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.

Book Review: The Way of Kabbalah

Everyone is searching for something. Some pursue security, others pleasure or power. Yet others look for dreams, or they know not what. There are, however, those who know what they seek, but cannot find it in the natural world. For these searchers many clues have been laid by those who have gone before. The traces are everywhere, although only those with eyes to see or ears to hear perceive them. When the significance of these signs is seriously acted upon, Providence opens a door out of the natural into the supernatural to reveal a ladder from the transient to the Eternal. He who dares the ascent enters the Way of Kabbalah.

from the Way of Kabbalah
by z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi

You could call this book "timeless" in the sense that it was first published in 1976 and yet, presents in a manner totally accessible to the reader 35 years later. Halevi offers his audience a guided tour and an introductory lesson into the world of Kabbalah.

Structurally, the book is quite linear. It starts off with a basic introduction and definition of what Kabbalah is and what it means at it's core. It then proceeds to lead the reader through a series of chapters on personality and social theory. This part of the book reads like many of the texts I studied when I was in graduate school and pursuing my Masters degree in Counseling Psychology. There are a number of different theories or models of how a human personality is structured and Halevi offers yet one more as conceptualized by Kabbalah. This is important to understand because Kabbalah is the journey of taking a person as they enter into the discipline and, through the guidance of a maggid in a structured group, assists the person in achieving higher spiritual and mystic levels of functioning and awareness.

From understanding the individual personality, the book proceeds to describing the dynamics of a study group in Kabbalah. Beyond that, different but equally valid approaches to accessing the higher levels of existence and accessing God are described. The last chapter being simply "Ascension"; the ultimate goal of the mystic.

Most people seem to believe that Kabbalah is the Jewish Mystic tradition, but as I said in my review of Gershom Scholem's Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism, Kabbalah is only one of those traditions, albeit, the most well-known.

Kabbalah uses a diagram model called the Sefirotic Tree of Life. This isn't really a static diagram because a number of different concepts can be illustrated using the basic tree structure including the seven levels of heaven, the seven levels of teaching, and interestingly enough, the seven deadly sins (and as you can see, Kabbalah isn't afraid of borrowing from other traditions and religious conceptualizations).

When I was asked to read this book, I was expecting a fully Jewish treatment of the topic, since Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical discipline, but the author makes good use of Christian symbols, including that of Jesus, in expressing different ideas. Halevi refers to Jesus as "Joshua ben Miriam" the "Maggid of Nazeret" as a great Kabbalist in his own right and offers up a number of his teachings from the Gospels as Kabbalistic in nature, this despite the fact that Kabbalah is thought to have originated in 13th century Spain. I don't criticize the author for this, since most Jewish mystic forms can trace at least some of their history back to earlier eras and practices and Halevi isn't the only one to state that the Gospels read like Jewish mystic writings.

The caveat to my last paragraph is that the author also compares Jesus and Buddha as equals and at once recognizes Jesus as a renowned maggid or religious teacher while denying he is the Messiah. Given that Halevi is rather liberal in quoting from the Christian Bible and attributing the quotes to a "maggid", I wonder if, as a Jew, he is really that generous with his praise toward the "Christian Messiah" or if he is casting his net, so to speak, to catch the largest number of "fish" (readers and potential neophyte Kabbalists, in this case)? There's no way for me to tell if inclusion of "Joshua ben Miriam" in Kabbalistic teachings is common or unique to this author, at least not without reading other Kabbalah related books or sources, so don't draw too much from the appearance of Jesus here.

If I had to pick a textbook for a course called "Introduction to Kabbalah", I might consider Halevi's book. The chapters are short, the book is short (only 216 pages), and the content, which could easily be extremely complex, is fairly easy to take in. I'm not enthralled with the book, although by reading other reviews, I can see others are, but it did give me a concise introduction into "the way of Kabbalah." If you're looking for a similar introduction, Halevi's book is can give you that.

Remember though, this is only an introduction. Actual techniques and practices, while mentioned, are not described in detail. The book recommends group study of Kabbalah under a qualified maggid. This is not a guidebook for a "do-it-yourself" mystic journey to discover the higher realms.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne)
The Matrix (1999)

Review: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Reading Scholem again from our precarious vantage point in the age of the information revolution, at the moment of the much-trumpeted breaking of a canon, we may detect in his grand evocation of this strange and in many ways quite alien mystical corpus an exemplary pattern of how viable historical change takes place, how the antithetic tensions of life in culture lay against each other without destroying the continuity of the cultural system.

