Jews, Christians, and Marital Metaphors

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church - for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery - but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. -Ephesians 5:22-33

As mentioned, things were somewhat different for Jewish women. Traditionally, women and men were seen as equals, but with different responsibilities and obligations. Thanks to God's revelations to Moses at Mt. Sinai, the Jews even had laws in place that governed the intricacies of marriage and divorce, as well as laws that specify what is to happen to a woman suspected of adultery.
Rabbi Aaron Parry
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud

Bilateral Ecclesiology and the Gentiles Series

I've been using marital metaphors in previous blog posts Bilateral Living and The One Who is Two to try and illustrate how it might be possible, based on scripture, to support at least some portion of Mark Kinzer's suggestions in relation to "Bilatereal Ecclesiology" as chronicled in his book Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People (2005). Keep in mind, I'm not completely sold on each and every point Kinzer makes in PMJ. I believe that the suggestions contained therein need a lot of work before they could be made a viable model to be pursued by Messianic Judaism and the Christian church as a "partnership plan". Nevertheless, the idea requires further investigation, particularly as it maps (or fails to map) to the Apostolic Scriptures, which is what I'm doing here.

Laugh if you must, but in trying to get a ground-level beginner's handle on even what the Talmud is, I've been reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud, which by the way, is a very good starter's primer. I decided to spend a small part of my Sunday afternoon reading the chapter "All About the Women" which addresses Nashim (Women), the third order of the Talmud. I barely got a few pages in when inspiration struck.

I was taken by how some of the descriptions regarding women and marriage not only seem to match up to the teachings of Yeshua and Paul, but how they could be applied to the "bilateral" relationship between Messianic Jews and non-Jewish Christians (and yes, there is and must be a relationship, otherwise, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Jewish Messiah was in vain). What first struck me was Rabbi Parry's words, ...women and men were seen as equals, but with different responsibilities and obligations. That's more or less how the concept of Bilateral Ecclesiology describes the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the believing realm, both in the time of Paul and today.

I had previously read Rabbi Judith Z Abrams's book The Talmud for Beginners: Volume I Prayer and she describes how, while women are not forbidden the commandments that men obey (except those that are obviously gender specific), some obligations, such as those that are time-bound, are not required. This includes praying the Shema twice per day, since the timing may interfere with a woman's duties and responsibilities in the home and to her children (and the feminists reading this right now must be pretty much outraged).

This sugya deals with a different kind of interference that prevents one from reciting the Shema with the required intention. In the rabbis' view, being a woman interfered with one's ability to relate to God. They assumed that a woman was responsible for the demanding, and time-consuming, tasks of raising children and managing a household and therefore could not be held responsible for performing positive, time-bound commandments...

Rabbi Abrams also states:

There are many exceptions to the rule of this system. Women are, in fact, obligated to perform some positive commandments, such as lighting the candles on Hannukah. Women are not forbidden to perform positive time-bound commandments; they are simply not obligated to do most of them...They may perform these mitzvot voluntarily if they wish to do so.

Because women are not obligated to do these mitzvot, the rabbis ruled that women cannot have the same intention and sense of responsibility regarding the mitzvot as men do...

I previously recorded these quotes and a more detailed account of Rabbi Abrams's book in my blog post The Right Question, but the content fits right in with what I've been writing about more recently, so I'm repeating it in this post.

It makes me wonder about God's plan in first, establishing His covenants with the Children of Israel, and making them His "treasured splendorous people" (Exodus 19:5) and then commanding the Israelites to be a "light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). It also makes me wonder about this:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. -1 Peter 2:9-10

Of course, Peter was the "emissary to the circumcised", so you could say he was writing to an exclusively Jewish audience, except in verses 11 and 12, he says, Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

If he were talking to Jews; people who were already members of the covenant, why would he call them foreigners and exiles, since they clearly weren't such a thing. Yes, in verse 12 he tells his audience to live such good lives among the pagans, but as Messianic disciples, the Gentile believers in the audience would no longer be pagans. Also, in the original quote, Peter refers to his audience as Once you were not a people which makes absolutely no sense if his audience were Jewish covenant members.

Don't worry. I'm not saying that believing Gentiles are equal to believe Jews, except to the degree, as Rabbi Parry states, that Jewish men and Jewish women are equal, but with different obligations and responsibilities. To extend the metaphor though, if Gentiles and Jews are equal but different in the manner that the Talmud describes Jewish men and women to be, then can we say, like Jewish women, that Torah obedience is not specifically forbidden to Gentile Messianics (i.e. Christians) but is allowed on a voluntary basis?

I know some of you are thinking that there are sections of the Talmud that specifically forbid Torah observance by Gentiles or sections that praise Gentile obedience to the commandments, with the understanding that those mitzvot are limited to the Noahide laws, but wait.

Remember that the Talmudic sages, probably down to a man, would not have considered the status of Gentile disciples of Yeshua (Jesus) as relevant to their opinions, particularly because Jews and Christians were very much at odds while the Oral Laws were being documented and certainly during the time when the sages were writing their Gemara on the Oral traditions.

This is a limitation, perhaps a necessary one, that restricts some of the application of the Talmud to the current argument, but not completely.

Daniel on his blog "Christian for Moses" has illustrated that there is Talmudic precedent for non-Jews to perform the mitzvot, though with different motivation, and I've blogged on similar topics and presented further quotes of the sages in the opinions of Rabbi Mayer Twersky and my review of FFOZ's tefillin booklet.

If you start putting all of the pieces together, the picture of the jigsaw puzzle begins to become recognizable. Getting back to something I said earlier, perhaps it was God's plan all along, to create a "nation of priests" of the Children of Israel, and then to use them as a "light to the nations" to, in effect, "marry" the groom to the bride, creating "one flesh" or "one new man" out of the two "individuals", each being equal or co-heirs and co-citizens to one another, but with different responsibilities and obligations to God, the Torah, and each other, much as what you would find in almost any marriage. I liked what Rabbi Parry said here:

According to Jewish thought, marriage is considered one of life's greatest treasures. What's more, it's believed that the relationship that most closely parallels the relationship between man and God is the marital union between a man and a woman.

Both the Tanakh and the Apostolic Scriptures use marital metaphors to describe the relationship between the Children of Israel and God as well as the union between the Jewish and Gentile Messianic community and the Jewish Messiah.

“Return, faithless people,” declares the LORD, “for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion. Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding. In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,” declares the LORD, “people will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the LORD.’ It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made. At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the LORD, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the LORD. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts. In those days the people of Judah will join the people of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your ancestors as an inheritance. -Jeremiah 3:14-18

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. -Ephesians 5:24

I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. -2 Corinthians 11:2

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.” (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.) Then the angel said to me, “Write: ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’ ” And he added, “These are the true words of God.” -Revelation 19:7-9

I don't think Kinzer's book is the final word on how this "mixed marriage" or rather God's plan for a "mixed marriage" between Christians and Jews is ultimately supposed to work out. Also, the One Law movement is very good about describing the "equality" between the "husband" and "wife" but not so good about describing the inherent differences in responsibilities and obligations that must exist, even between two people made into "one flesh" or two people groups made into "one new man". Clearly, no one has a "lock" on understanding how Jewish and Gentile Messianic relationships are supposed to operate.

I don't know how it works either, or rather, how it will work. I do think that we'll keep struggling with our relationship until the Jewish Messiah returns and straightens us all out. Then, we will all take our places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven together (Matthew 8:11).

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark, ignoring the light of the world. Look for the lamp who lights your path or you may become lost in the dark forever.

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