Understanding Orthodox Judaism, a Guide for Christians

One of the problems I have in some of the Christian congregations I go to is that most Christians simply don't understand Judaism and Jewish Biblical rules of exegesis. This article is an attempt to bridge that gap.

First of all, to start out, the Orthodox Jews claim to have an unbroken, continuous train of transmission of the Torah over all the millennia. They claim that they represent the true teachings of religious, monotheistic spirituality as embodied in the Torah. They also claim that the rest of the world has those teachings in a distorted format as translated by Jesus and Mohammed through Christianity and Islam.

Many times, Christians will claim that Judaism is filled with man-made laws, which are in contradiction to true spirituality. These people need to have an explanation of what is going on here and I am going to teach this to the benefit of both the Christian and Jewish communities.

Let's take a look at the Jewish belief in terms of what happened on Mt. Sinai. According to Orthodox Judaism, God gave 2 Torahs or teachings not just one. And this is where the confusion lies.

The word Torah comes from the Hebrew root word Ohr hence, "illumination," "instruction" and even "radiation." It seems to invoke quantum physics too. All you fans of science take note.

The first Torah is the Torah Sh'Bich Tav or the "The Written Torah." That is what is contained in the 5 Books of Moses which, according to the Orthodox tradition (mesorah) was dictated by God to Moshe Rabbenu ("Moses Our Teacher") on that mountain 3,400 years ago. The 5 Books are also called the Chumish as the word is derived from the root word chamaish, which means 5.

The only part of the Chumish, which God didn't dictate was the portion regarding the death of Moses which was filled in by Aaron, Moses' brother. So, this clears up part of the mystery.

The Tenakh embodies the Chumish, the Nevi'im or "Prophets" like Isaiah and the Ketuvim or "Writings" like Psalms and Proverbs. Sometimes the Tenakh is also called the Torah. Also, the term Torah in its widest sense means the entire body of Jewish religious literature.

Now, on to the second Torah or the Torah Sh'Baal Peh to fill in the gaps in our understanding of Judaism and it's most fundamental beliefs. This second teaching is called the "Oral Torah." The Oral Torah is encompassed in modern times in the encyclopedic work called The Talmud or the Gemara and also in the Mishna.

Originally, the Oral Law was passed down from teacher to student or from father to son. The rabbis claimed that the death of the Jewish community would be when the Jews finally wrote it down. Due to faulty memorization, eventually the Gemara was redacted around 500 AD.

Many people are confused and misinformed about the Gemara (Jews don't like to call it The Talmud, non-Jews do). Many people believe that the Gemara is a book of laws. It isn't such and no law is contained within it. It does have a series of legal discussions that take place over a period of some 1,200 years. It also has allegorical tales in it and those are extracted out of the Gemara and contained by themselves in Ein Yaakov.

To compound the matter, there are two Gemaras: the Palestinian and the Babylonian. While Jews study the former, the latter is considered to be the authoritative one. The bulk of the Gedolei Hador ("Torah luminaries in the generation") were living in Babylon not Israel, at the time of the Gemara's redaction.

To find where the laws are, you have to look at codifications of Jewish law like The Shulchan Orech. That means "The Arranged Table," literally. The only Shulchan Orech I have ever read is the Kitzur version or the Abridged Shulchan Orech by Ganzfreid. And I only read it in English.

That book isn't authoritative, it is very, machmir or "strict" and you need to study it with a competent teacher. I am not an expert in the Mishna, the Gemara or the Shulchan Orech, but I can refer someone to such an authority.

Now let's look at the process of Jewish legal adjudication. According to the Jewish mesorah ("tradition"), there was a chain of transmission in regards to making laws. The first legal court was the Beis Din of Moshe and the first legal matter he tackled was deciding that fowl was to be treated like bossur ("meat") in terms of kashrut ("keeping kosher"). Judaism forbids a meat and milk product mixture. So, that ruling was telling and a restriction as per the dietary laws.

Once God gave the law to Moses the law was no longer in Heaven but was down on Earth and the Jews were given certain laws of Biblical exegesis in order to make rulings. That is, law making is done according to certain rules and it is not done willy-nilly. And according to the Jewish way of looking at things, the rabbis have the definite rights to make laws as long as they adhere to those laws of proper exegesis.

There was also a chain of transmission from Moses to Joshua, the prophets and then to the Men of the Great Assembly and at some point in time the scribes of which Ezra was the last. Later on came the Sadducees and the Pharisees but they opposed one another. I am not up of the chain but it can be looked up in The Jewish Encyclopedia. Any good local library would have the books.

Eventually, when Jesus started his ministry he got into protracted battles with the scribes as well as the Pharisees and Sadducees. I will explain both sides of the issue.

The law of washing one's hands ritually before eating (specifically a meal which is proceeded by breaking bread and doing a blessing called Hamotzei Min Haaretz, "Blessed be He who brings forth bread from the Earth") was created by the Pharisees and as such is not deraytah ("from the Torah"), it is derabanan or "from the rabbis". The latter type of law doesn't carry the weight of the former. But it is still considered bad to break a rabbinic ruling

Jesus simply told them that he didn't need to satisfy their laws and he told them off. He started a new religious order based upon men he handpicked and based on his teachings.

