A Question of Balance

Tonight at sunset, something awesome will happen. According to the Jewish Lubavitch Chabad sect, God will “recode the Universe”.

In less esoteric terms, the Jewish New Year of 5771 will commences when the sun sets this evening. According to the Jewish calendar, God created the world 5770 years ago. The Talmud says that the world is to last for 6,000 years. The first 2,000 years were years of desolation after which the Torah flourished for 2,000 years after the Law was transmitted to Israel at Sinai. The last two millennia of world history were to be the Messianic Age. According to the Jewish system of calculation, Messiah should have appeared 1,771 years ago!

But coming back to this evening, as we stand on the threshold of the new year, all the deeds you have committed in the last year will be weighed in the balances of heaven. According to Rabbi Ahron Lopianski on Aish.com, “Rosh Hashana is a day of judgment on who will enter this most exclusive club of eternity along with which deeds, and what is to be discarded.”

If you are judged by God to be perfectly righteous you will be inscribed in the “Book of Life” thus being admitted to Rabbi Lopianski’s “exclusive club”; if you did nothing good in the last twelve months but only evil, you will be inscribed for death. The good news, if you are one of the “intermediate” class, having done a fair amount of both god and bad in the last year, you have ten days till Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement to tip the celestial balances in your favour. This can be done through acts of tzedaka, or righteousness, such as giving to charity. You should also seek to make amends with anyone you have wronged and give attention to study of the holy books.

Ten days to tip the balances of heaven in my favour? I would need a whole lot longer than that. The tragedy of Judaism is that it has become like the religions of the nations; it is a religion of personal merit. God forgives if we prove worthy of his forgiveness.

Foundation or Support?

My Roman Catholic proselytiser friend, whom I told you about yesterday, was quick to respond to my letter with a series of statements not from the Bible but from the Catechism. I won’t weary you with them all but if you think the the differences between the Church of Rome and biblical Christianity are marginal, the following will be helpful to you. Emphases are mine:

80 “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, then, are bound closely together, and communicate one with the other. For both of them, flowing out from the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing, and move towards the same goal.

“Each of them makes present and fruitful in the Church the mystery of Christ, who promised to remain with his own "always, to the close of the age”.

81 “Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit.”

“And [Holy] Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound and spread it abroad by their preaching.”

82 As a result the Church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of Revelation is entrusted, “does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honoured with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence.”

85 “The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.”

This means that the task of interpretation has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome.

86 “Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith.”

87 Mindful of Christ's words to his apostles: “He who hears you, hears me”, the faithful receive with docility the teachings and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.

To which I replied:

I’m grateful to you for copying and pasting what the Roman Catholic Church says about itself but you can’t really expect someone who believes in the principle of “Scripture alone” to be persuaded by the claims of an organisation that sees itself as being above Scripture.

The NIV translation of 1 Timothy 3:15 is, for the reasons I outlined, inaccurate. The Church is the support of truth, not the foundation.

This elicited the following response:

The church answers the very canard that you make of the Church being above Scripture. Read the extract.

86 “Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith.”

87 Mindful of Christ's words to his apostles: "He who hears you, hears me", the faithful receive with docility the teachings and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.

Foundation is a legitimate translation and can be found in several Protestant versions.

Hedraioma: “a stay, prop, support”. Is not a foundation a support? This is semantics and prejudiced choice of words I fear.

I replied:

Although article 86 states the “Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant”, in practice it does not act as though it is the servant of the Word of God.

In the booklet you gave me, Joel Peters states categorically: “The Catholic Church readily acknowledges the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. But the Catholic doctrine is that the immediate rule of faith for the Christian is the teaching authority of the Church.” (Scripture Alone? p.19, my emphasis)

If that statement does not put the Church above Scripture, I don’t know what does!
In this respect, Roman Catholicism is remarkably like Judaism: Jacob Neusner: in Jews & Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition says that Christianity is “the religion of the Bible”. Judaism is “the religion of the Talmud”. Likewise, Christianity is “the religion of the Bible”; Roman Catholicism is evidently “the religion of the Magisterium”.

The very fact that Peters (and you) see the Church as the “foundation” (ibid p.16) of the truth indicates that in his (and your) view, truth is built on the church, not vice-versa!

The foundation is the most important part of a building.

