Small Chasidic Insights into God

Why has God created the world and mankind, and for what purpose? Why has the soul descended into the body? (The preexistence of the soul was assumed in Chasidism.) Is there a more ideal world than the divine world in which the soul previously existed? Is there a greater joy than when man rejoices in God?

-Paul Philip Levertoff
as published in "The Love of God"
Messiah Journal issue 107

I previously reviewed Love and the Messianic Age written by early 20th century Chasidic sage Paul Philip Levertoff and as I am sure you can tell, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Levertoff's insights into the teachings of the Jewish Messiah as written in the Gospels and filtered through Chasidic mysticism are fascinating. I am pleased that Vine of David is publishing installments of Levertoff's classic study Die religiose Denkweise der Chassidim (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs 1918) translated into English.

However, a plain reading of Levertoff isn't always sufficient to comprehend the underlying concepts and history swimming below the surface of his text. In the footnotes to this very brief section of Chapter 1 of Levertoff's work, we discover several things that might not be apparent, including the association between the "birth pangs of the Messiah" (Matthew 24:8), the present age being like a pregnancy, the unborn child being like the "congregation of God", and the Messianic Age being the day of the child's birth.

We also get a glimse in the footnotes, of "Moses the Mystic":

The Prophet Isaiah saw God, when he was being ordained as a prophet (Isaiah 6), yet only according to his revelation of himself in the creation, but not in his true essence (how God actually is in himself, independent of his creation). Only Moses had a vision of God's essence.

We don't normally think of Moses in mystic terms, but he did see God in His "glory" in a manner no other man has beheld (Exodus 33:12-23). Also, in the mystic view of the Chasidim, we see that God's greatest ability is His being able to lower Himself to the level of a human being. This is no more evident than in the projection of the Divine Presence into the existence of the Jewish Messiah among men (John 1:1-18).

This brief taste of Levertoff and the equally fascinating footnotes accompanying the article, are only one small sample of the spring issue of First Fruits of Zion's (FFOZ's) Messiah Journal.

Over the course of the next week or two, I'll post other reviews and comments about Messiah Journal, which includes a special supplement on Isaiah's Exalted Servant in the Great Isaiah Scroll. I've read everything in the current issue except the special supplement and I haven't been disappointed yet.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

The King's Scroll

The 17th mitzvah is that we are commanded that every king who sits in rulership over the Jewish people shall write a Sefer Torah for himself; and that it shall never be separate from him.
Translated by Rabbi Berel Bell
Sefer Hamitzvot in English
The King's Torah Scroll
Chabad.org

"It shall not move from his presence except when he enters the bathroom, the bathhouse, or a place where one is forbidden to study. When he goes out to war, it must be with him; when he returns, it must be with him; when he sits in judgment, it must be with him; when he eats, it must be in front of him."
Rambam, Hilchos Melachim, Chapter 3, Halacha

"I will rise up at midnight to give thanks to You for Your righteous judgments." -Psalms 119:62

According to Deuteronomy 17:18, each King of Israel is to write for himself a copy of the Torah scroll. The Talmud interprets this as meaning the King will write two scrolls, one to be kept in the Treasury, and one to be kept, as we see in Rambam's commentary above, with the King at all times. If God's justice and mercy is before the King every waking moment, when he's eating breakfast, when he goes to war, when he sits in his home, when he goes along the way, then God's judgments will not be far from the King when the King issues his judgments over the people of Israel.

We who are disciples of the Jewish Messiah Jesus (Yeshua) have one King. If we are true to our faith, then he and his righteous judgments are always before us. He is our living Torah. But is he his own living Torah?

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. -John 1:14

It's common in Messianic circles to consider Jesus as the living embodiment of the commandments of God, the flesh and blood container for all of God's mercy, compassion, judgments, and ordinances, the Torah incarnate who dwelt among us. As the suffering servant, he set aside his Kingship and his majesty and he died, although he died with the titulus ironically declaring his Kingship nailed above his head. When he returns, he will come as avenging King. When he walked among men as a man, he obeyed all of the mitzvot without error or flaw. As King, he can do no less. But how will the King keep the Torah before him at all times?

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. -Revelation 19:11-16

I'm stretching the metaphor, probably beyond reasonable limits, I admit it. I can't say with any certainty that the commandment for a King of Israel to always have the Torah before him is fulfilled by his name written on his robe and his thigh. Yet it is a fascinating thought and a compelling image, that Yeshua is the Torah and that he wears the Torah, so to speak, upon him. He is the King of Israel; the final King. He is the Torah and the Torah is with him.

But what about us? Deuteronomy 31:19 is understood by the sages as a commandment for every Jew to write for himself a scroll of the Torah, even if he has inherited a scroll from his father. In modern times, the commandment is fulfilled by most Jews, in purchasing a book of Torah rather than writing it out by hand.

