tradition

Mezuzot

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Several years ago, my husband and I made Aliya to the Land of Israel, we lived for a time in Tzfat, which is considered one of the four “holy” cities of Israel. 

During that time, I tripped over an uneven place in the doorway of our  house and broke a bone in my foot. Several observant Orthodox friends told us we needed to have the Mezuzah inspected because it might have a broken letter in the scroll. That seemed pretty weird. Since that time I have had suspicions about man made laws. And to have the mezuzah inspected by a trained person costs money so again the element of making money over rabbinic teachings comes to view. . 

We left Tzfat after a hard struggle with some rabbis. We found a little town that was not so fanatical, a bit more secular, and where people left you alone. 

But the Mezuzah theme never left my mind. If you look at Torah there is nothing said about a box. It says to “write these commandments.” Does it say to buy an expensive parchment scroll, expertly written by a sofer and then hide it away in a box that you kiss when you pass in and out of your house? 

The verse says nothing about putting a scroll in a box. It does command each of us to do our own writing, not to go buy something and hide it away in a box!

Deut 6:4-9: “Hear, O Israel: YHVH our God, YHVH is one.[a] 5 Love Hashem your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

So the purpose of the Mezuzah, which means door post, is that we might have the commandments embedded, if you will, in our hearts and minds. What a better way than to do the writing ourselves and to place them where we can see them! 

The act of kissing an object is what is done in paganism. People kiss the graves of Saints and Rabbis. People kiss the image of St. Peter in the Cathedral in Rome and other places. Nowhere does the Torah tell us to kiss an object. 

But before we totally dismiss the Mezuzah, we need a new approach to it. How about finding a way to engrave the 10 commandments in a wooden plaque? Paint them, write them, wood burn them and hang them up so you see them and remember them when you go out and when you come in? 

Let’s make the Torah something personal between us and our God! 

Shabbat Shalom
Ariella

Tradition! It IS just a bit of fun, isn’t it?

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The Holiday of Purim is here again, and costumes, parties and fun are sprouting everywhere. Fun is the name of the game. Is there anything wrong with that? I admit that I love to see people smile and all the children and adults dressed up and clowning around! I am not keen on kids eating a lot of candy, partly because I know the health problems that go along with too much sugar, but then that is a personal issue. 

I want to examine, and I don’t claim to be right or wrong, a few things I am uncomfortable with:

  • I know that God’s Eternal Name, YHVH, is important in all of Tenakh, but why is he not mentioned in any form in the entire book? People tell me that it is because He had to stay hidden. That does not make sense. When is it right to hide the God whom we worship from stories that we write about our lives? If anything in a story was done by the Eternal, then why is the emphasis placed on the clever Mordecai and his beautiful niece, Esther, who found herself lined up to become queen of Persia? Why not mention that the Hand of God was involved? Why take credit for the Jews being so clever and smart and leave God completely out of it? Was this because they knew they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Were they indeed under persecution at this time?
  • If they were not suffering persecution, then what else may have been the reason for hiding one’s ethnicity?
  • Is it possible that the story about justifying life for the Chosen People among the nations? No need for a a temple? No need for a Covenant with the Land and the God of the Land?
  • Why were the majority of the Jews still in Persia many years after they were commissioned to return to the Land sixty years after the decree of Cyrus the Great? 
  • Why did Hadassah become Esther naming herself after the pagan goddess Ishtar? And why did Mordecai take that name since it is also a variation of Marduk, a pagan deity worshiped in Babylon and ancient Mesopotamia? According to Torah it is wrong to pronounce the name of a pagan god, but these went so far as to rename themselves after these idols..
  • Perhaps choosing these names was a political move to be able to work and live among the Persians. But the question looms large, why do they want to stay in the Galut? Is it because they are now permeated with the culture? Do they love the customs of the Gentiles more than their own?
  • And what else might be the motive to hide at this time before Haman had the decree to kill all the Jews signed by the king? Would Haman have declared the Jews as public enemy number one, if he had known that the queen was Jewish? The story does not say that they were being persecuted. If so, then why not move back to the land? 
  • The entire plot of the story of Esther seems to justify working subversively to overthrow the powers that be. When is it right to clearly hide one’s identity to be able to climb the political ladder with the intent of having someone at the top? Were Jews ever commanded to do such things? There is plenty of evidence of this happening throughout history. We see Joseph shaving to appear acceptable to Pharaoh when he was brought before him, but he apparently didn’t hide his parentage, because later in the Joseph story, the Egyptians would not eat with the Hebrews. He apparently was known as a Hebrew even since Potiphar put him in jail. 
  • Maybe there are other reasons, but to me, it seems that the Jews who stayed in Persia enjoyed the Persian lifestyle and culture and did what they did to justify living in the Galut 60 or 70 years after Cyrus opened the way for them to leave. (Note that the decree of Cyrus took place in 539 and the events in the book of Esther were between 483 and 473. (See here and here). These dates are estimates. 

I don’t have answers, on this, and I have to admit that I have gone along with things many times so that I don’t make waves. What should we do about this? Is there anybody else out there who is concerned?

So “Happy Purim” and please think deeply when you drink so much you can’t discern Haman from Mordecai!

Ariella

The First Thou Shalt Not–Who are the “Other Gods”?