In this regard, Scholem's searching investigation of the twisting paths of Jewish mysticism makes profoundly instructive reading as we approach the millennium. But he also sees sharply that the mystics, impelled by discernible historical circumstances, very often sought to escape the ordeal of history by withdrawing into a realm of ecstasy and, at worst, delusion.

Scholem's magisterial study is hardly intended to promote a nostalgia for mysticism or any illusion that we can embrace it as it was, but he makes us see the essential role it has played in the Jewish story, and indeed in the human story, and he leads us to ponder what other symbolic languages there might be to express our stubborn sense of connection with eternal things.

From the Foreward to Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
written by Robert Alter
Berkeley, 1995

Gershom Scholem was not a mystic. He was a thorough and compelled educator and researcher who threw himself into an investigation of Jewish mysticism which resulted in Major Trends, a book that is considered to be a major contribution and central tome on the history and nature of the Jewish mystical movements.

Scholem's book is based on the nine Stroock Lectures he presented at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1938 (Major Trends was published just a few years later) and each chapter stands, more or less, on its own, with just a few strings weaving forward and backward to the other material. The book functions as a whirlwind tour of the history of the various flavors of Jewish mysticism and how they developed, from first century Roman Judea and Merkabah mysticism, through 18th and 19th century and Polish/Ukrainian Chasidism. Suffice it to say, the book covers a vast territory. Unless you are already well versed in the different expressions of Jewish mysticism, don't hope to come away with an easily digested summary of what makes up the different mystic traditions. You can read the book cover to cover, but once you've done so, you'll need to do so again, and then you'll use this book as a reference when exploring one or more of the mystic movements in detail.

My own modest introduction to the Jewish mystic tradition was in reading and reviewing Paul Philip Levertoff's Love and the Messianic Age. Levertoff was a Chasidic Jew who lived in the late 19th and into the mid-20th century and who saw the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of John, as a reflection of his own mystic background as a Chasidim. When I read Levertoff and the FFOZ/Vine of David commentary on his work, I began to see frail glimpses of who the Jewish Messiah is through that unusual and elusive lens and I wanted to see and understand more.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is more; a lot more.

As a non-Jewish Christian and disciple of the Jewish Messiah, I started reading Scholem with an eye on discovering more hidden truths about the Jesus (Yeshua) within his pages and I must say I found those truths...and I didn't.

I have to be careful here. It is easy to find what you're looking for, much like a person panning for gold nuggets, eager to "strike it rich". But does a person searching the river with an eye filled with preconceptions find true gold, or only what looks like gold? That's the dilemma I faced reading Scholem.

I found many dualisms and parallels that seemed to point to Jesus, especially in the earlier mystic traditions, but is he really there? I don't know that I can say "yes" or "no" based on Scholem's rapid and intense coverage of such a broad spectrum of Jewish mysticisms. Right now, I prefer to withhold judgment and to be content learning what there is to learn on Scholem's terms rather than my own. The rest will come, God be willing.

The details of the book are too numerous to document here. I wrote copious notes as I turned each page, but to replicate those notes here would create a novel, not a blog post. The chief benefit of reading Major Trends at this stage of my education is to lay a wide foundation for what comes afterward. I've already started reading my next book, The Way of Kabbalah by Ben Shimon Halevi, and from the very first page, what I had learned from Scholem enabled me to grasp Halevi's description of Kabbalah in a way I couldn't have achieved otherwise (Scholem dedicated two full lectures just to the Zohar).

Scholem seems to leave out no detail or observation as he takes us through history, examining each mystic movement in Judaism. He relates not only the prize, but the peril of pursuing the mystic, and not only the virtues, but the flaws and fallacies of each mystic writer and explorer. As Alter stated in the Foreward, Major Trends is both a Jewish story and a story of human beings striving, sometimes vainly, to pursue God in His "native realm" which lies beyond the boundaries of human perception and existence. Scholem's final lecture ends this way:

The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me. Under what aspects this invisible stream of Jewish mysticism will again come to the surface we cannot tell. But I have come here to speak to you of the main tendencies of Jewish mysticism as we know them. To speak of the mystical course which, in the great cataclysm now stirring the Jewish people more deeply than in the entire history of Exile, destiny may still have in store for us - and I for one believe that there is such a course - is the task of prophets, not of professors.