It is said that many of the commandments do not apply to Gentile disciples of the Jewish Messiah. I certainly don't think the Talmudic masters intended for non-Jews to be obligated to the commandment of writing a copy of the Torah. It's not a common concern among Christians certainly. Nevertheless, we have this:

They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. -Deuteronomy 22:4-5

As the King wears his name, so will we wear his name and we will belong to him. You may believe you belong to him now, and I certainly cannot refute this. However, the "throne of God and of the Lamb" is not yet with us (Revelation 22:3) and we do not yet serve only him with wholehearted devotion as we will in Messianic days. Today, we can keep his name and his word before us by studying the Bible, by associating with other believers, by performing acts of kindness and compassion, by attempting to embrace a mystic understanding of the Messiah beyond the literal word, and by praying that his "will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:8).

Pray that the King comes soon and in our days.

To the Hasidic mind Devekuth and Kawwanah were the primary emotional values, a significance which they had by no means always had before. "That is the meaning of Devekuth that when he fulfills the commandments or studies the Torah, the body becomes a throne for the soul...and the soul a throne for the light of the Shekhinah which is above his head, and the light as it were flows all round him, and he sits in the midst of the light and rejoices in trembling."
from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
by Gershom Scholem

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Depths

Hundreds of linguistic and ideological differences between the commonly accepted Masoretic version of the Pentateuch and the Samaritan text indicate that editing may be one of the world's oldest professions.
Professor Yair Hoffman
Bible Studies / The things that you're liable to read in the Bible
Written for HAARETZ.com

In Israel, a new archaeological “discovery” of sorts is buzzing and making bold claims that they may be the next “Dead Sea Scrolls.” They include a collection of scrolls as well as 70 lead codices (ancient scripts bound in book form, rather than as scrolls). However, we have conflicting reports on the nature of these “newly found” artifacts. They are owned by “Hassan Saeda, a Bedouin farmer in Galilee who says they have been in his family’s possession since his great-grandfather found them in a cave in Jordan, a century ago.” Although there is still a lot of skepticism surrounding these artifacts, there are some strong voices that are willing to attest to their authenticity, wanting to avoid another possible Shapiro Affair.
from the Digging with Darren blog

How did the things we read now in the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John get written down in the form we now have them? There are many decisions to make if we try to reconstruct a possible or probably story of gospel transmission. I’ll try to make the story interested, not too bogged down with long lists of sources and proofs. I’ll keep that kind of writing short and refer the reader to various scholars such as Mark Goodacre, Richard Bauckham, Paul Anderson, and others that I know I will find along the way have added something significant to an understanding of gospel transmission.
Derek Leman
Chronicling the Formation of the Gospels #1
from the Yeshua in Context blog

All of the quotes you've just read have something in common. They are all the opening paragraphs of articles addressing the struggle we have in understanding, and in some cases locating, the Word of God. While many Christians in the world believe that the Bible, as it is translated into English (or as it is rendered in people's favorite English translation) is totally sufficient as the original, inerrant, Word of God; the source of truth and facts about God, Jesus, and everything, is this really so?

The quotes I posted and the articles they come from seem to indicate that the Bible, all by itself, as we have it today, isn't the end all and be all of the word of God.

I don't say this by way of complaint. I'm beginning to come to terms with the uncertainty that the Bible introduces as a "stand-alone" document and the requirement of interpretation and examination in "studying the Word". Yet, while we rely on the Bible for so many things, we can also be ignorant of what the Bible can't do for us.

He was born in Israel and lives in the north. He trains rabbinical court judges and writes essays on the weekly Torah portion, which he says are well-respected. Clearly possessed of a sharp, inquisitive mind, he could be described as a religious sage. During the flight, he was preparing a commentary on the Torah portion of Miketz, in Genesis, and he shared various questions and insights with me. I referred to variations of certain words in Genesis as they appear in the Samaritan Pentateuch, and to how the Greek Septuagint translation of the Bible contains sentences that do not appear in the Masoretic version.

My fellow passenger did not know what I was talking about. Not only was he unaware of the existence of ancient versions of the Bible, but he also lacked knowledge of the essence of the Masoretic text - the canonical Hebrew text redacted by scholars in Palestine and Babylon toward the end of the first millennium. He did not know, for instance, that the diacritical marks date only from the 10th century, or that manuscripts and later printed versions of the Masoretic text are not identical.

Yair Hoffman, professor emeritus of Bible Studies at Tel Aviv University, was describing a man he met on a recent flight from New York, a man who was an ultra-Orthodox Jew and who "trains rabbinical court judges and writes essays on the weekly Torah portion, which he says are well-respected." Yet, as Hoffman relates, this intelligent "religious sage" did not grasp some of the most basic facts about the Bible, what it is, and where it comes from. How can this be?

How can this be for any of us?

