodoxy too. Not just Big-O Eastern Orthodoxy, but all the Little-o orthodoxies that are showing up all over the place with upper-case letters any way: “Orthodox Anglicans” and “Orthodox Presbyterians”, etc. Both of these are quoted in Dynamic Judaism: the Essential Writings of Mordecai Kaplan.

The salvation of Judaism cannot come either from Orthodoxy or from Reform. Orthodoxy is altogether out of keeping with the march of human thought. It has no regard for the world view of the contemporary mind. Nothing can be more repugnant to the thinking man of today than the fundamental doctrine of Orthodoxy, which is that tradition is infallible. Such infallibility could be believed in as long as the human mind thought of God and revelation in semi-mythological terms. Then it was conceivable that a quasi-human being could hand down laws and histories in articulate form. Being derived from a supramundane source, these laws and histories, together with the ideas based on them, could not but be regarded as free from all the errors and shortcomings of the human mind. Whenever a tradition contradicts some facts too patent to be denied, or falls below some accepted moral standard, resort is had to artificial interpretations that flout all canons of history and exegesis. The doctrine of infallibility rules out of court all research and criticism, and demands implicit faith in the truth of whatever has come down from the past. It precludes all conscious development in thought and practice and deprives Judaism of the power to survive in an environment that permits of free contact with non-Jewish civilisations.

There are, no doubt, a few who manage to acquire a high degree of modern culture and even to achieve distinction in some branches of modern knowledge without finding themselves intellectually at variance with Orthodoxy. They belong to those who see no need for welding tradition and experience into a unitary organised mental background. They willingly subscribe to the medieval principle that Torah and philosophy have nothing to do with each other, because it saves them a great deal of mental bother. But such is only a small eddy in the main current of Jewish life.

From A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism in The Menorah Journal 6:4 (Aug 1920).

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Status Report

I met with a Rabbi on Thursday who made it quite clear that conversion, per se, isn’t necessary for a Gentile. Unlike the Christians and the Muslims, the Jews don’t have sense of “evangelism”. We had a nice conversation and he suggested I read a book - now out of print - which I found on eBay that night for only $6, including postage! I promptly ordered it.

I was to go to services on Friday night but the entire week of resumes and interviews and general stress had left me in a place of not wanting to meet any strangers. So I stayed at the house until leaving to spend the weekend w/ Brodie.

After I passed the customs station on the Canadian side of the border, I turned on my iPod, plugged into the car stereo, and began listening to a podcast. On the way I listened to a Rabbi discuss last Saturday’s (2/16) Torah portion: Tetzaveh. Then I listened to a discussion of this week’s (2/23) portion, Ke Tisa. I listened to two more podcasts on the way home today, on the same two portions of the Torah.

I arrived home, in Buffalo, at a very different place from when I left.

To explain this, here are some sentences, ripped from their context, that all struck me at the same time during this weekend’s journey.

1) In studying Judaism I meet the warm, Semitic deity I expect (but do not find) in traditional Christianity as I have experienced it.
2) The commentaries (as explored by some Rabbis) theorise that God gave the Tabernacle to the Jews to help them with the problem expressed in the worship of the Golden Bull.
3) Without the Rabbinic Commentary you can read the (Hebrew) scriptures to point directly to Jesus on the Cross or to my Bar Mitzvah.
4) Before I read Why the Jews Rejected Jesus I thought the issue was that there was a common text between Jews and Christians about which they simply disagreed. - Nothing could be further from the Truth.
5) The past has a vote but not a veto.
6) Christianity is a religion of Creed. Judaism is a religion of Deed.

Sentences 1 and 4 are mine, in dialogue with others. I’m talking there. 2 and 3 are recaptured from my audio memory - #2 from the podcasts this weekend and #3 from Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch. Sentence 6 is a quote from Mordecai Kaplan and, amongh Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic sorts, I often here the reverse sentiment expressed. 6 came from an online course for which I registered. It ties back to a discussion a year ago this week about the difference between Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy. Most of these came up - in one form or another - in the conversation with the Rabbi as well as in other conversations I’ve had around the net with all sorts of people.

What came to me in the zen of driving was that, really, I am still deeply committed to following God in the way of Jesus. What I blogged back in December is still true:

Yeshua: Rabbi? Yes, who fully participated in the Rabbinic debates of his time. Messiah? I’m confused as I look more into what Jews thought of the text they had. God-in-the-the-flesh? Well now…

So much of the theology I understand, so much of the theology by which I see God, experience the word, deal with my neighbour, understand forgiveness, healing/salvation/wholeness (tikkun olam) is exactly incarnational. I can’t make the leap. If Jesus isn’t God in the Flesh, not only does Christianity not make sense, but so also does nothing else.

