Mona & Herbie . . . and a dilemma

Uncle Ben, my mother’s oldest sibling, outlived all his brothers and sisters. I remembered on the way to his funeral that, ironically, Aunt Mona, my mother’s little sister, was the first of the siblings to die.

Mona was born when my mother, who had been the youngest, was twelve. She wasn’t an accident but a “surprise,” very much the baby of the family, especially pretty and favored, but also suffering from juvenile diabetes, which eventually took her life at the age of forty-nine.

Before Mona died, her husband, Herbie, had become a sold-out believer in Yeshua. He didn’t fool around with Messianic Jewish terminology. He was saved, born again, and eager to get others saved as well. Once, Uncle Herbie had to run out to get some milk or something, and popped back in a few seconds after leaving, saying he’d forgotten his Bible. Mona said, “Herb, why do you need your Bible? You’re just going to the local 7-11!” “I know, but there might be someone there I need to witness to.”

So when Mona died, Herbie called me to do the funeral, because he saw it as an opportunity to tell the whole family about Jesus. He was sure that Mona had accepted the Lord before she died and wanted everyone to know about it. His kids were not so sure, and in fact felt it was unlikely their mother would ever do such a thing. My father called me when I got to Uncle Herbie’s to tell me how hard Mona’s death was on my mother, who always had a special place for Mona in her heart. He said the family was worried about something happening at the funeral that would add to their grief. And then, uncharacteristically for my father, he said, “But I’m sure you’ll know how to do the right thing.”

OK, so here’s another ethical question. Tradition provides two guides for our behavior during the time of bereavement, termed in the Aramaic of the Talmud yekara d’shikhiba, or honor for the deceased, and yekara d’hayya, honor for the living, which usually is expressed in comfort and support for the family. As in all our traditions, of course, there is the underlying theme of honor to God as well, which is heightened as we contemplate eternity in the face of death. So here’s the ethical dilemma—do I put comfort for Uncle Herbie, who desired up-front testimony of Yeshua, ahead of comfort for the rest of the family, who would take any word about Yeshua at this moment like a slap in the face? Do I include Herbie’s assurance that Mona had salvation through Yeshua as part of honoring her memory, or leave it out as an imposition on her memory, as her children saw it?

Even back then, I knew that a funeral isn’t the time for intensive proclamation of the gospel, especially to a Jewish family struggling to cope with premature and tragic loss. Today I’d add that it also isn’t the time to provide false and flowery hopes about eternity that have nothing to do with the words of Scripture. The promise of life in the hereafter isn’t guaranteed to people just because we have good feelings about them, nor is it about loved ones living on after death through our memories or the good deeds we might do under their influence. My Aunt Mona was a fine and decent woman, wife, and mother, and it was enough to commit her into the hands of a merciful God. The iconic prayer of bereavement, the Mourners’ Kaddish, leads us in our time of loss to simply acknowledge God as the source of life, God as the Sovereign who knows what he’s doing even when we can’t figure it out, God who in the end brings peace from on high upon us and all Israel.

So, you ask, what did I do? I did a simple, traditional service and mentioned briefly Herbie’s faith in the Messiah and his assurance that Mona was OK with him. I don’t remember exactly what I said, and I don’t think it was that memorable. The word “Messiah,” though, did raise some eyebrows, including Uncle Ben’s, who had made a rare journey to the West Coast for the tragic occasion, but the eyebrows seemed more surprised than indignant. Later Herbie’s step-mother let me know that she was surprised, but in a positive way. by the whole funeral—“I thought it was going to be a goyishe thing and it wasn’t.”

Mona and Herbie’s son Errol became a believer not too long after his mother’s death, although I don’t know whether it was connected. Uncle Herbie, who was the picture of fitness and youth, never got over losing Mona and died suddenly a few years later in his early 60s. After he died I asked Errol about Mona’s funeral, saying that I guessed Herbie had been disappointed in the way I handled it, and Errol gently admitted that he was. I’m not sure what I’d do differently today.

Uncle Ben

Wednesday morning my cell phone rang and “Cousin Elaine” popped up on the screen. I knew she’d be calling about Uncle Ben, and was ready for what she told me: he had just passed away. Like most of my family, Elaine keeps any religious beliefs strictly private, but  I was able to say, “The Lord gives, the Lord has taken; blessed be the name of the Lord,” without too much awkwardness. Uncle Ben was a professed atheist, even to the end, as far as I know, but of such a sweet and gentle and old-country Jewish demeanor that I had to pronounce those words at the moment called for by tradition, which is right upon hearing the news. From there, Elaine and I talked for a moment about the funeral and I said I really wanted to be there (in Connecticut), but wasn’t sure I could make it. In fact, in my mind I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

In Jewish ethics, attending the deceased and comforting the bereaved are the highest of mitzvot. The tradition cites good reasons for this priority, but for me questions still loom—the dead don’t know what you’re doing and it won’t change anything. Will I really be of comfort to the immediate family—enough comfort to justify the time and expense and sheer schlep of dropping everything and getting on a multi-hour flight tomorrow?

