For the week of May 31, 2025 / 4 Sivan 5785

B’midbar
Torah: B’midbar/Numbers 1:1 – 4:20
Haftarah: Hoshea/Hosea 2:1-22 (English: 1:10 – 2:20)

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. (Hoshea/Hosea 2:16-17; English 2:14-15)

This week’s Haftarah (selected reading from the Hebrew Prophets) is from Hoshea, Hosea in English. It is a message of extremes, which is not unusual for God’s ancient spokespeople. The extremes are those of Israel’s great unfaithfulness and their eventual restoration to God. I think it is accurate to say that this is a core biblical theme, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Covenant Writings. From a New Covenant perspective, its reasonable to regard God’s restoration of the unfaithful as the theme of all Scripture. Despite the Hebrew Scriptures’ focus on a single nation, the people of Israel, New Covenant adherents tend to universalize God’s workings with Israel to the extent that the depictions of wayward Israel become a prototype of the general waywardness of the human race. For many Christians, the promised Jewish Messiah, the vehicle of Israel’s restoration, becomes the Savior of the whole world.

This connection is not only valid, it’s intentional. It fulfills God’s promise to Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Bereshit/Genesis 12:3). However, the fact of fulfillment has been leveraged in misguided ways. Many have concluded that this outworking of God’s covenantal commitment to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob nullifies its implications for its original recipients.

The universalization of God’s restorative work, as vividly depicted in Hoshea’s relationship with his wayward wife, if anything, should emphasize, not detract from, God’s faithfulness to the people Hoshea’s wife symbolized. In fact, denying God’s ongoing faithfulness to Israel undermines the basis of his restoration work among the nations. To deduce that the broader scope of restoring wayward Gentiles in some way makes God’s message through Hoshea to Israel obsolete is to not only deny Scripture but also misrepresents God.

Few seem to be aware of how destructive it is to deny God’s ongoing faithfulness to Israel. It wouldn’t be so bad if people would simply treat the Hebrew Scriptures as obsolete. It’s still wrong, just not as bad. This way of thinking sees God as working among Israel for a time, but whose purpose is complete once the Messiah comes. This approach might continue to use the Hebrew Scriptures for background information and to foreshadow New Covenant fulfillment, but that’s all. Come to think of it, that’s a very common approach. And even though it’s scripturally unsound, I wish it would end there. Yet, tragically, something very insidious usually happens instead, with passages such as our Haftarah being used against the Jewish people. In the name of obsolescence, God’s faithfulness to Israel is denied, while Israel’s waywardness remains.

In our Haftarah, the people of Israel are described in fairly negative terms. That’s pretty much par for the course throughout Hebrew Scripture. But that’s because they are normal people, just like everyone else. God didn’t choose Israel for Israel’s sake alone. He did so as part of his great worldwide restoration plan. A main feature of Israel’s function in the grand scheme of things was to demonstrate everyone’s need for the one true God. We (my being Jewish myself) do that by being both the historical vehicles of God’s Word and by being examples of human beings’ need for God. That’s why the Bible doesn’t only have teaching about God, but includes our stories of failure (and some successes).

But God didn’t broadcast our failures via the world’s all-time best-selling book in order to shame us. Instead, he wanted to vividly display his extraordinary graciousness for all to see. God’s faithfulness to wayward Israel is designed to demonstrate his faithfulness to wayward you! And yet, through the centuries, despite passages like this week’s Haftarah, the Church has denied the enormity of God’s faithful love. You can’t have it both ways. Either his covenantal commitment to Israel is secure or it’s not. And if not, what hope do any of us have?

For the week of May 24, 2025 / 26 Iyar 5785

Behar & Bechukotai
Torah: Vayikra/Leviticus 25:1 – 27:34
Haftarah: Jeremiah 16:19 – 17:14

O LORD, my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in the day of trouble, to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth and say: “Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit. Can man make for himself gods? Such are not gods!” (Jeremiah 16:19-20)

These words from God, spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, look forward to the day when the nations will acknowledge the uselessness of their ancestral traditions, including idol worship, and turn to him, the one true God, the God of Israel. This certainly foreshadows the Jewish messianic mission to the nations. From our vantage point, two thousand years after the coming of Yeshua, it’s challenging to comprehend the phenomenal revolutionary effect the early Messianic Jews had on their pagan neighbors. Led by God’s Spirit, they confronted one of the most powerful empires in history at its very foundation.

