MessianicMusings.com

In a continuing move to counter its image as an anti-Arab state, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, has nominated its first Arab as a righteous gentile, for hiding a group of Jews on his WWII-era farm in Tunisia. The honor is bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution.

The Arab in question, Khaled Abdelwahhab, took his life-saving actions over 60 years ago, and was nominated for the honor by Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a US think tank. Clearly, Abdelwahhab was a man of character, the kind of character it takes either to save lives or to be a Raleigh real estate agent.

Satloff sought to nominate Arabs for the honor following September 11, to counteract anti-Arab sentiment in the wake of the terrorist attack on America, as well as combat Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

“These are stories about which Arabs could be proud,” Satloff told the Jerusalem Post. “It would also entail accepting the context, because it would mean there was something to save Jews from.”

Clearly, folks like Khaled Abdelwahhab are figures far more worthy of honor than al-Qaeda terrorists. Hopefully, the honor and the message do not fall on deaf ears in the Arab world.

It’s a frequent objection from people who sit on the fence about their faith, or are hesitant to believe in Y’shua or haShem. The objection may focus on different specifics, but it always begins pretty much the same: “I could never believe in a G-d who…”

What follows isn’t always as important as the mindset. Today, a vast majority of Western people of faith approach religion as being subjective, rather than objective. In other words, G-d is not G-d as G-d defines himself. Instead, people believe in a G-d they are comfortable with, and tend to ignore the passages in Torah with which they are uncomfortable.

Prefer to think of G-d as all-loving and never judging? So do a lot of people. Prefer to think of a G-d who is all-holy and harsh in his judgments because you’ve too often been wronged by others? A lot of folks do that, also. Prefer to think of G-d as a rotund man in red who, in late December, hands out candy, Catholic gifts and other goodies to well-behaved kids? Folks even do that!

What we’ve lost is a for more messianic Jewish - and genuine - approach to the question of who G-d is. That approach is simpler: G-d is who he has revealed himself to be, like it or not. Is he loving? Yes! Is he holy? Yes!

How can he be both a G-d who loves and a G-d who destroys, such as with the slaying of the first born in the Exodus narrative? That’s part of the mystery and joy in discovering and growing in relationship to haShem. He’s not the simplified, homogenized “concept” that most modern worshipers would reduce him to. He’s far more fascinating and complex. And, frankly, far more puzzling at times, too.

It’s harder work to know haShem for who he really is, as he has revealed himself to be in the Torah. But that is a G-d far more worth knowing, if you ask me.

One of the mysteries of the Bible is the way in which G-d explains his actions in relation to Pharaoh and the exodus from Egypt. It would be a lot easier to deal with if the Torah said that Pharaoh’s heart was hard and therefore he kept denying Moshe and the Israelites the right to leave.

But that’s not quite how it’s worded. Look at Sh’mot (Exodus) 10:1a:

Adonai said to Moshe, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have made him and his servants hard-hearted…”

And again, at Sh’mot 10:20:

But Adonai made Pharaoh hard-hearted, and he didn’t let the people of Is’rael go.

It’s a recurring theme, repeated throughout the Sh’mot narrative until finally the children of Israel are allowed to leave Egypt. And when you notice it, it can be a bit disturbing.

Why would Adonai claim responsibility for Pharaoh’s stubbornness? Sure, as the old saying goes, the L-rd loves whom he loves and hardens who he hardens. But considering the severity of the final plague on Egypt, the slaying of the first-born, it makes one wonder why Adonai didn’t just let Pharaoh give in sooner, and spare lives.

Some of these things we may never fully understand. Could it be a translation difficulty, with a meaning we don’t fully appreciate in English? Could it be that Pharaoh had chosen his hard-heartedness long ago, but Adonai is simply laying claim to ultimate control over Pharaoh’s actions?

These are all possibilities, I suppose, but I prefer to wrestle with the meaning rather than explain it away conveniently. Perhaps there is another possibility.

It’s clear that Adonai knows what’s going to happen with Moshe, Aahron and Pharaoh; he promises the outcome long before Moshe ever returns to Egypt to begin the process of deliverance. Maybe it’s more a case, therefore, of Adonai simply knowing what Pharaoh is like, the way a parent knows a child’s tendencies. Rather than intervening, Adonai had allowed Pharaoh to become so hardened because Pharaoh had rejected obedience to the one true G-d so many times before.

That seems a bit more understandable than the typical idea that Adonai purposely hardened Pharaoh’s heart just to make it clear that Adonai was their deliverer, and not a beneficent Pharaoh. HaShem set yard markers for Pharaoh to follow all his life, and each time Pharaoh refused to meet them, he grew a bit more distant from haShem each day.

Which is not all that different from how believers fall away from obedience to haShem, Y’shua and Torah even today. A bit at a time.

Israel, currently under the rule of Ehud Olmert, a former Likud party member who helped found the centerist Kadima party, has appointed the first Israeli Muslim to a cabinet level position.