Uncle Ben was 96, the first-born of my mother’s whole generation, and the last one to die. I hadn’t known him well—he lived in New York and we were in California and my mother’s family were hardly jet-setters. In addition to a couple of funerals, Jane and I saw Uncle Ben and Aunt Sylvia once, about 30 years ago, when they had a stopover in Albuquerque on their way to El Paso, or actually Juarez, to visit their son Neil. What was Neil doing in Juarez? He wanted to be a vet and veterinary schools were really tough to get into, so he settled for one in Juarez that was good enough, but taught entirely in Spanish. And you guessed it, Neil didn’t speak Spanish! That story was a great icebreaker and we had a nice visit, but it wasn’t until my mother died in 2003 that I felt compelled to reconnect with her big brother, who was living in New Jersey at the time. I visited Ben and Sylvia  there and later, along with Jane, in Connecticut, where Neil (now a successful vet) and Elaine lived. I was set to visit Ben again a couple of years ago when Sylvia died suddenly and he was too distraught and disoriented for visitors.

I really liked Ben and Sylvia and enjoyed our visits, but what made the visits actually happen was a desire to honor my mother’s memory. You may remember the old parental noodge: “Oh you’re going to be in Florida? Give Uncle Max a call,” even if he’s halfway across the state and you could call him more cheaply from your home town. So I was honoring my mother’s desire to keep the family together by visiting Ben, which made it a double mitzvah, but also raised the same questions. Would my mother even know? Was it worth it to add three days to a business trip in New York so I could hop a train to New Jersey, transfer to a bus, and get close enough for Uncle Ben to round me up and take me home for a day before I had to head back?

There’s an ethical tension here. We need to expend ourselves on feeding the hungry and clothing the naked (all the more urgently now in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti), but we don’t want to become utilitarian about it. Pursuit of a mitzvah can’t be too calculating. What did Yeshua say about that woman who wasted money on expensive ointment for his feet, just days before his burial?

So, with great encouragement from Jane, I turned from the practicalities of not having the time and money to fly off to Connecticut to attend the burial and spend an hour or two with my cousins amidst the too many things I was already dealing with. I remembered that I had a frequent flyer ticket, could shift a couple of appointments, and get a bunch of essential work done on the way. So here I am in Connecticut, where I landed after midnight, getting ready to go to the cemetery a little later.

It’s a mitzvah to attend the burial and represent my mother there, but I have to say that Jane gets the biggest share of the mitzvah. She’s the one who helped me think outside the box of practicality to see a good deed just waiting to be done. And she sent me off on her birthday, January 21. I’d miss her celebration, but she encouraged me to go. Eishet chayil mi yimtza?

Poor in Spirit

We’ve heard the phrase, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” or, as I translate it in Divine Reversal, “Happy are the poor in spirit,” so often that we don’t think too much about what poor in spirit might mean. Oddly, one clue to its meaning is an apparent contradiction in the gospel accounts. According to Luke, Yeshua just says “blessed are the poor,” with no reference to “in spirit,” as in Matthew’s version. I’m enough of a Bible literalist to believe there’s no real contradiction, though. Doubtless, Yeshua said it both ways—not at the same time, but in slightly different forms of a message that he gave more than once. (Which seems to give us preacher-teachers warrant to recycle our messages too . . . until we realize we’re talking about the Sermon on the Mount here. That one bears a repeat performance!)

Luke’s account is the most Jewish-positive of the gospels, so perhaps Luke chooses to record the simpler version because in second-temple Jewish usage, “the poor” or anavim in Hebrew, had a specific meaning. The term appears in the passage that Yeshua reads when he visits his home synagogue in Nazareth one Shabbat morning:

 The Spirit of the LORD is upon me,
 Because he has anointed me
 To preach good news to the poor;
 He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
 To proclaim liberty to the captives
 And recovery of sight to the blind,
 To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
 To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD. (Isaiah 61, cited in Luke 4:18-19)

One commentator describes the poor in this passage:

These are people who suffer because they have walked in humility with their God, so they are meek, mourning, brokenhearted now. Mercy, purity of heart, and a desire for righteousness and peacemaking drive them. Jesus promises that God will recognize and reward that pursuit . . . because they have sought to walk in his steps and reflect his character as his children.[1]