Take the great port city of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey, for example. It was home to the so-called “great mother goddess” Artemis. It was here that a riot began because a messianic Pharisee named Paul was proclaiming that “gods made with hands are not gods” (see Acts 19:26). This is not a case of competing religions, but a cosmic clash between light and darkness. This clash has continued to the present day, to the extent that there are few places on earth where people have not turned from their empty traditions to the truth of the one and only God in the Messiah.

Perhaps you grew up in an environment that was friendly to biblical truth. It might be difficult to imagine the level of personal and societal upheaval associated with accepting the emptiness of one’s false gods. This is not so much due to the entities themselvesbut the structures of thought and social norms associated with them. It’s no wonder that even today, people lose jobs, friends, and family over accepting God’s truth.

But don’t be fooled. This dramatic, all-encompassing transformation isn’t just for those from cultures vastly different from a biblical view of the world. Not to take anything away from Jeremiah’s extraordinary prediction of Gentile nations turning from their false gods, notice that immediately preceding the beginning of this week’s Haftarah (weekly reading portion from the Hebrew prophets), we read of God’s punishing Israel for the very sin of idolatry. I like to say the Bible is always talking, not to someone else, but to the reader. No one is let off the hook. Our reading of Scripture should always result in an examination of self, not the other guy. I am pretty sure that Jeremiah’s prophecy about Gentiles turning from idols was designed to prompt Jewish repentance.

The Jewish expectation of pagans turning to the God of Israel was not to be a source of pride, but instead an opportunity to examine oneself and respond accordingly. All of us need to take a serious look at our own lives from a biblical frame of reference. Just because we claim to adhere to the truth doesn’t mean we do. We might try to assure ourselves we are okay just because we think we have the right words, attend the right congregation, have the right creed, or have the right associates. And perhaps they are the right words, and so on. Remember, even good things can become idols when we rely on them instead of God.

Scriptures taken from the English Standard Version

For the week of May 17, 2025 / 19 Iyar 5785

Emor
Torah: Vayikra/Leviticus 21:1 – 24:23
Hafatarah: Ezekiel 44:15-31
Originally posted the week of May 5, 2018 / 20 Iyar 5778 (updated)

Thus Moses declared to the people of Israel the appointed feasts of the LORD. (Vayikra/Leviticus 23:44)

According to Wikipedia, “Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity.” When cultural appropriation first came to my attention some time ago, I thought the strong objection to it was a bit strange, not because I don’t understand the concern, but because I am so used to it – sort of!

As a Jewish believer in the Messiah, whose spiritual relationships are mainly among non-Jews, I encounter cultural appropriation constantly. In fact, Christianity is and has always been an exercise in cultural appropriation. Generally, Jews and Christians are not aware of this, however, since most Christian cultural expression wouldn’t be recognized as Jewish. The fact is there is almost nothing within Christianity’s core beliefs that isn’t derived from the Jewish world. Some are more obvious than others. The primary document for Christians is the Bible, both Old and New Testaments written almost exclusively by Jews and focused on activities happening to or done by Jewish people. Even as global outreach developed, its development and implementation was in Jewish hands. The God of the Christians is the God of Israel. The religious and theological concepts adhered to by Christians are all Jewish in origin, such as sin, righteousness, sacrifice, and holiness. Then there’s the very center of all core concepts, the Messiah. While the Jewish and Christian worlds have traditionally been divided over the Messiah’s identity, Christianity is founded on the conviction that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Jewish Messiah. Using Greek-oriented instead of Hebrew-oriented terminology obscures the cultural connection. That many Jews and Christians aren’t conscious that Christ and Messiah, for example, are synonyms doesn’t negate the Jewish nature of the messianic concept.

Other key Jewish components of Christianity are not as obvious. Most people don’t realize that baptism was originally a Jewish custom that was done as part of the conversion process as well as when an estranged Jewish person wanted to return to God. The development of the church as the place of community teaching and prayer was based on the synagogue. Communion, also called the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper, is taken from Passover. The hope of the resurrection of the body was an exclusively Jewish concept. We could go on.

The early Jewish believers went out of their way to allow the Good News about the Messiah to function freely and fully in a non-Jewish context. Through God-given wisdom they freed the core of biblical faith from Jewish cultural control, allowing the nations to work out the essentials of biblical spirituality within their own contexts. What I don’t think the early believers envisioned is how far from a Jewish frame of reference the Church would go.