You accuse me of “semantics and prejudiced choice of words” when you ask the rhetorical question: “Is not a foundation a support?” Yes it is but the distinction between hedraioma and themelios is not mere semantics. As for “prejudiced choice of words”, that criticism is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways.

Of course a “foundation” is a “support” but it is a particular type of support, one on which the entire edifice rests. That is why Christ is the only “foundation” (themelios not hedraioma) on which we build (1 Cor 3:11).

You can see what a difference if would make if 1 Cor 3:11-14 read like this: “No other support (hedraioma) can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this support (hedraioma) with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is.”

Hedraioma is never used in the New Testament for a foundation. The Greek word for foundation is themelios.

When we first met many years ago I told you there was one overwhelming reason why I could never accept Roman Catholicism. When you were an evangelical, you would have spent all your energies trying to lead people to Jesus; now those energies are spent trying to lead people who follow Jesus to “the Church”. If you were truly a Christian all those years ago, I have no doubt that Jesus would have been everything to you; now “the Church” is everything. Put up all the reasons for that polar shift as you might, the fact remains that for you “the Church” is now more important to you than Jesus.

A Tsuris Man

As everyone knows by now, A Serious Man is the “most Jewish” of Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies. I saw it last night and understood why many Jewish critics have felt offended by it. In the hands of the Coen brothers, the Book of Job turns into Kaballah meets the Theatre of the Absurd.

As the saying goes, “Jews are like everyone else and more so”, even more so in the unrestrained imaginations of two of the greatest film makers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A Serious Man is peopled by bland, vacant, selfish, foul-mouthed Jews. And that’s just the rabbis. There’s a Talmud Torah teacher who keeps a copy of Playboy hidden in his desk drawer, while other Jews in the film are in various combinations adulterous, lecherous, potheads.

For what it’s worth, the few goys in the movie don’t fare any better. The Japanese father is corrupt and willing to pay handsomely under the table for his son to get a good grade in physics. The non-Jewish neighbour of the principal character is an anti-Semite whose hate for Jews is exceeded only by his dislike of Orientals.

Larry Gopnik, like Job, is a man “perfect in his generation” (well, compared to everyone else) but “born to trouble as the sparks fly upward”. He doesn’t drink, smoke, swear, womanise (though, unlike his counterpart in the Hebrew Scriptures, when the opportunity presents itself he gives in to the temptation to take a peek at his next door neighbour sunbathing au naturale), cheat or lie but his world suddenly begins to fall apart around him. It starts with his wife informing she wants a “get” (no one else, not even the rabbis, seem to know what a “get” is) because she and Larry’s friend Sy have become “close”. From there on Larry is on a downward spiral. As a physicist, the distraught. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells him that no one knows what is going on but, like Job, he wants to know what is going on. Why are bad things happening to him? Why does HaShem allow him to suffer?

His three comforters are rabbis. The first two have nothing of substance to say and the third, considered to be the wisest of them all, just has nothing to say; he’s too busy thinking. The wisdom he eventually imparts to Larry’s post Bar Mitzvah son is not from Torah or Talmud but from Jefferson Airplane: "When the truth is found to be lies and all the joy within you dies… what then?"

The lesson? “Be a good boy.”

Larry's Satan/Adversary/Accuser is the Barry White soundalike Sy Adelman who takes away Larry's wife and home, and attempts to sabotage Larry’s tenure as a teacher through a series of anonymous letters to the school where Larry teaches.

In the closing scene of the movie, Larry’s doctor calls to tell him he wants to see him about some X-rays he took at the beginning of the film while, simultaneously, a tornado heads for Larry's son’s school. Was this the point, I wondered, when God would speak to Larry out of the whirlwind as he did to Job? In other words, was this the beginning of a turn around in Larry's fortunes? Or was the whirlwind an ominous portent that Larry's woes were only just beginning, as at the beginning of Job when a whirlwind kills Job's children?

A Serious Man is, like so many Coen brothers’ films, extremely clever. It is at one and the same time hilarious but tragic and serious. And, like their No Country for Old Men, it is bleak and without redemption. Not even Rashi is of any help; “Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you” is the quote at the start of the film.

The Coens paint a bleak picture of the inability of Judaism, or physics for that matter (no pun intended), to answer the deep questions of life. The answers to the questions asked by Larry, and Job before him, are found not even in the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings but in the one of whom they spoke, the one who said to his disciples, “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”