There's another way to view the course Scholem describes:

If we were Jews because our minds and hearts told us so, then our Judaism would take us only as far as our minds and hearts can know. But we are not. And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
from his short article, "Not by choice"
Chabad.org

Jewish mysticism is not just a Jewish story but a human story. It's a journey to find God using means that go beyond prayer and study. It's a path that leads us outside of our perceptions and even outside our imaginations, and into a set of worlds fantastic and dangerous. Ezekiel saw such worlds. So did John as he describes in the Book of Revelations. Scholem doesn't tell us how to find the road that takes us to these worlds, but he tells us many stories about the men who did. If you want to learn about the mystics who discovered the trail head into the unknown, reading Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is a good place to start.

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

Search for the Messiah in Pools of Unknowing

The first phase in the development of Jewish mysticism before its crystallization in the mediaeval Kabbalah is also the longest. It's literary remains are traceable over a period of almost a thousand years, from the first century B.C. to the tenth A.D., and some of its important records have survived...Between the physiognomy of early Jewish mysticism and that of mediaeval Kabbalism there is a difference which time has not effaced.

Gershom Scholem
Chapter 2: Merkabah Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

The first thought I had when I read this passage from Scholem's classic is that this early mystic Jewish tradition occurred within the lifetime of Jesus, the apostle Paul, and later "church fathers", and some the writers during the era of the Gospels and Epistles could possibly have been influenced by such a tradition.

OK, I know you may think that's rather far fetched, but considering the "mystic" nature of John's Gospel as well as the imagery in Revelation, I don't think I'm reaching too far out of the bounds of credibility, particularly considering all (or most) of the early "documenters" of the teachings of the Jewish Messiah were Jewish themselves. Perhaps Yochanan ben Zakkai, who Scholem cites as one of "the most important representatives of mystical and theosophical thought" during the mid-first century era influenced some of the writings about Yeshua (Jesus) and his followers.

All of this, at least in terms of my very limited knowledge, is very thinly connected and anyone even marginally more familiar with the topic (which includes just about anyone familiar with Jewish mysticism) could blow away my arguments and suggestions with a mild sneeze. Still, it's rather compelling to take a look at these tentative connections and consider the possibilities.

Derek Leman, in his recent blog post Biblical Glimpses Into Mystical Horizons makes a few comparisons of his own:

EPISTLES: The one who ascended into the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12. The uniting of all things in Messiah in Ephesians 1. The one who descended into human form in Philippians 2. The God and Lord of 1 Corinthians 8. The Radiance of His Glory in Hebrews 1. The One in Whom All Things Adhere in Colossians 1 (and the Image of the Invisible God).

Scholem writes:

Thus for example in the "Visions of Ezekiel", which have recently become known, Ezekiel sees the seven heavens with their seven Merkabahs (driven by four chayot or "living creatures"; Isaiah 6:2, Revelation 4:8) corresponding to the seven heavens is still innocent of any mention of Hekhaloth, or chambers, of the Merkabah.

This references Ezekiel's vision (Ezekiel 1:4-26) and definitely recalls the scriptures Leman cites including:

I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. -2 Corinthians 12:1-7

Again, I can't say for certain nor to I assert as absolute, the connections I'm proposing here, but novice in mysticism that I am, it certainly sparks some interest. Still, Paul seems to be saying that he has accomplished what many mystics throughout the ages have attempted: a transition (in one form or another) into the realms outside of our own into those that approach the Throne of God...and he returned sane and whole.

I've said numerous times before in other blog posts, that I'm becoming convinced that we cannot understand the teachings of the Jewish Messiah and his early disciples without some ability to look at those teachings through a Jewish mystical lens. This goes beyond an understanding of Torah and Talmud (and possibly flies in the face of Judaism's more "rational" understanding of God), but there are "mysteries" exposed in the Apostolic scriptures that suddenly become more comprehensible if we don't examine them only with a literal and practical microscope. Seeing that Jewish mysticism can trace its origins to the first century B.C.E. (and perhaps before even that), makes it all the more likely that such a tradition found its way into the early Jewish writings describing the person and mission of the Jewish Messiah. How the divine could become a man and dwell among human beings requires belief beyond the physical realm and mysticism is the door that leads to the world where the mysterious can, in some fashion, become known.

I suppose you could just consider me a person who has gone off the deep end and that mysticism is a fool's errand. You wouldn't be alone. From Scholen's book:

If, finally, you were to ask me what kind of value I attach to Jewish mysticism, I would say this: Authoritative Jewish theology, both mediaeval and modern, in representatives like Saadia, Maimonides, and Hermann Cohen, has taken upon itself to task the formulating an antithesis to pantheism and mythical theology, i.e.: to prove them wrong.