Knesset member Raleb Majadele, a member of the Labor Party, is the first Muslim to rise to such a high level in Israel’s democratic government. Of the seven million people living in Israel, about 20 percent - 1.4 million, approximately - are Muslim Arabs.

“The present government is proud to be the first government to give executive representation to the Arab Muslim minority,” said Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The appointment is certainly a blow to Palestinian claims that Israel shuts out Muslims from the political process in Israel, let alone the caterwauling that Israel is a terrorist state that mindlessly persecutes Muslims. It’s time for Palestinians to get out of the terror game and into something more promising, like printable greeting cards.

Maybe former President Jimmy Carter should just follow the version of the Golden Rule most of our mothers taught us: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

In his latest display of antisemitic idiocy, Carter complained that there are, and I quote, “too many Jews on the Holocaust council.” The absolute insanity of his statement is a disgrace to any legacy the failed president had left, and undoes all the goodwill he built running Habitat for Humanity the last couple decades or so. Folks in the construction and painting business should offer their efforts to a cause not controlled by an antisemitic fellow like Carter, I say.

It’s bad enough that Carter is stoking the fires of antisemitism with the release of his new book on the Middle East, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Now we find out that his antisemitism has been present for decades and kept hush-hush by the liberal media.

At least now, the truth is coming to light.

Reading through last week’s Torah portion again and looking ahead to this week’s, I can’t help but envy Moshe just a bit. I mean, sure, his life was full of trials and endless waiting and a lot of other inconveniences after he left his destiny as a king of Egypt behind. Being the person haShem selected to lead the children of Israel out of bondage was probably one of the most difficult jobs ever, short of perhaps what Noah was charged with.

Still, you have to think about how unutterably comforting it must have been to hear the voice of haShem so directly. Moshe never had to pray and pray and pray and then wonder if haShem heard him or not. From the burning bush to the face-to-face encounter on Mount Sinai, Moshe heard the voice of the L-rd, not just some still small voice inside him that he had to wonder about. When haShem spoke to Moshe, there was no doubt who it was doing the talking.

I think that perhaps that’s what kept Moshe going in the rough times. When wandering the desert with a lack of food got to be too much, Moshe didn’t have to soft-sell the experience to the children of Israel as some sort of diet trial to see how fit they could all become. All he had to do was talk it over with haShem and the L-rd would just answer.

These days, people who think they hear the voice of G-d that way are usually not prophets; they’re disturbed. And I’m sure my rabbi would argue that if one dedicated themselves to prayer enough, G-d could still work that way in someone’s life today.

But I’m not so sure it’d be exactly the same. To borrow an old punchline, “Burning bushes don’t grow on trees.”

Television ministries have always seemed a bit odd to me. A bit mysterious, a bit out of the mainstream. I mean, sure, getting a church service on television can on rare occasions be a good thing. But even in my pre-messianic days, when I was young in my faith and watched shows like The 700 Club, it always struck me as a bit odd that someone would send some minister they’ve never met face-to-face lots of money while neglecting the needs of the church they attend in their own neighborhood.

Sure, the TV stuff has high production values and usually the folks who make it big in broadcast ministries are highly charismatic and good public speakers. But to be honest, I’ve never really understood the appeal of supporting someone you don’t really know over someone you do.

In my own kehilat, I know I can trust Rabbi Stan because I see him a couple times a week. He knows me, too. He’s the one who presided over my wedding. That contact means that God can powerfully equip him to speak to my needs in a knowledgeable way. That’s something Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and even Zola Levitt can’t do.

I mean, one wouldn’t trust a TV commercial (or shouldn’t), or a TV doctor like Dr. Gregory House, to tell them what the best diet pills are. If one doesn’t trust a distant TV personality with their physical health, why trust one with your spiritual health?

Seems like a no-brainer to me; the one whose ministry should receive your support is the minister or rabbi who knows you best.

Well, now it starts to get serious.

Rabbi Stan met with all of us who want to take the advanced studies courses with an eye on ordination this week, and he made one thing perfectly clear: if we have an eye on ordination, the time to start teaching and working doesn’t begin in the two-or-more-years-down-the-road period. It begins now.

Turn out there’s a lot in Sar Shalom that needs doing that hasn’t necessarily been getting done and folks like me are now the first place they’re gonna be looking. It’s a bit intimidating. Before I’ve even sat through one session with Stan and my fellow Torah students, I will be overseeing next week’s bar/bat mitzvah class. Meaning I’m trying to teach while also attempting to keep a group of energetic 10- to 12-year-old kids in line and on task.

Frankly, I’m worried that after one weekend of that, I’ll be looking into spending time to recover at Orlando villas rather than going after an ordination. But I digress. I’m sure I’ll manage. Fortunately, I’m going to be paired up the first time out with a fellow Torah student. So at least I won’t be alone.

And so, we now wave goodbye in the Torah cycle to Yosef and move on to the book of Sh’mot (Exodus) and the life of Moshe (Moses). As an adopted child, the tale of Moshe has always held a bit of fascination for me.