“Poor in spirit,” then, is an amplification of the simpler “poor” in the sense of anavim. The problem, though, is how we can say “Happy are the poor” in the presence of the grinding and relentless poverty of 21^st century global economics. And “blessed are the poor” sounds even more other-worldly, more readily dismissed as a pious platitude, as in the old protest song to the tune “Sweet Bye and Bye,” which I cite in Divine Reversal:

Long-haired preachers come out every night

To tell you what’s wrong and what’s right

But when asked how about something to eat

They will answer in voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye

In that glorious land above the sky

Work and pray, live on hay 

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

That’s a lie.[2]

Karl Marx stated this position more simply and famously: religion “is the opium of the people.”[3] In other words, we might ask, when Yeshua pronounces the poor and meek to be the truly happy, is he telling them to be content with their lot and not to complain against the oppressive system? Worse, is he telling the representatives of the system that they need not consider changing?

In my book, I list several factors in Yeshua’s teaching that make it clear he is not defending the status quo. But we’ve still got a problem. How do we say, “Happy are the poor” to the desperately poor of Haiti in the wake of the recent earthquake? It’s clear from Yeshua’s example that we don’t say it, or anything else, that we are not ready to enact ourselves. Better, that we enact it instead of saying it at all. The true response to the mystery of suffering is not a matter of better words, but of taking on a portion of the suffering somehow to relieve it. I don’t know how to do that on behalf of Haiti or Darfur or the back alleys of Juarez. I am sure that targeted prayer and careful giving are a start, and perhaps others can suggest where to go from there. In the meantime, let’s make sure we don’t use “Happy are the poor” to dodge helping the poor. Instead, it’s a rebuke of our pursuit of advantage and accumulation—not something to tell others, but to tell ourselves.

[1] Darrell L. Bock, Jesus according to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002) , pp. 128-129.

[2] By Joe Hill. Accessed 11/8/2008 http://www.ciscohouston.com/lyrics/pie_in_the_sky.shtml.

[3] In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, referenced at http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/31765.html, accessed 11/8/2008. The entire quote reads, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”

Haiti

I just posted a brief notice on Haitian relief under Community News at www.umjc.org. You can get more info at the Yinon blogsite by my colleagues Joshua and Monique Brumbach http://yinonblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/thoughts-and-prayers-with-haiti.html.

Self Effort

Why don’t the ethical teachings of Yeshua get more coverage? Perhaps the main reason is that they are so radical, so demanding, so much a reversal (to reflect my title) of the whole man-centered arrangement in which we live. But there’s another reason, which ranks right behind it, at least in the contemporary Protestant West. It’s the old theological misunderstanding that draws a hard line between “faith and works,” or “law and grace,” and considers the two completely incompatible. In this view, if we’re not careful we might get so intent on doing what Yeshua tells us to do that we forget that we’re saved by grace.

For example, the current issue of Christianity Today (January 2010, page 58)  includes a letter reporting “on a number of experiences in ministries that put less emphasis on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and more emphasis on what we need to do. . . . I’ve heard rousing exhortations to develop accountability relationships and spiritual disciplines, but far fewer exhortations to believe the gospel anew and cling to the completed work of Jesus.” Now the author may not intend this, but it sounds as if he sees believing in the finished work of Messiah as somehow distinct from doing anything about it. Discipleship and spiritual practice seem to compete with a focus on the death and resurrection of Yeshua. This is just one letter to the editor, but we’ve all heard the sort of teaching that warns against mixing in any sort of human effort (“works,” “law”) with the redemptive work of God in Messiah (“faith,” “grace”). I’ve seen folks get nervous as soon as you say anything positive about Torah or good deeds in general, and I’m sure it’s because of this imbalanced view.

Sure, there is a problem. We can become proud of outward religious adherence. We could reduce the message of Yeshua to a mere system of moral behavior, to which we respond with a hearty application of self-effort. But there’s the equally massive problem of imagining that what you do doesn’t matter all that much, as long as you believe the right things. I sat next to a gung-ho Christian on a recent flight and when he found out that I was a Jewish follower of Yeshua, he hit me with about a half-dozen theological test questions in a row. Not one of them had anything to do with how I behaved, how I treated other people, how I sought to obey the Scriptures, even though the Jesus that he was trying to make sure I believed in told him that he would know me by my fruit. This approach seems so afraid of self-effort that it ignores any kind of effort at all, and employs fancy interpretive footwork when Yeshua talks about fruit, or warns us that we’ll be judged by what we do, as he repeatedly does.