Here, we see some of the greatest luminaries among Jewish wisdom and intellectualism standing opposed against the Jewish mystic tradition. Nevertheless, Jewish mysticism has survived such attempts to be extinguished and endures into modern times in Kabbalah and Chasidic Judaism. It occurs to me that the philosophical vs. the mystical approach to God doesn't have to be either/or. They can both co-exist as different perspectives; perceiving God from radically different angles of observation (and participation). And then, there's this:

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.

Commentary on Paul Philip Levertoff and
Love and the Messianic Age

A rare but direct and living connection between the Chasidim, their mystic understanding of things, and the Gospel of John brought young Feivel Levertoff into discipleship under the great Rebbe Yeshua of Nazareth. He recognized the mystic in the Gospels and in the teachings of the Messiah. In fact, Levertoff thought it was impossible to understand the Jewish Messiah without a mystic understanding.

Where does that leave those of us without that understanding? It leaves us at the doors to the libraries and maybe even the synagogues, daring to enter and striving to learn more.

Knowledge is beyond me; exalted, I am incapable of it. Where can I go from Your Spirit? And where can I flee from Your Presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; were I to take up wings of dawn, were I to dwell in the distant west, there, too Your hand would guide me, and Your right hand would grasp me. -Psalm 139:6-10

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

A Brief Meeting with the Mystic

We have seen that mystical religion seeks to transform the God whom it encounters in the peculiar religious consciousness of its own social environment from an object of dogmatic knowledge into a novel and living experience and intuition. In addition, it also seeks to interpret this experience in a new way. Its practical side, the realization of God and the doctrine of the Quest for God, are therefore frequently, particularly in the more developed forms of the mystical consciousness, connected with a certain ideology. This ideology, this theory of mysticism, is a theory both of the mystical cognition of God and His revelation, and of the path which leads to Him.

Gershom Scholem
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

This is part of Scholem's struggle or "quest" to attempt to define mysticism in general and Jewish Mysticism in specific. It's also just a few pages into the first chapter of his classic tome on the latter and my first serious introduction to this topic.

Just about the only time I find free time to read most days is during my lunch hour from work. I walk ten minutes to my local public library, try to find a quiet corner where I'll be undisturbed, and begin to turn the pages and perform an elementary exploration into what most would consider "alien" worlds.

It's slow going.

The concept of mysticism is difficult to define, not because Scholem lacks the skills or understanding, but because the mystic is a difficult vision to relate, particularly as words on a page. It's like trying to describe a world to others that only you can see. It's as if you can peer into a fifth and sixth dimension and then labor to find a vocabulary to relate your perceptions to those of us who can only see in the mundane three-dimensions.

Perhaps it's not that bad, but it's not that easy either. Yet the need to describe the journey is as powerful as the drive to walk the mystic's path. And that drive comes from the need to walk beyond the four walls of ordinary existence and to somehow become involved in a realm where you can touch the hem of God's garment. It's the need to cross a fundamental gap that was built into the universe:

Man becomes aware of a fundamental duality, of a vast gulf which can be crossed by nothing but the voice; the voice of God, directing and law-giving in His revelation, and the voice of man in prayer. The great monotheistic religions live and unfold in the ever-present consciousness of this bipolarity, of the existence of an abyss which can never be bridged.

When I read Scholem's words and tried to envision the abyss, another voice spoke up from a different direction:

“If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

While I doubt that Nietzsche intended this expression to be used in the way I'm interpreting it, I sometimes wonder if the abyss he describes is the same one Scholem offers; staring into the abyss between man and God...and having the abyss finally stare back into you?

Is that the mystic's final goal, to be able to have an exchange with the abyss, or is it just the first step on a journey into a larger experience?

This leads us to a further consideration: it would be a mistake to assume that the whole of what we call mysticism is identical with that of personal experience which is realized in the state of ecstasy of ecstatic meditation. Mysticism, as an historical phenomonon, comprises much more than this experience, which lies at its root. There is a danger in relying too much on purely speculative definitions of the term...

Herein lies an introduction to the danger of exploring the mystic; the assumption that whatever you experience personally and subjectively, must be a mystical encounter with God or His Spirit. I add that last part because I have heard so many times in traditional Christian circles of believers relating their encounters with "the Holy Spirit" and that, their internal, subjective, emotive states were interpreted as signs of what the Spirit wanted them to do.

As far as I could tell, the "signs" were telling many of these people to do what they wanted to do anyway, more's the pity.