The end result was that the bulk of the Jewish people never accepted Jesus' leadership and the religious establishment wrote a prayer called the Birchat Haminim, or the "Curse of the Sectarians and Slanderers. " The prayer is the 12^th in the order of the 18 Benedictions (Shemonah Esrai), also called the "Standing Prayer" or Amidah and the Kedusha or "Sanctification."

This curse was designed to weed out the Jewish believers in Jesus who were trying to pray in the Second Temple. As they wouldn't say it, everyone knew who they were.

The Jewish establishment simply claimed that Jesus slandered them. They saw no validity in his claims. Tradition has it that someone named Shmuel Hakaton ("Samuel the Lesser") drafted up the curse. The Shemonah Esrai really has 19 sections and not 18. It is a trick actually and sometimes anti-missionary workers have made Jews for Jesus' say the prayer and in doing so condemning themselves unknowingly.

Jesus did not choose a prominent Jewish leader of scholar to be among his early apostles. John MacArthur considered that to be a condemnation of the entire Jewish religious leadership. See his book Twelve Ordinary Men. Furthermore, only the Apostle Paul was considered to have a wide knowledge of Judaism but Jewish anti-missionary literature contains a lot of refutations as to Paul's teachings.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach also used to say, "It's not how the Torah is coming down to us. It's the roots of the Torah." I always felt that Shlomo was uncomfortable with many laws as poskimed ("adjudicated") by the gaonim ("sages").

I am a Jew of East European extraction or an Ashkenazi Jew. My relatives came from England, Vienna, and Poland. The Ashkenazi tradition is more stringent than the Sephardic or Arabic and Spanish Jewish tradition.

For example, the Sephardim are able to eat legumes on Pesach ("Passover"), and my community can't. Furthermore, rice was banned too. The reason the latter was banned was due to the line of logic that says that if rice is ground up, the grinds will look like wheat flour so that also went the way of the do-do bird in Ashkenazi tradition.

I used to always complain to my father about all these laws. He simply told me that when a custom has been around for a while, it becomes law.

And just like in civil law, all of it is subject to interpretation by the legal authorities. That tends to change over time. For example in the old days, electric razors were illegal and yeshiva bochrim ("students") had to wear black suits if they were men. Now, brown suits and blue suits are common too. Maybe things didn't change much in antiquity but they do now.

Also, in the old days there was a rule that you couldn't eat before you davened ("prayed"), in the morning. In Chabad Lubavitch, the late Rebbe was said to have a medical opinion and he ruled that people in his dynasty were weak and sickly and they could do such.

There was an old story that I remembered about how a bochur choose a rabbi. The rabbi told him, "Go eat breakfast before you pray." The student started to eat and the rabbi interrupted and said to him, "Just because an old goat with a beard tells you to break a law doesn't mean you can!"

The dynamics around what happened in that story revolves around the custom of rabbis subjecting a potential talmid ("student") to a suitable nissoyin or "test" to determine if the rabbi wants to take the student on. I don't know the rest of the story but I remember the main part of it.

In a similar vein, even if it's off the main topic, years ago, I was at Moshav Modi'in which is the Israeli home of the followers of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Once Shlomo told someone tavoh b'Shabbat. Literally, it means, "come on the Sabbath." The person told him, "I know you for only a second and already you're giving me a nissoyin?" One of the chevra ("group") told Shlomo that the problem was that his Hebrew was off. He should have said, Tavoh bishvile Shabbat. The latter means "Come for the Sabbath."

Additional factors that cause confusion is the etymologies and usages of Hebrew words as translated from Hebrew to Greek and then to English. Many English Bibles were translated from Hebrew to Greek as per the Septuagint first which a team of 72 Jewish scholars worked on.

The Orthodoxy claims that Hebrew is a very precise language and that nothing is done coincidentally or without t a definitive purpose. Nothing is redundant. Every word and phrase has absolute meaning.

In the New Testament, Jesus said to love your enemy. Now, in Greek there are three different words for love. Agape was the word Jesus invoked here. This word doesn't mean emotional love but the type of concern you should have for a person's welfare.

Similarly, in Hebrew people get confused on why Jews don't do a lot of things on the Sabbath. There are 2 words for work used in the Old Testament avodah and melacha. Avodah is the usual type of work as per your livelihood, and worship (avodat Hashem is "worship of God" and avoda Zarah is "idol worship").

Melacha is only used to denote working on the Sabbath and also the 39 categories of work done in the First and Second Temple (the Bet Hamikdash). It is that type of work that is discussed in the section of the Torah when it is classified as assur ("forbidden") on the Sabbath day. All of those 39 categories are what's banned on the Sabbath.

So, I hope this article will suffice to straighten out some of the confusion people have and I hope it will bridge that gap of understanding between the Jewish community and the non-Jewish community.