In my own case, I just didn't know any better. Fortunately I found out (the hard way) and once I got over my shock, I started consuming every text I could lay my hands on, specifically on the New Testament, and with a focus on Jesus and the "deity issue".

Our own Messianic Bible scholar, Derek Leman, addresses similar matters regarding the Gospels in a recent blog post and I certainly hope he continues to write articles for his series "Chronicling the Formation of the Gospels". It's not enough to "have" the Bible as it exists today. "Having" isn't understanding. Like a pool of unknown depths, we must go beyond the surface, brave the shadowy waters, and search for what awaits us as we dive into a sea of many hidden truths.

I had rather high hopes for the recently discovered lead codices before I found out that they were fakes. I did entertain the interesting question "are they Christian or Kabbalistic" with the hopeful thought that they could, in their own way, be both. That may sound strange to some of you, but I've found that looking at the mystery of the Jewish Messiah through a mystic and Chasidic lens has revealed more to me than most traditional Christian commentaries and dogmatic interpretations.

Saying "the Bible isn't enough" probably sounds horrible and maybe even a bit heretical, but if a surface reading of the Bible were enough, we wouldn't have commentaries, interpretations, and scholarly theological theses. Certainly observant Jews don't think the Bible is enough. Otherwise, we (they) wouldn't have Talmud, Mishna, and Gemara. When I introduce this topic among some folks associated with my congregation, I get the argument that we must rely on the Word of God, not the word of man. Yet the Bible we have today is as much (if not more) the word of the human writers, interpreters, and translators as it is the Word of the One, True God of the Universe.

While the "facts" of the Bible may be contradictory, and the truth of the Bible remains elusive, somewhere in the middle of man, God, and the words on the page, I see an inviting but mysterious portal. Paul said that in the present age, we see the things of God as "through a dark glass" (1 Corinthians 13:12). I believe we're looking at the surface of a body of water. We can't tell what's under that surface, how deep the water goes, how hot or cold it is, and what sub-sea enigmas it contains. If we want to know what God has to tell us, we have to dive in, sometimes half-blind, and pray that once we've made our "leap of faith", we will find the illumination under the blue waves that we can't find in the light of day.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Seeing Jesus Through Different Windows

There are even methods to help decipher all the hidden meanings in the text. One is called the principle of first mention. Whenever you come across a significant word in the passage, find out where this word first appears in the Bible. John does this in his gospel. This first mention of the word love in 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son." We then discover that love is first mentioned in Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to take "your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love" and offer him as a sacrifice. John is doing something intentional in his gospel: He wants his readers to see a connection between Abraham and his son, and God and God's son. John's readers who know the Torah would have seen the parallels right away.

-Rob Bell
Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

I don't know if Bell is completely accurate in what he says in his book (Pastors of "megachurches" aren't necessarily also scholars or researchers), but it is a compelling image. Many scholars and even "ordinary" believers, have a tendency to read the Bible from a purely literal and historical vantage point. In extreme cases, people read the Bible in English and believe that the surface meaning is the meaning of what the author (and God) is trying to say (and here, we aren't even sure that the author of John's Gospel was the "John the Apostle" who walked with Jesus...in fact, it probably wasn't).

Derek Leman in his book Yeshua in Context, paints a picture of the Gospels as "stories" which communicate something about the Jewish Messiah that the Gospel writers wanted their audience to especially understand. These are viewpoints, perspectives, and interpretations about the Messiah that are being presented, rather than literal facts and events you'd expect in history books or (presumably) as reported on CNN (and I've just started Leman's book yesterday, so a full review will be forthcoming).

I'm tempted to say that Paul Philip Levertoff in his book Love and the Messianic Age, takes his interpretation one step further, but Levertoff's step is more sideways and represents a difference not so much in degree as in identity.

One of the things that's been impressed upon me as I've read these (and other) different authors, is how they each see Jesus (Yeshua), his context, his lived experience, and what we are supposed to understand about him, in almost fundamentally dissimilar ways. Sure, there's some overlap, but when reading all of the different books on the issues of Christ's deity, mission, and teachings, it's like I'm reading about different people rather than a single individual.

So far, I've been most impressed with Levertoff's perspective (and a full review of his book and the Vine of David commentary on Levertoff is also forthcoming) on the Jewish Messiah and the writings that describe him and what he did (and does).

He read the Gospels in German. Then he obtained a Hebrew version and reread them. Though he was in the midst of a Gentile, Christian city where Jesus was worshiped in churches and honored in every home, Feivel felt the Gospels belonged more to him and the Chasidic world than they did to the Gentiles who revered them. He found the Gospels to be thoroughly Jewish and conceptually similar to Chasidic Judaism. He wondered how Gentile Christians could hope to comprehend Yeshua (Jesus) and His words without the benefit of a classical Jewish education or experience with the esoteric works of the Chasidim.