Of course, I can't completely discount that "the Spirit" communicates while, at the same time, conducting an inquiry into a metaphysical encounter with God; staring at the abyss and summoning a method of crossing. But how do you tell who is truly the recipient of a supernatural encounter and who is simply engaging in wish-fulfillment? Scholem himself proposes that internal, subjective experiences are not enough evidence:

There is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysticism of a particular religious system, Christian, Islamic, Jewish mysticism, and so on.

Moreover, as Evelyn Underhill has rightly pointed out, the prevailing conception of the mystic as a religious anarchist who owes no allegiance to his religion finds little support in fact.

Above all, what encourages the emergence of mysticism in a situation in which these new impulses do not break through the shell of the old religious system and create a new one, but then to remain confined within its borders.

So much for studying Kabbalah without the context of the Jewish faith.

Apparently, there is no such thing as mysticism isolated and apart from an existing and recognized religious system, hence a study of "Jewish Mysticism" as opposed to "Christian Mysticism", "Islamic Mysticism", Greek Mysticism", and so forth. So Scholem, at least in this preliminary forage into locating a definition for his book's topic, presents a context for the mystic, in that he or she must remain within the boundaries of the larger religious organism, which for our purposes, is Judaism. But does the mystic always allow himself to be so contained?

It is hardly surprising that, hard as the mystic may try to remain within the confines of his religion, he often consciously or unconsciously approaches, or even transgresses, its limits.

With the context defined, we see that the main danger to the person desiring to explore mysticism is the risk of crossing the borderland from the mystic to the heretic...and as you might imagine, that dividing line is quite thin and not very apparent at times.

The subject of Jewish Mysticism came up at a class I taught (about the Shabbat) last Wednesday evening and, as an amateur explorer and novice tourist amid the dark alleys and shadowy passageways of the mystic tradition, I couldn't do justice to the questions of some of my students. After all, I'm a mere student myself.

I recently had the advantage of reading and reviewing Paul Philip Levertoff's Chasidic/Messianic text Love and the Messianic Age and the accompanying commentary produced by First Fruits of Zion/Vine of David, so I was able to point the interested parties in that direction.

Beyond that, I'm starting to read Scholem's classic. I suspect it will take awhile, but on the other hand, I must take Scholem's advice to go slow, allow myself to remain grounded by my religious anchors, and cautiously enter into the outer limits of the abyss between man and God, seeking to dispel darkness with an unfamiliar illumination.

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

Review: Love and the Messianic Age

Kabbalistic literature is, generally speaking, comparable to a large, sprawling city with many treacherous back-alleys, dangerous neighborhoods, and sudden, unexpected dead-ends. Even with a good map and a good sense for direction, the visitor is likely to find himself lost and confused and may easily stray into a bad part of town. Rather than trying to find your way through this maze-like metropolis on your own, we recommend you follow a reliable guide. Paul Philip Levertoff is just such a guide.

Boaz Michael from the Foreward to the
Love and the Messianic Age Commentary

I love this description of navigating the mystic Jewish writings. I feel as if, opening the pages to Paul Philip Levertoff's Love and the Messianic Age, that I'm an American tourist on his first visit to Constantinople. The year is 1923, and I've been suddenly diverted from my innocent vacation plans into adventure and intrigue, thrown in with Kasper Gutman and a collection of rogues, searching the back alleys of this ancient city for some clue as to the whereabouts of the Maltese Falcon.

While Dashell Hammett's famous detective novel wasn't published until 1930, Levertoff's short but impressive work originally became available in 1923 and now, thanks to First Fruits of Zion (FFOZ) and Vine of David, Levertoff's writing, insights, and expression of Jesus the Jewish Messiah, are accessible to us again.

Before continuing with this review, you might want to become briefly acquainted with Levertoff and how a young Chasidic Jew at the end of the 19th Century came to faith in Jesus, by reading my blog post, A Short Lesson from Feivel the Chasid. Levertoff's journey from an Orthodox Jewish student in Orsha, Belarus to an Anglican priest in Wales is fascinating and even amazing. Understanding his journey is the way to understand what he has to say to us.

As Boaz Michael writes in the Foreward to the book's commentary, mysticism isn't for everybody. I didn't think it was for me either, but I was getting "stuck" reading more Christian-oriented inspirational and scholarly works, as a way to find the Jewish Messiah. The vast collection of Gentile Christian commentary has made discovering the "original" Jesus difficult by largely dismissing a Hebraic understanding of the Jewish Messiah, his Jewish disciples, and his teachings as a Jewish Rabbi and Prophet. After briefly being introduced to Levertoff's book and the concept of Jewish mystic writings on Derek Leman's blog, Boaz Michael suggested that I read (and review) Levertoff's book and the accompanying commentary.