Many non-Jewish believers over the past hundred years or so have sought to re-contextualize Christianity within a Jewish frame of reference. Some correctly understand that the freedom to adapt biblical teaching within foreign cultures, while helpful in many ways, can tend to skew biblical truth, especially when cut off from its Jewish roots. At the same time, however, the passion to restore biblical faith to its ancient roots can go overboard. This is where appropriate cultural adaptation can become misappropriation. This happens in two ways: first, by confusing Jewish culture with biblical truth. Not everything that is Jewish is necessarily biblical. Much of Jewish culture found in the world today is recent in origin. While we don’t know the tunes of King David’s psalms, we are fairly certain that they were not anything close to what is thought of as Jewish music today. Similarly, Jewish foods are normally adaptations of local fare throughout the world where Jewish people have lived. Apart from the limits of kosher laws, there is nothing intrinsically biblical about the vast majority of Jewish cuisine.

The second type of misappropriation is in regard to actual biblical material. For example, take the feasts as listed in this week’s parsha (weekly Torah portion). It is tragic that this key component of the Books of Moses, like most of the Hebrew Scriptures, has been virtually ignored by Christians. There is so much to learn from the feasts as they teach us about God’s character and activities. Yet it is easy to go from a healthy renewed focus on Scripture to a misguided emphasis on cultural expression. Much of Jewish festival observance today is based on tradition, not Bible. Tradition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is culturally bound to the people who developed it. People don’t often possess the level of sensitivity necessary to adapt cultural forms. That doesn’t mean it should never be done. Perhaps what needs to be done, be it non-Jewish Christians in relation to Jewish people or between other cultural groups is to truly get to know the people whose culture it is before we treat it as our own.

Scriptures taken from the English Standard Version

For the week of May 10, 2025 / 12 Iyar 5785

Aharei Mot & Kedoshim
Torah: Vayikra/Leviticus 16:1 – 20:27
Haftarah: Amos 9:7-15
Originally posted the week of April 24, 2010 / 10 Iyar 5770

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Vayikra / Leviticus 19:17-18)

The Messiah was asked the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” (See Matthew 22:35-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-37). It was popular among Jewish religious leaders to attempt to summarize the Torah. Here is Yeshua’s answer:

The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And 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 neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:29-31)

Some people take this to mean that unlike the people living under the Old Covenant, followers of Yeshua have only these minimal requirements to follow. But that completely misses the point. Yeshua’s summary statement is intended as a perspective by which to view God’s requirements, not a recipe by which to ignore them. Yeshua was reminding a people who had become obsessed with the Torah as an end in itself that its directives were intended as the means of loving God and other people. Losing sight of these primary commands results in the failure to properly keep the others. Loving God and loving people is what God’s commands are all about.

Hearing Yeshua highlight “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” should draw us to the context of what he was quoting, some of which we read at the beginning. Loving our neighbor is not a vague sentimental concept based on emotion. It has very practical and far reaching implications. For example we read, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.” This tells us first that when difficulties arise with someone with whom we have relationship, we are not to hate them. Hate is not simply negative and angry thoughts toward another person. It is the tendency to disregard them or not care about them. This may occur with very little emotion. God instructs us that instead of ignoring issues we have with others, we need to deal with them through open and honest discussion and thereby avoid even greater issues arising between one another. This is what “love your neighbor” is all about or it is at least one example.

It could be that “but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” sums up a larger Torah section (see Vayikra / Leviticus 19:9-18) that includes being mindful of the poor among us, not stealing, having fair business dealings, not lying to others, not using God’s name to justify wrong, not oppressing others or robbing them, paying wages on time, showing respect toward the physically handicapped, demonstrating justice in court without partiality, not slandering, and not taking vengeance or bearing grudges against others. This is not a complete list, though it makes it clear that loving our neighbor is far more and much deeper than what we may normally think it is.

Loving our neighbor is not just having warm affection toward others or showing kindness to them, though it may include those things. God’s version of loving others involves a deep understanding of his ways and how they relate to how we are to treat others. To love is to be true to our God-given responsibilities towards those with whom we have personal and work relationships, business and legal dealings, as well as the needy and vulnerable around us. Let’s not cheapen God’s Word by reducing it to anything less.

Scriptures taken from the English Standard Version