Taken from Jorge Quinonez:
"Paul Philip Levertoff: Pioneering Hebrew-Christian Scholar and Leader"
Mishkan 37 (2002): 21-34
as quoted from Love and the Messianic Age

We all interpret Jesus from our own perspective; not just our educational or even our own faith perspectives, but from who we are as childhoods, personalities, and lived experiences. It's always bothered me that most of the people writing about the Jewish Messiah aren't Jewish and particularly, they aren't people who have the benefit of a completely lived Jewish identity, background, and education starting from childhood (there are a few exceptions). Even Christians who are well educated NT scholars, come from an essentially Gentile background and they are people who were born, raised, and who identify with a non-Jewish world view; people who did not take upon themselves an educational experience that included the Jewish writings until adulthood.

Even many Jews in the Messianic movement, previously identified with Christianity and worshiped in a church context before shifting into a Messianic Jewish worship style and becoming educated in a Jewish faith perspective (which includes Talmud study, among other things).

Levertoff, having been born, raised, and educated in a Chasidic Jewish environment and context from childhood, applies a seamless Jewish experience across the entire Bible, looking at the Gospels from a Talmudic and Chasidic vantage point, and is able to see what most of us would miss. This isn't just a viewpoint that illustrates heretofore "hidden" messages in the text, but a fundamental shift in understanding that allows us to read the Gospels in the tradition of mystic Jewish writings rather than history, literature, or "the Christian sayings of Jesus".

I'm not denigrating any of these other assessments or studies, but I do believe they all lack something critical that, in its absence, leaves us with questions that Levertoff's Chasidic presentation are more equipped to answer.

As I mentioned, I'll write individual book reviews (in the case of Bowman's and Komoszewski's evangelical view of Putting Jesus in His Place, I already have) on each of the works I've cited, but I had the need this morning, to write a sort of summary of my investigations into the deity of Jesus and how my journey of exploration into an understanding of the Jewish Messiah has been proceeding.

I must say that my level of "anxiety" over my faith and understanding has been reduced significantly, I'm learning a lot of things that were simply invisible to me before this...

...and I'm having fun.

Chag Sameach Purim.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Freeing Sparks

From this life and light proceeds the divine "spark" which is hidden in every soul. Not all men succeed in rising to this close union with God at prayer, because this spark is imprisoned in them. "Yea, even the Shechinah herself is imprisoned in us, for the spark is the Shechinah in our souls.
-Paul Philip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

My heart says of you, “Seek his face!” Your face, LORD, I will seek.
-Psalm 27:8

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls...
-Psalm 42:7

There's something of God in each of us. I don't mean the "indwelling of the Holy Spirit", but after all, every person was created in God's image. We each have a soul...something of the divine in every person. In Judaism, it's thought that man has two spirits: the nephesh and the ruach. The nephesh is our "animal" soul or the type of spirit any living creature possesses; our "personality". The ruach is a "spark" of the divine within each person and is only possessed by human beings.

When we die, it's believed that our nephesh goes with our bodies into the ground and perishes with us. Our ruach, on the other hand, rises up, like sparks from a fire, seeking to return to the source; to God.

When we pray, we have the potential of connecting the spark of holiness within us directly to God, but this doesn't always happen. As Levertoff has already said, we can imprison our spark, the living Shechinah, within us. The Vine of David commentary on this passage explains more:

Although every man has the divine potential of a godly soul planted within him, this is not a guarantee that every man will enter into a relationship with HaShem or even that every soul will be redeemed. Instead, the soul is separated from God by a wall of partition - sin and guilt. HaShem removes the wall of partition between man and Himself through the work of the Messiah. When the wall is removed, then the soul can connect with HaShem. Then He can "use it for the gathering of these 'sparks'."

Through sincere and heartfelt prayer, we can breakdown the wall separating us from God and let our spark connect to the flame of God, but it is our faith in the Messiah that provides the conduit for our prayer. I wonder if the Vine of David commentary has given us the true meaning of the following event?

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” -Matthew 27:50-54

This passage is often quoted by traditional Christianity as "proof" that, with the death of the Messiah, that the Jewish sacrificial system was destroyed, that the Law was replaced by grace, and that Judaism was replaced by Christianity. Given Levertoff's point of view on Jesus, prayer, and the divine, perhaps what was really torn down was not what God had instituted, for after all, God established His Temple (and will do so again as recorded in Ezekiel chapters 40-48), but rather, the barriers that all men create between themselves and God. Through the Messiah, humanity has been given a unique opportunity to connect to God in a way we never had before. We can set our sparks free.

However, the process isn't completed automatically. The removal of the wall is like opening a door. Entry is now available, but we still must walk through to the other side.

God is waiting for us to have faith and to pray; to release the sparks trapped within us, so that they can rise up again and be gathered by God.

Is that joy?