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Several thousand years ago Abraham, called Abram at the time, rejected the many gods that the people around him had set up. He spoke to Elohim who revealed himself to him as El Shaddai. (see here) He was, according to Scripture, the only one in his day who saw the falsity of strange gods. He was obedient to the One   God. We know this because of what the Torah says of him:

Gen 26:5 “…Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.”

How did he know these things if the law had not yet been given? This is perhaps a mystery that we cannot understand, except that he spoke directly to the Eternal, and as it says above he “obeyed my voice.” He apparently had no human interpreter. 

So how can a human understand the voice of the Most High, One and Only   God without others to direct him? 

By the time Moses came on the scene, there seemed to be a need for someone to guide and lead. Moses heard the Voice at the burning bush and was in direct communication with Elohim. He had no interpreter nor leader. And apparently there has never been another like Moses by whose hand we received the written down “voice” if you care to call it that, or “Words” of   God. 

Deu 34:10 “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the YHVH knew face to face,”

Today, several thousand years later, human leaders have overtaken every religion in the world. How do we know that they correctly interpret the written words of Elohim? I say that usually they don’t give it to us as it was given through Moses. And they stand in the middle between us and our Creator, as interpreters or mediators. If we look at the 10 commandments, the very first “Thou Shalt Not” says something very big. Let’s look at the Hebrew for Exodus 20 3, and then look at the meaning in our own language.
לֹא יִהְיֶה־לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים עַל־פָּנָיַ׃

This is usually translated as “thou shalt have no other gods before me.” But if we look deeper we see “there shall not be to you other gods upon my face or in  my presence.” עַל־פָּנָיַ (literally: upon my face or countenance or in my presence).(See Strongs).

Exodus 20:3 does not mean merely to not worship other gods, but rather not even to have them in between us and Hashem. He should not have to work through them to reach us. He would rather have a direct connection with us. 

If we look at the word Elohim throughout the Tanakh we will see that it is often used for judges or powerful men as well as false gods. 

From Strong’s Hebrew definitions:

אֱלֹהִים “ĕlôhîym, el-o-heem’; plural of H433; gods in the ordinary sense; but specifically used (in the plural thus, especially with the article) of the supreme God; occasionally applied by way of deference to magistrates; and sometimes as a superlative:—angels, × exceeding, God (gods) (-dess, -ly), × (very) great, judges, × mighty …rulers, judges, either as divine representatives at sacred places or as reflecting divine majesty and power.” Strongs.

So anybody that is great enough in our imagination that we look to as an interpreter of   God’s laws, or anything to do with Him, anyone who stands between us and the Eternal or in the presence of   God as a mediator, is a false elohim or god: as it says: “there shall be to you no other elohim upon my face.” 

Moses actually stood in that place for the people of Israel who had just been delivered from Egyptian slavery. But who is as great in our day as Moses? Priests? Rabbis? Are there even any true prophets today? What about all the books that have been written to interpret Torah? Who gave anyone the right to define or reinterpret Torah, let alone add to or take away from it?”

If you are a religious Jew, you probably believe in the Chain of Transmission (See here) which endorses the passing down of the Torah through the generations of Sages and Rabbis who developed the Oral Torah and Tradition which is today’s Judaism. But did you know that not even Joshua was allowed to change even one word that Moses handed over?

Jos 1:7 “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. 8 This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

So, not even Joshua who was on Mount Sinai at the giving over of the two tablets of 10 commandments, was allowed to reinterpret anything. (See Exodus 24).

How do we get back to hearing the voice of  God speak to us in the wilderness like Abraham and Moses? Is it even possible? Perhaps some of us feel that YHVH has withdrawn his face from us. Maybe the question to ask ourselves is: what do we need to turn away from in order to cause His face to look once again upon us?  If the literal commandments were not to be altered or added to, then there may be a reason why we are not getting the connection we desire. 

Zec 1: 3” Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn ye unto me, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the LORD of hosts. 4 Be ye not as your fathers, unto whom the former prophets have cried, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn ye now from your evil ways, and from your evil doings: but they did not hear, nor hearken unto me, saith the LORD. 5 Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live forever? 6 But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? and they returned and said, Like as the LORD of hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us.” 

We can see evidence in the verses above that even in the time of the prophet Zechariah, the people blamed the Eternal for abandoning them. And it is still true today, when troubles come upon God’s people, He often gets the blame, rather than people taking a hard look at their lives and measuring themselves with the only standard of righteousness–the written Torah!

Are we the chosen people just because we once were? Is there any standard at all that we must measure up to in order to qualify? Is there a slim chance that Hashem will or has abandoned us? The prophet Jeremiah serves up a very dire warning to the house of Israel. God forbid that it should be true of us today!

Jer 18:6 “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay  is  in the potter’s hand, so are  ye in mine hand, O house of Israel. 7 At what  instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it ; 8 If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. 9 And at what  instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant  it ; 10 If it does evil in my sight, that it obeys not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them.”

So, if we have been following the interpretations of men who set themselves up as leaders who claim to teach the ways of the Creator, and we admit that we really do not understand the Torah and that we somehow cannot connect with the Eternal other than through manmade rituals, then why not begin studying in earnest what the literal Torah says. Is it really that difficult?

Deu 30:10-14: if you obey the LORD your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
11 …what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?”
13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

Ariella Golani

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