By John Ballard
The Rev. Howard Bess, a retired American Baptist minister who lives in Palmer, Alaska, penned an essay that one need not be either Christian for Jewish to appreciate. I did not know of this man before but when this assessment of Sarah Palin came back in a Google search he became a man after my own heart.
His observations of Palin from September 2008 in Salon said in part...
Bess is unnerved by the prospect of Palin -- a woman whose mind is given to dogmatic certitude -- standing one step away from the Oval Office. "It's truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level," Bess said. "Like all religious fundamentalists -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim -- she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil -- you destroy it. Talking with the enemy is not part of their plan. That puts someone like Obama on the side of evil.
"Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That's trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It's her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she's ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.
His essay about Jesus as a rabbi is a short, easy read.
Jewish religious leaders of the time were committed to cooperation with a corrupt and vicious Roman Empire that claimed divinity for its Caesars. Jesus could not bear the thought of being an ally of imperial Rome nor of its collaborators in Jerusalem.
To do so was contrary to his best understanding of Torah. His tool to achieve change among the Israelites was the telling of stories.�
The rabbinic tradition is fascinating. Torah never changes but the application of Torah changes constantly in accordance with the context of living. If Jesus is to be understood as a rabbi, we also need to recognize that he was a part of an ongoing tradition that would take into account the challenges of our time.
When Jesus was queried about Torah, he responded that it all could be summed up in two statements. Love of God and love of neighbor. Apparently these two statements in the mind of Jesus are never changing.
Yet, when he was asked to expand on love of neighbor, he told a story. In my imagination, if rabbi Jesus were asked questions in 2010, he would tell more stories, but he would not tell the same ones.
His new set of stories would be set in earthquakes, oil spills and hurricanes. They would be about animals, delicate plants and our earth�s environment; about paying taxes, luxury cars, and fatherless children.
They would be about courts and people in prisons; about farmers, lawyers and bankers, about immigrants and drug dealers; about football quarterbacks, senators, homeless alcoholics and scientists; about soldiers and protest marches.
Rabbi Jesus demands that his followers take Torah and the Kingdom of God everywhere they go � and Torah avoids no place or situation.
The question then becomes can you take the Torah with you and not take the Torah with you. Since this is impossible you must make the distinction that the real man Ribi Yehoshua ben Yoseph, the Mashiach took the Torah with him and taught his students to do so also, but Jzeus is the Hellenistic idol of the Xtain church which rejects Torah. They don't mix. They are diametrically opposing. The Jewish man whose tomb was found in Talpiot, Jerusalem is not the fabrication of Torah rejecting Hellenist Jews and non-Jews. These Torah rejecting Xtians are not the Torah observant Jews of the 1st century. The most complete compilation of the extant proof, including archeology, can be found at www.netzarim.co.il
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment and an enchanting link. I an appreciate how a contradiction in Rev. Bass' article jumps off the page at you. I appreciate you both in different ways as torchbearers along the same journey, though he is clearly more gadfly than you (serious, scholarly and contemplative).
ReplyDeleteYour comment reminded me of the name of a recent book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, lately reviewed on NPR. The author, Philip Pullman, is a self-described atheist telling a story. I'm not interested in yet another book about the subject, but some seekers may find it valuable.
In Pullman's version of the story, Jesus has a twin brother named Christ.
"I was intrigued, you see, by the difference between the two parts of the name Jesus Christ that we commonly use interchangeably," Pullman says. "So I thought, 'Well, maybe there is a difference. Maybe there are two beings here, not one.' "