Good Shabbos.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Rejoice and Tremble on the Bridge to Heaven

In the deepest recesses of our hearts fear and love dwell together; they reveal themselves in joy. We rejoice in the consciousness of God's love and nearness but tremble at the same time because of the awfulness of His presence.
-Paul Philip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

Therefore, you kings, be wise;
be warned, you rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear
and celebrate his rule with trembling.
-Psalm 2:10-11

According to Levertoff, the Chasidic interpretation of Psalm 2:11 (Be glad with trembling) is symbolized by Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham expresses the love of God while Isaac represents the fear. We tend to think of "fearing" God in terms of awe, but for Isaac after the Akedah, God indeed became "the fear of Isaac".

Depending on who we are, we obey God out of one of those two motivations; fear or love. Most people who have newly come to faith tend to obey God out of the awareness of their own previous lives of sin. We fear God's punishment for the things we've done wrong in our lives and, if we continue to struggle with sin as believers, we continue to experience that fear.

As we develop spiritually, our fear turns to wonder, awe, and love of our Creator and we serve Him, not because we are afraid, but because we love Him.

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” -Mark 12:28-33

Jesus encapsulated the whole of Torah as well as the point Levertoff is making, in Christ's declaration of the two greatest commandments as recorded in the Gospel of Mark (quoting Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18).

We can "rejoice with trembling" that God chooses to allow His attribute of mercy to outweigh His attribute of justice, so that we, and the world, can endure the presence of the living God. The Vine of David commentary on Levertoff tells us how we respond to God's grace:

Every commandment of the Torah is an expression of God's will. When a person obeys one of God's commandments, he is literally living out God's will on earth - uniting Himself with HaShem and partnering with Him on earth.

When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, part of what we call "the Lord's prayer" contains the same directive; "on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10), so again, we see that the teachings of the Jewish Messiah can be viewed in Levertoff's understanding of the Chasidic Jewish mystical tradition (specifically from the Tanya).

If you are looking at Jesus and the Gospels from a more traditionally Christian perspective, you probably are asking yourself what Chasidic Judaism and quotes from the Talmud and Tanya have to do with the saving grace of Jesus Christ. As I've previously written, Paul Philip Levertoff didn't understand how it was possible to comprehend the teachings of the Jewish Messiah without having a background in Talmud and Jewish mysticism. Levertoff read the Gospels and the teachings of the Master like other aggadic teachers from the Tannaim era, and they unfolded before him like a rose in bloom, revealing an interior many of us do not know exists. He recognized concepts from the Talmud and Mussar in the lessons and parables of the Messiah, and thus felt the Gospels were more Jewish in their nature than "Christian", as we understand modern Christianity.

Yet if the message of Jesus is so uniquely Jewish and can only be comprehended and acted upon from a Hebraic lived experience, how can non-Jewish Christians ever sufficiently access the Messiah and draw close to God? How can we, who are not part of Israel, His chosen ones, extend our relationship out of the realm of fear and into the vast expanse of awe and love?

Fear of God is necessary to inspire us to initially repent of our sins and make us aware of our need to turn or to return to God. For all the world, and particularly for non-Jewish believers, Christ becomes our bridge between fear and love, filling the gap that separates us from the understanding of our Jewish brothers and from the divine; a holiness that was previously only available to the Children of Israel. The Messiah came to allow the same kind of access to God for all human beings, regardless of who we are, where we're from, or any other attribute we may possess. Paul was very clear on this point in Galatians 3:28 ("neither Jew nor Greek").

When Jesus sent his Jewish disciples out to make disciples of all the nations (non-Jews) of the world (Matthew 28:19-20), he was extending the love of God to the entire human race, using himself as the intermediary to connect us all to the Father. When Jesus said "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:16), he wasn't excluding Jews in favor of Christians. Rather, he was projecting God's love beyond Israel by offering himself as a "doorway", so to speak, to the Almighty, using his life, suffering, death, and resurrection as the means by which the rest of us can join the community of the redeemed.

When we join with the Messiah, we join God as junior partners in the work of Creation, acting as small "Messiahs", in a sense, living out the will of God on earth as one day, the Messiah will come and complete God's will with us.

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. -Revelation 22:3-5

May the Messiah come soon and in our day. Amen.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

The Descent of God to Man

“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things, and so they came into being?” declares the LORD.
-Isaiah 66:1-2

Isaiah 66:1 is often allegorically interpreted to describe the union of the heavenly with the earthly, the spiritual with the material, the infinite and the finite, in the Torah. The Torah is the "descending of the divine wisdom from the highest heights and embodying itself in earthly commandments." In these commandments God reveals His will and wisdom which are really one with Him.
-Paul Philip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

You might think of this blog post as "part 2" of this morning's article We Are Living Torahs. In fact, it was the small essay I am creating now that I intended to write this morning, but as my fingers were moving over the keyboard, I discovered the need to appeal to people to extend their (our) spirits and to consider so many others in pain.