I did...and I was hooked.

If you follow my blog, you could probably guess this, as, over the past two weeks, I've posted about 9 or 10 separate "mini-reviews" of different concepts and lessons I've learned while reading Levertoff.

Since last summer, I've been challenging my faith and questioning my basic assumptions about who Jesus is and who I am in him. This investigation intensified at the beginning February when I ran headlong into my ambiguity about the deity of Jesus (is he or is he not literally God?). In reading various Christian texts including Bowman's and Komoszewski's Putting Jesus in His Place, I failed to discover sufficient evidence and information to convince me that the Orthodox Christian viewpoint on Christ's deity and the Trinity held water. Reading Levertoff, I think I've found out why.

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 think Levertoff is right. I don't believe it's really possible to understand what the Jewish Messiah is teaching by taking him out of his context. I think what impressed Levertoff about the Gospels should absolutely amaze us.

In 1887 a nine-year-old Chasidic Jew named Feivel Levertoff was trudging home from cheder (a Jewish day school) when a discarded scrap of paper caught his eye. It was printed with Hebrew text. Supposing it was a leaf from a prayer book or other sacred volume, Feivel picked it out of the snow.

He quickly read the piece of paper. It was a page from a book he had never read before. It told the story of a boy like himself - not much older either - whose parents found him in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, expounding the Scriptures and learning with the great sages of antiquity.

Jorge Quinonez continues this tale of young Feivel by telling us that he had found a Hebrew translation of Luke 2:45-47 and supposed it was part of the Jewish holy writings. Feivel was shocked when he later showed the paper to his father, and his father expressed anger, forbade Feivel from ever again reading "such things", and then watched his father crumple the paper and toss it into the stove.

This was just the beginning of Levertoff's fascination with the Gospels as Feivel (later he chose the name Paul Philip after his formal conversion to Christianity) secretly found opportunities to continue reading the teachings of "Rebbe Yeshua of Nazareth". What continued to draw Levertoff along this path (and what should draw us as well), is how the Gospels so seamlessly and thoroughly blended into the Chasidic Jewish mystic writings, teachings, and world view. Seen through the eyes of a teenager who had the benefit of a classical Jewish education and exposure to the esoteric works of the Chasidim, Feivel was puzzled at how Gentile Christianity could ever make heads or tails of Yeshua. By the time Levertoff was 17, he was a devoted Chasid (a "Chasid" is a disciple of a distinguished Rabbi or spiritual leader in a religious community) of the great Rebbe Yeshua.

What Levertoff created in writing Love and the Messianic Age some decades later, and what FFOZ/Vine of David has provided by creating their commentary on Levertoff, is a roadmap that allows us to see the territory of the teachings of Christ through the lens of the Zohar, the Tanya, and the realm of Chasidic Judaism.

Although the world sees Levertoff as a Jewish convert to Christianity, it is more accurate to describe him as a Chasidic disciple of the Jewish Messiah. Levertoff's Jewish understanding of Jesus as the greatest and most unique Prophet, Rabbi, and ultimately, as the Messiah and Son of God, never wavered throughout his lifetime, and by writing Love and the Messianic Age, he granted a larger audience the ability to see through his eyes. By republishing Levertoff's book and writing their own detailed commentary on Levertoff, FFOZ and Vine of David have allowed even generally non-mystic, non-Jewish people like me, the ability to navigate the strange roads Boaz Michael describes, and to finally understand the Lord and Savior of the world as I believe he truly is.

If you're reading my review from a traditional Christian context, you may be having problems understanding what resonates within me when I read Levertoff, but I have found in this book, the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle in the picture of Jesus. Each writer, each scholar, each believer, has a different way of seeing Jesus. Sometimes the differences are slight, but I've found some of those differences to be profound. I can't say as an absolute fact, that Levertoff's presentation of who Jesus is, and his understanding of what Jesus taught, is the only way or the best way to look at the identity, nature, and character of the Jewish Messiah, but it is the only perspective that has answered questions for me, that no other investigator has truly addressed. How does Christ's deity connect to the Shechinah? How does the Gospel of John line up with the writings in the Zohar? What is the match between the Christian concept of koinonia and achdut or "unity", the highest ideal in Chasidism?

It seems more than astounding that the world of Jewish mysticism and the world of the Gospels so completely map to one another. It's like wandering through a city where the streets have no names, and then finding a guide who tells you how it all makes sense.