Judaism, Islam and Christianity all three have their true believers: people who somehow imagine the Sacred Text or Form of thier religion to have existed somehow, unchanged from all eternity. I’m told that Allah had a Koran in mind at the creation of the world. I’m told that the scrolls of the Torah sat in HaSham’s throne for eternity before they were given to Moses. I’m told that Jesus was alive on the Throne of Glory even as he died on the Cross and that the Gospel was planned from all eternity. But what comes to me, over and over, having looked at the claims and the reality, is that There is no way to get to a “pure” religion - if that means a religion some how crafted by God and handed whole cloth to man.

There may *be* such a path, but unless it shines with gold light for everyone to see, we’re not going to know what it is. Each of us is called to the Holy One in the voice designed to speak to us, in the voice we are designed to hear.

The next thing that came to me in the zen of driving, is the realisation that if what I believe to be true really is true… then I am a Christian - whatever that may mean - and that I must do that in a Christian community - whatever that may mean - rather than a Jewish one. I say that no matter how I might feel about the various points in the Nicene Creed. (There are times when I can’t get past the first paragraph without hedging my bets or crossing my fingers.) But what I *do* believe is in the deeds that Yeshua taught, some of which are Jewish, through and through, and some of which are elaborations on Judaism and some of which, finally, are Jesus (or his followers’ communities’) Jazz riffs on elemental truths.

From the Sh’ma we get to the Trinity - in round about ways.
From the Torah we get to the Sermon on the Mount.
From the Shabbat and Pessach Seders we get to the Communion Supper.
From the Hillel we get to the Greatest Commandment.
From Shammai we get to the teaching on Divorce.

Judaism has Rabbis - so does Christianity: for everyMaimonides there is a Gregory of Nazianzus; for every Shimon bar Yochai there was a Gregory of Nyssa; for every Rashi an Origen. For every one of Maimonides 13 Principles of Faith there is a point in the 12 sections of the Nicene Creed. It is, however, only at that point that Judaism and Christianity part company for even with these two “creeds” the two communities differ. The Jews debate the meaning of the 13 points and even deny their creedal necessity. Many Christians (even those who might debate the finer meanings of various points), however, insist that the Nicene Creed is sort of a checklist that defines one’s status as a Christian.

What Judaism does not have is the ability to make a final statement. What Christianity did not have until Constantine, was a desire to make such a statement: she has largely made a fetish of it. What Judaism does have is a conscious, overt debate and stylistic give-and-take between opposing schools of thought. What Christianity fails to name is her own give-and-take, being hung up on the claim that someone must be right and someone must be wrong.

Christianity - in her institutional forms (which Jesus would never recognise) attempts to close all discussion down.

Judaism - in her institutional forms (especially in the ones Jesus would recognise in our day as being descended from those of his day) attempts to keep discussion open.

To use to game theory as expressed in Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, Christianity, as projected by her institutions (liberal and conservative) is best understood as a finite game. Judaism - at least as far as Rabbinic Debate is concerned, is an infinite game.

The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of an infinite game must change.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.
A finite player plays to be powerful; an infinite player plays with strength.
A finite player consumes time; an infinite player generates time.
The finite player aims for eternal life; the infinite player aims for eternal birth.
The choice is yours.

The issue is, at heart, to find a way to follow God in the way of Jesus that is aware (and honest) about growth, evolution and change and that seeks to further all three. In short, one seeks to find a way to Do Church as an Infinite Game.

Is it possible to read the scriptures - and all of our history - and to live, honestly, in relationship with those sources: and yet be in a different place?

I’m going to stop there, because, at the age of 43, I feel I’m on the verge of a Manifesto which is to be avoided, I think, at all costs.

Judeo-Christian

The Jewish Chronicle presents an interesting essay by Nathan Jeffay on the idea of “Judeo-Christian”. It is introduced in the context of the Vatican’s recent revision of the prayer for the Jews but it goes quite a bit further.

Skip to the fourth paragraph and go from there.

The fact is that the desire to convert the Jews is basic to Christianity, and it is only the Church’s efforts to reach out to the Jews in recent years to make up for centuries of persecution that has somehow convinced us otherwise. The fact is that the desire to convert the Jews is basic to Christianity, and it is only the Church’s efforts to reach out to the Jews in recent years to make up for centuries of persecution that has somehow convinced us otherwise. That, and that fact the Jews, en masse, have come to accept in recent decades to a fiction called the “shared Judeo-Christian heritage”.

(Props to DovBear.)

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