I previously described you and me as people who are "living Torahs", yet there is another living Torah, the living Torah, that we must also ponder. I am continuing to meditate on the issue of the nature and character of the Jewish Messiah Yeshua (Jesus) and whether we can include in that nature, the deity of Jesus. Is the Christ literally God as has been described by traditional, and particularly by evangelical Christianity, or is there another way to understand the Master and how he is illustrated in the Bible? I believe there is a way to understand Jesus as both human and as containing the divine:

According to this concept, God's unknowable and divine will and wisdom (which are inseparable from His being) descended to be clothed in the corporal substance of commandments of Torah and ink in a book. This is not to say that a Torah scroll is God, but that the Torah scroll is an earthly container for His will and wisdom. It is similar to the concept of the Shechinah, the "Dwelling Presence of God." Just as the Shechinah took residence and filled the Tabernacle, the Spirit of God fills the words of the Torah. -from the Love and the Messianic Age Commentary

The Word became a human being and lived with us, and we saw his Sh'khinah, the Sh'khinah of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth. -John 1:14 (CJB)

Looking at the quote from the commentary on Levertoff's book, we can see that God and the Torah are one in the same and at the same time, the Torah is not literally (or even figuratively) God. God has extended some portion of Himself out of His heavenly realm and "humbled" himself, if you will, to send a portion of His essence into His creation so that we can perceive and act upon His will and wisdom. Yet the words we find in the first chapter of John's Gospel also describes Jesus as both Word and, in a sense, God.

The Jewish doctrine of the "real Presence", to quote Levertoff and the book's commentary, is "that the Torah is the divine expression of God's will and wisdom, placed within the physical limitations of this world and translated into terms comprehensible to human beings. However, God's will and wisdom cannot be separated from HaShem Himself. If the Torah contains HaShem's will and wisdom, then it contains something of HaShem Himself; they are 'one in the same'."

That's kind of like saying the Torah is and isn't God. Remember, we're dealing with mystical and metaphysical concepts, so don't try too hard to understand the "nuts and bolts" of how a Torah scroll can contain something that is intrinsically connected to God and yet not actually be God.

Levertoff projected this Chasidic concept into the eucharist to explain how the bread and the wine could "be" the body and blood of the Christ and yet not literally be human flesh and human blood.

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. -Mark 14:22-24 (NRSV)

My understanding of Levertoff is that he's saying while the matzoh and wine at the Seder were not literally or symbolically his body and blood, but in a mystical way, they contain something of him and something of God that we must incorporate into our being and in doing so, we become part of the "body of Christ". Again, don't try to imagine the mechanics of this process. If this only works for you on a strictly symbolic level, that's great, but if we compare how "real Presence" is applied to a Torah scroll and to the matzoh and wine, then it brings a whole new meaning to how we will experience our next Passover Seder.

Finally though, as found in the commentary for Levertoff's book, we discover that the "real Presence" is extended into the area that describes the relationship between the Father and the Son:

Regardless of how the "real Presence" is interpreted, Levertoff sees a parallel between the Chasidic idea of Hashem's presence in the Torah and the Christian concept of Christ's incarnation in the Eucharist.

Another way of presenting the parallel is to say that just as the mystics and the Tanya teach that the Torah is God's will and wisdom made into a scroll, the apostles and the Gospel of John teach that Messiah is God's will and wisdom made flesh.

In other words, if we can accept that something unique about God can inhabit the Mishkan (Tabernacle in the desert), Solomon's Temple in holy Jerusalem, the Torah as a "personified" object, and the eucharist, can we not accept that the divine God "inhabits" the living, human Messiah in the same manner?

I realize that's a lot to take in, but if you are a religious person who fully accepts that Jesus is literally God the Son, part of the triune God, then is what I'm writing here, as presented by Levertoff and his commentators, really so extreme?

Christianity isn't accustomed to utilizing Jewish mysticism to understand its own conceptualization of Jesus, but it might be wise for them (us) to start. So far, Paul Philip Levertoff, a man born a Jew, educated in the Jewish Chasidic tradition, who came to faith in Jesus as Messiah in the late 19th century, and who spent the majority of his adult life preaching the word of Jesus from a uniquely Jewish viewpoint, offers a different way of looking at the statement "Jesus is God." Did Levertoff believe Jesus was divine in the way Evangelical Christianity declares? Probably not. Did he see the divine residing within the Messiah in a special way that at once made Jesus God and not God in the same fashion as God "inhabits" a Torah scroll? Probably.

Some call Jesus "the living Torah" because he lived a human life in complete consistency with the will of God, never sinning. If we believe God can humble His nature so that he can "inhabit" a tent, a building, and a scroll (and none of these are literally God), can we not think of the Messiah in the same way?