You may be thinking that trying to grasp the meaning behind Jesus by using a Chasidic model is too far for you to go. However, there's actually nothing particularly difficult about reading Levertoff or the commentary. The sources being cited may be beyond your experiences (they were for me), but the interface provided by book and by the commentary, make what's being said and the attendant meaning very accessible. For me, beyond accessibility and meaning, I also found illumination.

This isn't the only way to look at and understand Jesus, and it may not be the one you would choose at first, but I highly recommend that you give it a try, especially if how you see the Jewish Messiah right now in your faith, seems a little bit stale or perhaps, is just a picture that hasn't challenged you for a very long time.

Who is Jesus really? What did he teach? Is it possible that what you have been taught; what you think you understand isn't the whole picture? If those are questions you have, I urge you to get a copy of Levertoff's book as well as the FFOZ/Vine of David commentary. Read them slowly. Carefully unfold the map. Discover how the ancient streets and byways of the Holy City begin to open up for you. Faith isn't a vacation; it's an adventure. Let Paul Philip Levertoff be your guide to discovery and treasure.

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.

Proceeding Hopefully

I was having lunch with a guy who was telling me about a struggle he had been having for a while. He said he knew he was a sinner and that he was fallen and that he would keep committing this one sin, and he knew he was going to keep committing this one sins because he was a sinner and his nature was evil and there was nothing he could do about it because of what a sinner he was...

Do I have to go on?

I was so depressed I wanted to bang my head on the table. His question was basically, why do we struggle like this?
Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
by Rob Bell

If we have no joy in our hearts, we deny the love of God. We should not say, "Our heart is a dwelling place of lust, jealousy, anger; there is no hope for us." Let us realize that we have another guest in us who desires to give us life and joy, notwithstanding our sin. Even if we are disturbed by worldly thoughts during our most intimate converse with God, we should not lose courage and joy.
Love and the Messianic Age
by Paul Philip Levertoff

Jacob wrestled with an angel (Genesis 32:22-32) and we wrestle with what it means, especially to us. We wrestle with our sin and we wonder if God even hears us sometimes. We behave as if we're our own worst enemy and yet we're commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31, Leviticus 19:18).

Isn't that crazy?

Probably not.

Yesterday, I talked about struggling between despair and joy, experiencing disturbing emotions in the immediate situation and striving to find my joy in God as an enduring state. Where do we find this? How do we do this?

I don't know. It's not easy.

I sometimes get really tired of moral or religious platitudes that we hear from religious leaders who are preaching or writing books, saying that we just need to do "this" in order to achieve "that". It's as if they don't live in the same universe as the rest of us. It's as if they don't have real, personal lives like the rest of us. What the heck are they talking about?

Of course these people have the same struggles as everyone else. Being a Pastor or a Rabbi or a whatever doesn't suddenly mean that you aren't human anymore, or you're not vulnerable to the same human struggles as everyone around you. It sometimes means that religious leaders try and pretend they're not human because they think their "flock" needs a superhuman shepherd.

It's one thing to "suck it up" and put your own concerns to one side when someone else needs a shoulder to cry on, but it's another thing entirely to project your self-expectation of being "perfect" onto the people around you, especially the people who depend on your compassion.

It's OK to want to bang your head on a table sometimes. It's OK if, during prayer, some rotten, guilty little thought creeps in between you and God. That doesn't mean you have to cave in to either temptation, and it doesn't mean you're a horrible person or a failure. However, if we give in to despair and we give up on ourselves, we're also giving up on God.

He's convinced he is a sinner, he's convinced he is going to sin, he has no hope against sin, he believes his basic nature is sin, and then he wonders why he keeps sinning.

Rob Bell pretty much nails it as far as his lunch companion is concerned, and he maps out the danger Levertoff has warned us against (see the quote at the top of the page). While Jesus chided his disciples for their lack of faith, in fact, they had faith. They struggled with faith. They really struggled with faith when their Master was executed by the Romans, and their faith was restored when Jesus was resurrected. Their faith was strengthened and they were empowered when the Spirit came to them on the Festival of Shavuot (Pentecost). They kept their faith. They kept their hope. They were not abandoned. They were sometimes afraid, but they were never alone.

It's not a crime to struggle with faith. It's not a sin to struggle with God. The only real failure you'll face is if you give up on Him...and on you.

Sometimes we get tired and it's tough to get up and walk after a fall.Take it slow. Put your weight on one foot and then the other. Stand up. Then take the first step...

