 How Goodly Are Your Tents, O Jacob, Your Tabernacles, O Israel
Torah, Mitzvot and Messianic Judaism as a Way of Life
by Rabbi Stuart Dauermann
Living a Jewish life is far from boring. In fact, it is a source of never-ending delight and frequent surprises.
Here is one surprise as an example: it has probably never occurred to
any of us, nor to most of the people we will meet, that the Jewish
morning service, Shacharit, begins with the words of a pagan prophet,
Balaam. It is his words, recording in Torah, which are enshrined at
the beginning of our daily service: "Ma tovu oholecha Ya'akov,
mishkenotecha Yisrael—How goodly are your tents or Jacob, your dwelling
places, O Israel." Since our service begins there, in this message, I
will begin there as well.
Balaam was indeed a pagan prophet, not from the seed of Abraham. But he was nevertheless genuinely gifted by Hashem to speak beautifully and comprehensively about the privileges entailed in being part of the Jewish people.
In Torah, we read of Balak, the King of Moab. He grew very threatened when he saw the size of the encampment of the children of Israel during their wilderness wanderings. He sent a delegation to Balaam, a pagan prophet from far away Mesopotamia, who had a triple-A reputation for the accuracy of his prophecies. Balaam eventually allows himself to become a prophet-for-hire, and traveled with Balak's escorts from Aram in the East, all the way to Moab. Balak was willing to pay him well. In return, he wanted one thing, and one thing only.
"Curse Israel for me, for I know that whom you curse is cursed indeed, and whom you bless is blessed indeed."
Balaam warned King Balak that he could only bless what God has blessed and that he could not curse that God is not cursing.
He eventually consented to come to Balaam's aid, and in Numbers 23 we read of his first prophecy concerning Israel. From this prophecy, I direct your attention to three ideas which help form the foundation of the kind of Messianic Judaism I believe we should be forming in our day.The Jewish people are a people of DESTINY - Three times Balaam tells King Balak that he can only say what God puts in his mouth—that he cannot curse Israel unless God does so. Balaam knew Israel to be fundamentally blessed by God. He knew what a privileged and blessed thing it was to be part of this community, to be within Israel's tent. He knew that Israel was a people of a good heritage and holy destiny. That is why we have made his words our own: "Ma tovu oholecha Ya'akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael—How good our your tents of Jacob, your habitations O Israel'. He continues and says, "Let my end be like theirs. " This is a people of destiny.The Jewish people are meant to DWELL APART—to be are a distinct people.. "This is a people that dwells apart: that will not be numbered with the nations." Not only does Israel have a unique destiny: this destiny and identity is to be reflected in a distinctive way of life that causes us to be a people that dwells apart, with a distinctive. Torah-lifestyle, and which experiences with HaShem and with one another a God-given sense of community.
This conviction permeates the Torah and the self-awareness of the people of Israel. One of my favorite passages highlighting this awareness is found in the Morning Blessings of the Shacharit service. In part, that prayer says this:
"What are we? What is our life? What is our kindness What is our righteousness? What is our salvation? What is our strength? What is our might? What can we say before you, Hashem our God, and the God of our forefathers—are not all the heroes like nothing before You, the famous as if they had never existed, the wise as if devoid of wisdom and the perceptive as if devoid of intelligence? For most our their deeds are desolate and the days of their lives are empty before You. The preeminence of man over beast is non-existent for all is vain.
"But we are Your people, members of Your covenant, children of Abraham Your beloved, to whom You took an oath on Mount Moriah; the offspring of Isaac, his only son, who was bound atop the altar; the community of Jacob . . .
"Therefore, we are obliged to thank You, praise You, glorify You, bless, sanctify, and offer praise and thanks to Your Name. We are fortunate—how good is our portion, how pleasant our lot, and how delightful our heritage!"
British philosopher Thomas Hobbes starkly and indelibly characterized a life without community, the isolated life, as "nasty, mean, brutish, and short."
These two ways of life—the way of isolation and the way of covenantal community—are contrasted in the prayer I just quoted—humanity apart from covenant, and God's people under covenant. The nasty, mean, brutish and short life of isolation, and the blessed life of Jewish covenantal community. How good our portion, and how delightful our hertage!
The way of life reflective of Israel's DESTINY and DWELLING APART is the life of Torah and Mitzvot He also knew something about what it means to respond to Hashem's authority . .it is found in 23:26: Halo dibarti elecha leimor col asher y'daber adonai oto e'eseh" Didn't I tell you that whatever the Lord says to me, that is what I will do?" [ Three times: 23:12, 26; 24:13]. He understood that it was axiomatic that God's commands are to be obeyed. Although the commands Balaam received were occasional, and those Israel received were far more detailed and all encompassing, the principle stands: mitzvot are to be obeyed.