I tackle this question in Divine Reversal, critiquing two ”common misinterpretations” of what it means to follow Yeshua. “First, we might see following Jesus as optional, a mere accessory to the central act of accepting him into our hearts and getting saved. . . . [But] the distinction between faith in Yeshua and obedience to Yeshua is a false distinction, and can only be made outside of a biblical frame of reference.

“The other misinterpretation takes Yeshua’s teachings seriously enough, but writes off the more mysterious and supernatural aspects of the besorah [gospel].” I go on to speak of one my hippie friends in the old days, who “felt that the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of James were all you needed in the entire Bible. Just live according to their teachings and you’ll be in good shape. Don’t worry about all the rest, including the cross, the resurrection, and our need for salvation. 

“According to this view, Yeshua is a great teacher, a rabbi, perhaps the greatest of our rabbis, but not the divine Messiah.”

I have a copy of “The Jefferson Bible” on my bookshelf. It’s a rather slim volume because Jefferson had produced a version of the gospels that left out everything miraculous or supernatural, claiming, “There will be remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Doubtless–but can man live by such a code apart from a miraculous and supernatural retooling? Jefferson’s life would suggest otherwise. Jefferson, like my hippie friend, didn’t seem to worry much about the pitfall of self-effort. This perspective looks at the ethical teaching of Yeshua, rubs its hands and says “let me have at it.” But of course Scripture as a whole makes it clear that we humans are going to need serious help if we are to follow this sublime code.

Sometimes the Messianic Jewish world reacts so much to the law-free, works-free gospel that we distort it in the opposite direction and think of Yeshua simply as the ultimate Jewish moralist. But the journey Yeshua has in mind when he says “follow me” leads us into good deeds, into a life of compassion and service . . . and into the discovery that to pursue this life requires his power. So law and grace, faith and works, are different categories and could be at odds, but in the good news of Messiah they come together to reveal and lead us into the transforming work of God.

Why another book?

When my last book, Creation to Completion, came out, a friend asked me how I’d found time to do all that writing in the midst of my busy schedule (not that I’m any busier than everybody else in our too-busy world). I said that writing was a relief and necessity for me; it helped me maintain my sanity by putting things into order amidst the chaos that–like busyness–characterizes our times. Writing isn’t just about conveying a message or a story. There’s something compelling about arranging words, ordering ideas, apart from the content itself.

Years ago, when I was taking a practicum for my master’s degree in counseling, the prof asked us students for some good reasons to go into the field. We tried to say things about helping people in ways that didn’t sound too do-gooder, but the prof wasn’t impressed. He was skeptical about the idea of helping others (completely lacking any kind of biblical or other religious perspective as far as I could tell), and worried that we’d fall into bugaboo of that era, codependency, if we were too wrapped up in the problems of others. He thought the best reason to practice counseling was because you found it interesting. That sounded rather cynical then, but I can see his point–something about love of the practice apart from the results. And often that motive produces better results. Likewise with writing. Without love for the craft–the interplay of words, the sense of discovery as you roll out the sentences–you might become grimly serious or so intent on stating your case that no one can stand to read you. Yeshua himself often conveyed his message (which of course is always far truer and more important than any of ours) in story, riddle, and paradox, sometimes reveling in the sheer joy of words.

But, of course, however much we may write out of the sheer necessity or love of writing, we do choose our content, as in the title of my new book, Divine Reversal: The Transforming Ethics of Jesus. Writing on a topic we love is part of what makes writing such an addiction. So, what about this book? First, I’m satisfying another need, one I probably share with many of you, to dig into the text of Scripture. Specifically I wanted to dig into the gospels, the Yeshua story, more deeply. I also wanted to learn from Yeshua on the matters that often seem closest to his heart, the weightier matters like justice and mercy and faithfulness.

I’m also responding to some specific disorders. First, what seems to me a tendency to focus so much on the vicarious work of Yeshua in his death and resurrection (which of course are central to everything) that we forget about the matters that Yeshua himself tells us not to neglect. I focus on Yeshua’s ethical teachings, then, not in contrast with his work of atonement, but as an essential part of it. Second, I’m trying to reorder some of the talk about the Jewish Jesus. In fact, my original working title was Following the Jewish Jesus. Plenty of books and articles argue for the Jewish background of Yeshua and his teachings. Some seem more intent on defending Judaism, especially in its early forms, than on learning from early Judaism to better understand the unique message of Yeshua. My desire is to build on the Jewishness of Jesus to gain new insights into his message, which ultimately leads to new insights into his person and his redemptive work.