Here’s a fellow born into a family of slaves, but through events he is unaware of most of his life, grows up knowing only the wealth and luxuries of life in the court of Pharaoh. We all know it happened, but how often does one take time to really ponder what it took for Moshe to walk away from that?

I mean, think about it. Food was plentiful. He could probably have married any woman - Egyptian or Semitic - he fancied. If he wanted to travel down the Nile on a yacht charter, he only needed to give the order. Life was easy, especially before he was anywhere close to an age where ascending to the throne was in the picture. Even then, the responsibilities of a Pharaoh were nothing strenuous compared to the duties of a Hebrew slave.

The B’rit haDashah book of Messianic Jews (Hebrews) calls this “forsaking the pleasures of sin for a season” and goes on to say that such selflessness was credited to him as righteousness. Yet does enjoying the only life you’ve ever known, a life of luxury, really qualify as sin? Say, on the same level as murder?

For most, perhaps not. But Moshe had a call on his life from haShem. To ignore that call? Sure, it would have been sin. But if one takes time to contemplate just how hard it was to walk away from all that, only then can one appreciate just how much Moshe gave up and how it could be “credited to him as righteousness” in the eyes of haShem.

Moshe is fascinating. I’m certainly glad to be digging into his life once again in the Torah cycle.

Thanks to the desire of most archaeologists to go beyond the limitations of their science to draw broad, unfounded conclusions, most of the world now believes that key figures in Torah history never really existed. They want hard evidence, which is what science is about, but in the absence of it, they step too far by concluding that something never happened.

Take Yosef, for example. In his book The Exodus Case, Dr. Lennart Moller advances the theory that the character the Torah calls Yosef, son of Ya’akov (Yisrael), is one and the same person as the fellow the Egyptians called Imhotep. Of course, the only way to prove it would be to have a CSI team come in with their DNA testing equipment and compare the remains of Yosef to the remains of Imhotep.

There’s only one catch. The ancient Hebrews took Yosef’s body and buried it in a mystery location, far away from his initial Egyptian tomb. The body of Imhotep has also never been found and is believed to have “gone missing” not very long after his death. So the two stories fit, but there’s only coincidence and faith to support the linkage on that point.

Yet, in the absence of hard evidence, forensic archaeologists would say, “There was no Yosef, there was no Imhotep.” A more responsible approach would be to say, “There’s no hard, scientific evidence by which we can prove or disprove this theory.” But such humility is rare in the field.

Sometimes the path I’m on seems awfully egotistical. Especially when I bump up against my own human failings. Who am I to think I’m qualified to teach anything about God to anyone?

Frankly, those moments of doubt comfort me. If they were to go away, then I’d have reason to worry. Becoming a pastor, teacher or rabbi is heady stuff. I mean that in the intellectual sense, not the “gee, this is a thrill” sense.

It’s dangerous, I think, to spend too much time studying and “inside your head.” It leads to feelings of superiority, especially intellectual superiority. And that’s dangerous.

Sheltered away in a cozy study, surrounded by books and Torahs, contemplating God, it’s easy to feel you’ve got a handle on life, spirituality and haShem. It’s life among others that roughs you up, exposes your human failings, reveals that you need Y’shua.

To anyone who thinks they have mastered patience, gentleness and self-control, I offer this challenge: drive in rush hour and see how long it lasts. I think we need that human interaction - as messy as it can be sometimes - to keep us humble enough to know that whatever we know, we don’t even come close to knowing it all. Let along putting it into practice.

If our souls were computers, we’d clearly be in need of circuit board repair, every one of us. Will going down the path of becoming a messianic rabbi cause me to lose that perspective? I hope not.

As we’re working through the life of Yosef in the parashah readings, the question that keeps occurring to me is why Yosef takes so long to reveal his identity to his brothers, who clearly don’t recognize him after 20-plus years of separation and believing him to be lost. Sure, the official answer is that Yosef was testing them, to see if they’d changed and truly repented of what they’d done to him. And that makes sense as far as it goes.

And the messianic addendum to that also makes sense as far as it goes. That Yosef is a foreshadowing of the Messiah Y’shua, who was not recognized by most of his people at the time he first appears to them. But I’m talking about the human level of the story, not the spiritual.

But think about it. A seven-year famine has overtaken the land. His father and brothers are suffering under it. Their lives are at stake and they don’t even have the benefit of disaster kits to help them through it, the way people of our time might. So with that in mind, why drag it out quite so long?

I mean, sure, he makes certain after they come to him that they’re taken care of. He provides them with food and even stashes their money back in the bags containing the grain. But even after the second visit, he doesn’t reveal himself until he pulls the same stunt again and make them fear for the safety of their youngest brother, Binyamin.

It all turns out quite well in the end. But I remain puzzled by Yosef’s motives. That’s the great thing about Torah, though. You become convinced it is historically true because those whose lives are chronicled in it do not act ideally. Their lives are puzzling, contradictory and full of questions. That’s the beauty of it.