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

Failing "Joy 101"

If we have no joy in our hearts, we deny the love of God. We should not say, "Our heart is the dwelling place of lust, jealousy, anger; there is no hope for us." Let us realize that we have another guest in us who desires to give us life and joy, notwithstanding our sin.
-Paul Philip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
-1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
-James 1:2-4

As believers, we all want to obey Jesus. We want to do the will of God "on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). As human beings we all want to be happy. But I must admit that I have a very difficult time obeying God when He commands me to rejoice.

I don't feel joy, especially on a continual basis.

What?

Wait a minute. First of all, what is "joy?" According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, joy is:

1 a: the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires : delight
  b: the expression or exhibition of such emotion : gaiety

2: a state of happiness or felicity : bliss

3: a source or cause of delight

Is that what God's talking about?

If it is, then I have a problem and, according to Levertoff's statement, which I quoted above, it's a big problem. If I have no joy, I am denying God. Here's more:

Therefore, first of all, man ought to be happy and joyous at all times, and truly live by his faith in the Lord who animates him and is benignant with him every moment. But he who is grieved and laments makes himself appear as if he has it somewhat bad, and is suffering, and lacking some goodness; he is like a heretic, Heaven forbid. -Igeret HaKodesh 11 (Kehot)

But I'm not "happy and joyous at all times" and in fact, I don't really experience lots and lots of happiness on a more or less frequent basis. Sure, there are times when I'm happy or pleased or amused, but I have other emotions as well. I get angry, I get frustrated, I get sad, I get scared, I get depressed. When I'm experiencing those emotional states, am I denying God? Am I a heretic for not experiencing joy continually?

OK, Levertoff does distinguish between a state of happiness or joy that is situational vs. joy that is always present. He says that happiness is affected by immediate events as opposed to a joy in God that is (or should be) continually available. This seems to mean that I can be situationally angry or sad at the same time I'm experiencing (or should be experiencing) ongoing joy in prayer and worship of God.

The really tricky part is, in the Messianic age, of all the festivals of God, only Sukkot (The Festival of Booths) specifically commands that representatives of all the nations of the earth come to Jerusalem and celebrate before the Lord (Zechariah 14:16-19) and here's something very special about Sukkot:

Celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress. Be joyful at your festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns. For seven days celebrate the festival to the LORD your God at the place the LORD will choose. For the LORD your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete. -Deuteronomy 16:13-15

That's right, people celebrating Sukkot are literally commanded to be joyful. It's not an option. No other festival has the specific requirement for people to experience joy. But how is it done?

I know all the platitudes and the Bible verses that are aimed at us and that I am told, when utilized properly, will generate a continual state of joy in the believer, but I'm just not "feeling it." Heck, I still haven't figured out how Paul learned to be "content in all circumstances" (see Philippians 4:11-13), let alone joyful. I'm obviously missing something in my character and my faith. Is it just me, or do other people have this problem, too (and would you admit it if you did)?

What about people who are chronically depressed and even suicidal? According to Levertoff, the commentary on his book, and general Christian belief, they are being sinful. What about kids being sexually abused at home, wives battered by husbands, men who have just lost their wives to cancer, the 12 year old daughter of Udi and Ruth Fogel whose parents and three of her siblings were murdered in their home by Palestinian terrorists last Shabbat? What about all of the men, women, and children who have suffered terribly because of the earthquake, tsunami, and current nuclear radiation threat in Japan?

Where is their joy? Are they denying God and being heretics because they are in anguish? Can you feel joy at the same time as you're feeling anguish?

I know that all of the things I've just described are situational and the joy Levertoff and the Bible (and God) are talking about is a different, more persistent state, but how does that all work? I know there are times when I feel a kind of peace when I'm praying, worshiping, or studying the Bible. Is that joy, though?

I don't want to sin. I'm not trying to sin. Technically, when I feel sad, I should feel guilty for sinning but then, feeling guilty for sinning is a sin, too, isn't it?

I love Levertoff's book and I'm really enjoying the Vine of David commentary that goes along with it. I plan to pursue a modest study of Jewish mysticism at some point in the fairly near future, because I can see that it has very significant applications to understanding the Jewish Messiah and everything he taught.

But all that said, I am really struggling with this part of Levertoff and the whole "joy" thing, and it's only a few pages long. I'm tossing this one out there to everyone who reads this blog because I don't have an answer. What is this "joy" God is talking about? Where is it? How do you find it? How do you keep it? Most importantly, what do you do when you don't have joy?

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.