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

We Are Living Torahs

The deepest longing, therefore, of the genuine Chasid is to become a "living Torah." The keeping of the Law is to him only a means to an end: union with God. For this reason he tries to keep the Law scrupulously, for "God's thoughts are embodied in it."
-Paul Philip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’
-Mark 12:28-33 (NRSV)

Hillel said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn"
-Shab. 31a

I know people who refer to Jesus as "the Living Torah"; the only being in human form who perfectly obeyed the will of God and did not sin. According to the early 20th century sage Paul Philip Levertoff, the true desire of a "genuine Chasid" is to imitate the Master and also exist as a living embodiment of the Torah; the will of our Creator. For a Jew, this means continual, scrupulous study of the Torah and Talmud and also living out that "knowledge" in one's day-to-day existence, striving to improve obedience with each passing moment.

But is obedience to the commandments the goal?

If a man is worthy, the Torah becomes for him a medicine of life, but if he is not, it is a deadly poison. This is what Raba explained. "If he uses the Torah properly it is a medicine of life unto him, but for him who does not use it properly, it is a deadly poison." -b.Yoma 72b

The aforementioned quote of the Talmud is taken from the commentary to Levertoff's book and may illustrate something for those of us who are non-Jewish disciples of the Jewish Messiah.

Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love. -Galatians 5:2-6 (NRSV)

Paul seems to be contradicting both Christ's and Levertoff's perspectives on the Torah, but look at what Levertoff's source, the Talmud, is saying. What is it to use or misuse the Torah? The Chasidic Jewish tradition teaches that it's not enough to mechanically obey the commandments. Your intention must be correct. It not only matters what you do, but why you do it.

The Gentiles Paul is criticizing, as recorded above, most likely weren't desiring to convert to Judaism for their love of Torah or even for their love of God, but rather, because they had been convinced by outsiders, that they must convert to Judaism and take on the full weight of the yoke of Torah, in order to be disciples of Jesus; in order to be "living Torahs", just as the Master is our "living Torah."

However, it's not wearing tzitzit or laying tefillin that allows a Gentile disciple of Jesus access to God, but rather the desire within us to reach up to God through faith and trust in Jesus, and out of that desire to offer ourselves as "little Messiahs" to the rest of the world, by doing deeds of compassion, charity, and kindness.

I'm not drawing a conclusion at this point regarding the level of Torah observance that is proper for a Jewish Messianic disciple vs. a Gentile Christian disciple, but it seems clear from what we can read of Paul the Apostle and Paul the Chasidic disciple of Yeshua, that our approach to the Torah must be more than obedience for its own sake (although there is some merit in this if our desire is to also honor God). We must approach the Torah as if we are approaching the living essence of God, with a motivation not to take, but to give. Just as Jesus gave everything for us, including his own life, we must strive to be like him, "living Torahs" in the world, giving back to others the things we have so graciously received.

I don't want to end today's blog post without reminding everyone that the nation of Japan is in dire need of our help. Whatever you can do by donating funds or goods, please extend yourself to those who need you. Be a hero. Act in the Spirit of Jesus. Pray for Japan.

The Hovering Dove

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.
-Matthew 3:13-17 (NRSV)

And he set up the enclosure around the Tabernacle and the altar, and put up the screen for the gate of the enclosure. When Moses had finished the work, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud had settled upon it and the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. When the cloud lifted from the Tabernacle, the Israelites would set out, on their various journeys; but if the cloud did not lift, they would not set out until such time as it did lift. For over the Tabernacle a cloud of the Lord rested by day, and fire would appear in it by night, in the view of all the house of Israel throughout their journeys. -Exodus 40:33-38 (JPS Tanakh)

You're probably wondering what connects these two events, but I think they have a great deal in common and perhaps, they describe virtually the same act; the act of the divine dwelling among humanity. Let me explain.

Over lunch, I continued to read the commentary for Love and the Messianic Age by Paul Philip Levertoff. In the commentary (page 44), I found this:

In Romans 5:14, Paul says that Adam was "an impression of Him who was to come." That is to say that Adam was made in the image of Messiah. This teaching is very similar the esoteric idea of Adam Kadmon described above. Another connection in Jewish literature between Adam Kadmon and Messiah can be found by comparing two different versions of the same midrash on Genesis 1:2. Genesis Rabbah 2:4 (Soncino) states: " 'And the spirit of God hovered': this alludes to the spirit of Messiah"; whereas the same midrash in Midrash Tehillim 139:5 has (Braude) "the spirit of Adam."

What instantly captured my attention about the quote were the words, "And the spirit of God hovered..." It immediately reminded me of the "something like a dove" sequence from the depictions of the baptism of Jesus in the four Gospels (not to mention the spirit of God hovering over the waters during Creation).

I remember being in a Bible study once and we were discussing why the spirit was described as "something like a dove". One of the people there said that a dove in flight tends to flutter side to side as it descends; sort of how you see a feather or a sheet of paper fall when it descends from a significant height. The object can seem to "hover" as it comes down.

