Thanksgiving, mammon, and the super committee

I don’t know who set the November 23 deadline for the congressional super committee to agree on a plan for cutting our national debt by $1.2 trillion, but he or she was an unwitting prophet. November 23 is one day before Thanksgiving, a moment of sanity in the form of family gatherings and feasting before the nation plunges into its annual orgy of consumerism on Black Friday.

I’ve been dwelling on the second line of the Shema these days—“Love Hashem your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”—and also studying Matthew with a few friends, in the new Delitzsch Hebrew-English translation (see  http://vineofdavid.org/resources/dhe/). This week we arrived at this:

A man is not able to serve two masters. For he will hate the one and love the other, or he will cling to one and despise the other. You are not able to serve both God and mamon. (Matt. 6:24)

Rabbi Yeshua is giving us an application of what he calls “the great commandment” to love God wholeheartedly. If we’re serious about fulfilling this commandment, we can’t also serve material comfort and increase, personified as the false god mamon. A divided loyalty just doesn’t work with Hashem our God.

Shema and Trinity

While I’m deep in my studies about the Shema, I receive this email from a colleague:

I have a question that relates to one of my children’s friends at school, who has a Jewish mother and a Christian father…  She is interested in Yeshua as Messiah but has questions about the Trinity and the Shema balancing out. I am trying to help my 14-year-old son to have these conversations with her.

Now I know how our sages Shammai and Hillel must have felt when a Gentile came to each one of them and said, “Teach me the whole Torah while standing on one foot.” Except it would have been a 14-year-old asking the question—and I’m not quite as smart as Hillel and Shammai.

But, let’s give it a shot.

Doing the Shema

Judaism doesn’t put the same kind of emphasis on creeds or statements of faith that Christianity does. A true-blue conservative Christian worries first about what you believe and whether it’s orthodox. Only after he settles that, does he get around to what kind of person you are. Jews tend to consider whether or not you’re a mensch—a decent, upright human being—before they worry about what you believe. (Unless of course you believe in Yeshua, in  which case a lot of Jews freak out even if you are a mensch, but that’s another story.)

On the other hand, some people think of the Shema as a sort of Jewish statement of faith: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. But is it really a statement of faith? Or is it just as much about behavior as about belief?

Positively bound up

The terms bound up, bondage, and binding usually have a pretty negative connotation. People normally think of the devil as the one who binds people up—at least those folks who believe there is a devil. But now that I’m focusing on the Shema more intently, I’m obeying one of its instructions, which says to bind Hashem’s words as a sign on your hand (Dt. 6:8). You could translate that as “tie them as a sign,” which sounds a little milder than “bind,” but the meaning is about the same. And “binding” certainly describes the experience. The hand-tefillin is placed on the biceps, and then its leather strap is wrapped seven times around the forearm, from the elbow down to the hand itself. My understanding is that you’re to wrap this tightly enough for it to make an impression in your flesh.

In The Year of Living Biblically, AJ Jacobs describes his experience with wrapping tefillin (both binding and wrapping are used to describe the ritual). It’s part of what the book’s subtitle calls his “humble quest to follow the Bible as literally as possible”:

Oy vey, paganism

I met with some of my pastor friends here in Albuquerque the morning after Halloween. After we prayed, we hung around to schmooze for a while, and one of the pastors mentioned that his church had hosted a harvest festival the night before as an alternative to Halloween. He’d caught some flak about it, which he didn’t seem to mind much. I don’t know about the harvest festival idea, but he made a great observation: lots of believers in Yeshua worry about being defiled by contact with pagan elements, but other Yeshua-believers think that they can redeem pagan elements. In other words, some believers seem to think the power of pagan influence is stronger than the power of the spirit within, and others see it vice versa.

Now, it’s a given that there are some things that are defiling, period, but I thought my friend made a good, and biblically-rooted, point. Even in Scripture you see examples of things with pagan origins being redeemed and pressed into service for Hashem. For example, the design for the altar in Torah is the same as the design of pagan altars, with horns on the corner. The temple in Kings has the same design as pagan temples. Some of the imagery in Psalms and Prophets might reflect pagan tales, like the slaying of Leviathan, or the Rahab mentioned in Ps. 89:10 or Is. 51:9.

The point isn’t to minimize paganism, but to maximize God’s power. In some cases Hashem seems to appropriate items tainted by paganism and revamp them for his own redemptive purposes—which is part of what redemption is all about, no?