Yeshua of Nazareth unambiguously taught the mandatory and permanent nature of mitzvot . For example, he said
"Don't misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the Torah of Moshe or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to fulfill them. I assure you, until heaven and earth disappear, even the smallest detail of the Torah of HaShem will remain until its purpose is achieved. So if you break the smallest commandment and teach others to do the same, you will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But anyone who obeys Gods laws and teaches them will be great in the Kingdom of heaven" [Matt 7:17-19].
Yeshua's brother Ya'akov was the most prominent leader and teacher in the first generation of believers in Yeshua. He demonstrated the same strong view of Torah and mitzvot. One of his letters survives and includes his teaching on loshon hora in the community, In addressing the matter he speaks of the proper relationship to Torah in the strongest possible terms, saying; "Don't speak evil of each other, my dear brothers and sisters. If you criticize each other and condemn each other, then you are criticizing God's Torah. But you are not a judge who can decide whether a law is right or wrong: your job is to obey it. God alone who made the Torah and mitzvot, can rightly judge among us. He alone has the power to save and to destroy. So what right do you have to condemn your neighbor?" A number of points are made here concerning Torah and mitzvot which we are not miss:
- the Torah and Mitzvot have their origin in God.
- because of what the Torah is, and its origins, we are not to criticize it, no more than we are to criticize our brother. We do not stand over the mitzvot but rather under them. Or to put it another way, God is Ha-M'tzaveh—the Commander; he gives mitzvot commandments; and we are the M'tzoovim—the commanded. Torah and mitzvot embody God's authority to direct our lives.
- God alone who made the Torah can rightly judge among us—His standards are superior to our own.
Generally American Jews recoil at these ideas. We do not quite "get" this-we don't like the idea of a God who commands and whom we are to obey. We just don't feel comfortable being commanded. Jewish leaders identify this as the struggle between authority and autonomy.
In Reform, the largest wing of American Judaism, autonomy has historically been regarded as an almost unquestioned good, and the birthright of all enlightened Jews However, Reform is now reassessing and largely rejecting this position. The reason for this reassessement is the determination that it has tended toward the transformation of Judaism into a religion where people pick and choose as to what they will or will not do or believe, while calling the minimalistic remainder Judaism. This is clearly inadequate. It fails to demonstrate a proper reverence for our tradition. It results in a rapid erosions of the common legacy to be transmitted from one generation to another. It results in what some Jewish leaders call a "dummying down" of Judaism. And it threatens to convert Judaism into a religion of personal preference and convenience.
The proceedings of a Reform Jewish symposium on this crisis are published in a fairly recent book Duties of the Soul: The Place of Commandements in Liberal Judaism. Among many others, the following quotations from that book illustrate how even Reform Judaism is affirming the priority of a return to Torah and Mitzvot.
"If there is a God, there cannot be a fully autonomous human being. If there is a God. . . . there has to be obedience. How you know God's will for you, and whether you're able to do God's will are difficult questions, but they are secondary to the belief that, if you know, when you know, however you know God's will, there is no choice about performing it. There is only obedience or sin.
[Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf. "Back to the Future: On Rediscovering Commandments"]
In this he is fully in agreement with Ya'akov who puts it this way later in his letter: "Remember; it is a sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it" [James 4:17].
"Mitzvot are deeds that Jews perform and acts from which we refrain in fulfillment of God's will. While this is a difficult and problematic statement, without at least an a priori commitment to the concept that God makes demands upon us and that we are no matter how imperfectly, able to know them, Judaism is reduced to a series of strictly human choices. To consider oneself to be in the service of God [as part of a people called collectively into this service] is what ultimately gives Judiasm its meaning as a way of life…" ." [Peter S. Knobel "Recreating the Narrative Community.']
I am committed to a form of Messianic Judaism very comfortable with statements like these. You might call this kind of Messianic Judaism "Torah-positive and tradition-positive." Such a Messianic Judaism resonates with what Torah says in the account of Balaam, and what Yeshua and Yaakov taught concerning the role of Torah and mitzvot:--A Judaism that understands that it is blessed to be a Jew; A Judaism that understands the rightness to Jews being be a people who are set apart from others by their way of life; a Judaism that understand this way of life to be rooted in Torah and Mitzvot. How beautiful are your tents O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel!
Shabbat Shalom!
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