I have no idea if that describes what actually happened as the "dove" came down upon the Master, but that scene, along with what I've been reading in the commentary on Levertoff, made me consider what it is about the Messiah that makes him Divine.

This is especially relevant to my recent investigations (including book reviews) of the deity of Christ. The Christian explanations I've read thus far supporting the deity haven't been very satisfying but I wonder if the concept of the "Shechinah becoming flesh and dwelling among us" (John 1:14, my interpretation) might not fit better. After all, we have a series of precedents in the Bible relative to the Divine Presence and both the Tabernacle and Solomon's Temple. The Divine Presence inhabited them, and though they didn't literally "become" God, they contained a special essence of the Divine.

I don't state this as an answer, but simply offer it for consideration (and I know it's full of trap doors). The commentary on Levertoff's teaching states that, in Jewish mysticism, it is believed that the totality of God cannot be actively perceived by humans. At any point where people have perceived God in any way (cloud on top of Sinai, Moses seeing God's back but not his face), God has chosen to "humble" or "condense" Himself into an essence that is detectable by people.

What if that's what happened when "the Word became flesh?"

"A Jew never gives up. We're here to bring Mashiach, we will settle for nothing less." -Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Good Shabbos.

A Short Lesson from Feivel the Chasid

He read the Gospels in German. Then he obtained a Hebrew version and reread them. Though he was in the midst of a Gentile, Christian city where Jesus was worshiped in churches and honored in every home, Feivel felt the Gospels belonged more to him and the Chasidic world than they did to the Gentiles who revered them. He found the Gospels to be thoroughly Jewish and conceptually similar to Chasidic Judaism. He wondered how Gentile Christians could hope to comprehend Yeshua (Jesus) and His words without the benefit of a classical Jewish education or experience with the esoteric works of the Chasidim.

Taken from Jorge Quinonez:
"Paul Philip Levertoff: Pioneering Hebrew-Christian Scholar and Leader"
Mishkan 37 (2002): 21-34
as quoted from Love and the Messianic Age

I wonder the same thing. I'll be doing a full review of Vine of David's Love and the Messianic Age by Paul Philip Levertoff in the near future, including the rather large commentary that accompanies the book, but I wanted to connect the aforementioned quote back to last Tuesday's book review and the decidedly Evangelical Christian view of Jesus and his teachings that we normally encounter.

Levertoff had a very specific way of looking at the Gospels based on his education and Chasidic worldview and, if he had not become a disciple of Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus), it's quite possible he would have been one of the foremost Chasidic Rabbis of his generation. Instead, he chose to pioneer, in the late 19th through early 20th centuries, an early incarnation of what we now call "Messianic Judaism". It must have been a tremendously difficult and rewarding role to play, and I am sorry that more of his works have not survived because he could have taught us so much more. Here's what I mean:

Levertoff believed that the Gospels and Chasidic Judaism merged seamlessly, and he dedicated his scholarship to demonstrating that conviction. He is said to have best developed his ideas in his major life work, a manuscript on the subject of Christ and the Shechinah. Unfortunately, the book was never published and the manuscript has been lost; however, he presented a lecture titled "The Shekinah Motif in the New Testament Literature" to the Society of the Study of Religions that we may assume represented something of an abstract of the larger work. This short paper provides a glimpse into a compelling and radical attempt to reconcile Jewish mysticism and faith in an exalted, divine Messiah.

Love and the Messianic Age is all we have left of Levertoff's insights into the nature and character of Christ in relation to the Shechinah or the Divine Presence; that aspect of the eternal God which descended upon and inhabited the Mishkan (Tabernacle) in the desert, and later, upon Solomon's Temple in holy Jerusalem. If his book had survived, I believe it would have answered many of the questions about Jesus that Gentile Christianity lacks the ability, experience, and viewpoint to even perceive. Authors like Bowman and Komoszewski, for all of their education and experience in the realm of Evangelical Christianity (and please forgive the conceit) don't have a clue next to what I believe Levertoff saw and understood.

Near the end of the short biography of Levertoff's life that I read last night, I discovered this:

Feivel Paul Philip Levertoff died at the age of 75 on July 31, 1954, on Rosh Chodesh Av (the New Moon of the Fifth Month).

I was born on July 23, 1954, eight days before Levertoff died. All Jewish male babies born on the same day as I was, would have experienced the Brit Milah; the ritual circumcision and naming, as commanded by God to Abraham, on the day Levertoff died. I don't know if it means anything for a Jewish boy to undergo the brit milah on the day a great Rebbe dies, but I hope it does. Although it can have no impact on a non-Jewish Christian like me, it still means something that our lifetimes overlapped for those eight days and, for a very brief period of time, we shared the same planet.

Although he is gone, I hope to learn a little something from what Paul Philip Levertoff left behind. May he be remembered for good and may his legacy cause both Jewish and Gentile disciples of the Messiah to draw one step closer to Heaven.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.